The Guthrie Board of Education agreed on a new principal for Fogarty Elementary on Monday evening at their regular scheduled meeting. The board also voted 5-2 to conduct a voluntary climate survey for the district staff.
After executive session, the board unanimously passed the personnel reports that included naming Marsha Todd as the new principal at Fogarty.
Todd, who currently serves as a first grade teacher at Central Elementary, replaces Karen Watkins who is resigning at the end of the school year. In addition, Jonathan Washington was named as the head 9th grade girls track coach.
Before the executive session, Carmen Walters, Executive Director of Federal Programs, went over the state’s Reading Sufficiency Act conducted by the current third grade class. 56 of the 265 students scored Unsatisfactory while 151 students (57%) scored Proficient and 46 (17.4%) students scored Limited Knowledge. Related story: 56 third graders fall short on state reading test
In the business agenda, the board spent 18 minutes discussing the district staff climate survey and became the latest contested dialogue between board members.
Guthrie News Page has added the audio of the 18 minute discussion.
Board member Janna Pierson showed concern that only two board members (Travis Sallee and Sharon Watts) along with Supt. Dr. Mike Simpson had discussed the climate survey prior to the board meeting.
The eight page survey asks questions such as: How long do you plan to work for Guthrie Public Schools? At this present time, how would you rate the overall morale of employees within the Guthrie Public Schools?
“I looked at the survey. Not a bad survey,” Pierson said. “I’m not sure what we are going to use this tool for. You can’t use it to evaluate your superintendent because you didn’t put it as a part of the evaluation process. We don’t evaluate our principals,the superintendent does that. What are we accomplishing and why didn’t we all get input in this?”
Sallee, who approached Simpson in putting the survey together, said the survey questions had came from the UVA (University of Virginia) survey. Sallee’s goal is to develop strategies if the survey were to prove the school district indeed has poor morale.
“This is not about judging how effective people are doing their job,” Sallee said. “Its about how we can help you? How can we help the teacher in the classroom do their job better.”
Pierson, who ultimately voted in favor of the survey, said she did not have a problem with the survey, but the process.
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