BOE self-evaluation discussed at 8/30 meeting.

At our last BOE meeting, members of the Board reviewed our annual "self-evaluation." As I did last year, I thought it would be good to share the results of our evaluation with you.

A little background...
The state requires Boards of Education to conduct self-evaluations each year, and actually Ridgewood has been doing an annual evaluation since long before the state required it. Currently, we use the services of the New Jersey School Boards Association. NJSBA gives us a Self-Evaluation form, which is completed by members of the BOE and Dr. Fishbein. Each topic includes questions about the Board’s performance, and then questions for individual Board members to evaluate their own performance. We all completed our evaluations, which consisted of questions with ratings from 1 to 5 plus the opportunity for free-form comments, and then our NJSBA rep compiled the responses and brought us back a report. We don’t know how individual members answered, and we don’t know which comments are from whom.

One of the purposes of the self-evaluation is to help us identify challenges facing the district and to guide us as we develop Board and District goals for the school year. After we reviewed the evaluation, we brainstormed on goals. I think we'll be discussing the potential goals we came up with, at our next meeting (Sept. 13).

So, like I said, I want to share the ratings from our self-evaluation, just so you can see where some of the conversation was focused. (What? You didn't watch the meeting on Channel 77 or live on the web?!?)

The evaluation covered the following categories:

Planning
Policy
Student Achievement
Finance
Board Operations
Board Performance
Board/Superintendent Relationships
Board/Staff Relationships
Board & Community

Over the next week or so, I will report on our self-evaluation for each of these categories. First up will be Planning...