Duval County School Board what are you waiting for?

From the Palm Beach Post,

Palm Beach County public school teachers will not have to worry about receiving a poor overall review for the next school year as part of the upcoming merit-based pay system, according to a school district negotiator.

Chief District Negotiator Van Ludy told the union at a meeting Thursday that the school board has agreed to relax how it evaluates teachers for one year. The district wanted more time for both more intensive training of the observers, and to try to make the process as objective and standardized as possible.

Lynn Cavall, executive director for the Classroom Teachers Association, applauded the move. “It’s the right thing to do and we are certainly glad the district is doing it,” said Cavall, whose union represents the district’s roughly 12,000 teachers.

Ludy said all teachers who receive a score of lower than “effective” — such as “unsatisfactory” or “needs improvement” — on the new Marzano Evaluation System the district is adopting, will automatically get bumped up to “effective.”

The district’s concession basically “holds (teachers) harmless” for the first year the new evaluation system is being used because they cannot end up with a less than effective evaluation on their record for next year, according to Chief Union Negotiator Brian Phillips.

Cavall said the idea of a one-year amnesty from bad evaluations was discussed by the Joint Teacher Evaluation Committee, a group of union and district officials that has been trying to come up with ways to implement the state-required merit pay system for teachers. Ludy said the school board agreed to the amnesty during an executive session Wednesday to discuss the district’s ongoing contract negotiations with the union.

Ludy said district officials were concerned that they were finding “too many inconsistencies in the evaluation process” in the testing of the administrators — like principals who will be responsible for observing and grading teachers.

“It’s like a huge ship at sea,” Ludy said. “It takes a long time to turn.”

Teacher’s salary levels are not actually effected by the new merit-pay system until the 2013-2014 school year, so the change would not mean any additional pay this coming school year for teachers who have their poor evaluations bumped up to effective, Ludy said.

But according to the Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers union, veteran teachers on a long-term professional contract who receive poor evaluations for two out of three consecutive years must be changed to an “annual” contract and if there is still no improvement in their evaluation after that must be terminated. Annual contract teachers in general can essentially be let go at the end of each year without cause by the district simply not renewing their contract.

The one-year amnesty gives all teachers a little bit of a reprieve from having to worry about getting two bad evaluations out of the next three years, Ludy said. Now no teacher can end up getting that first poor evaluation mark on their record this coming school year.

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