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Updates to future director’s contract recommended

Member of the Coffee County Schools Director’s Evaluation Committee discussed proposed changes to the existing contract it utilizes for its director of schools.

Board member Thomas Ballard previously discussed dissatisfaction with some portions of the contract as it was proposed during discussions regarding whether or not to renew the contract of Director of Schools Dr. Charles Lawson during recent months.

“What we need to do is we need to take a look the current contract that Coffee County Schools is offering to our director and we need to determine if there is language that needs to be changed, if there are any additions that we want to add or address for the next contract that we extend to a potential director,” committee member Kathy Rose said.

Committee members reviewed a copy of the existing contract with Ballard’s notations on areas of concern. One area of concern Ballard has raised during past Board of Education meetings is the inclusion of an “annual performance agreement,” which seemingly does not exist.

The terminology has appeared in both Dr. Lawson’s Contract as well as that of his predecessor LaDonna McFall.

Rose said that the terms “annual performance agreement” and “annual performance evaluation” are both referenced in these contracts. While the annual performance agreement has never existed, the annual performance evaluation is completed each year.

“The Annual Performance Agreement is terminology that appears in both those contracts and in reading through everything that you got for us and looking at the sample contracts that we got from TSBA, it is my literary, my syntactical assessment that I believe the intent was that performance agreement and performance evaluation were meant to be interchangeable terms,” she said.

Ballard said that while it is possible the two terms were used interchangeably, the terminology is referenced in two separate places within the contract and he believes they were intended to be separate documents.

Rose suggested that the “Annual Performance Agreement” be eliminated from the contract since an evaluation is done on the director of schools annually.

“That language needs to disappear,” she said. “If we are not going to come up with a document, let’s make a recommendation to the board that this language would be omitted.”

Ballard said he agreed with that, as long as the quantitative section of the evaluation is completed.

“The evaluation has a section in there for goals every year and that has not been completed to my knowledge…we have talked about the results but we don’t have goals and that is something I think the board needs to do..,” he said.

Ballard said it is important to have attainable goals, because that is how progress can be measured.

Committee members agreed to recommend to the full Coffee County Schools Board of Education that the term “Annual Performance Agreement” be removed from its director’s contract because the document does not exist and change it to “Annual Performance Evaluation,” which does exist.