Brooks wants "no raise"; will accept >16% bump in his retirement annuity and an extension of his 3/4s of a million dollar golden parachute

The School Board met in secret yesterday to evaluate Supt Winston Brooks; seen here ordering the arrest of peaceful protesters at a Goals Setting meeting at Manzano High School, link.

The evaluation is tainted by the appearance of a conflict of interest; when the board evaluates his performance, they evaluate their own selection of him as superintendent. When the board finds Brooks has done a great job, they find also, they did a great job in hiring him. If the Board pans his performance, they pan their selection of him.

In effect, the board is evaluating itself; a blatant conflict of interest.

Does the board have to evaluate the superintendent, or could the evaluation be completed by an independent third party?

The simple truth is that the evaluation could be done independently, removing the cloud of a conflict of interest. Further, an independent evaluation could be done by people who actually know something about evaluating administrative performance. The school board is no more expert in evaluating administration than they are in selecting administrators. It comes with their job; they don't have to any manifest expertise or experience in administrative evaluation, to get elected.

The Board won't allow an independent evaluation of the Superintendent for the same reason they won't allow an independent evaluation of administrative and executive standards of conduct and competence; they have much to hide.

According to the Journal, link, the board has scheduled a meeting for January 6th, where they will extend his contract (golden parachute) until 2014.

The Journal reported that Brooks was praised for his "community outreach", no doubt based on the recent seven meeting tour of the District for the purpose of establishing goals. Never mind the fact that his community outreach included reaching out to arrest peaceful protestors of the leadership's denial of due process to their legitimate petition.

His evaluation included, or should have included, his success in hiding the Caswell Report, link. on corruption and incompetence in the leadership of their publicly funded private police force. An honest and courageous board would have held him accountable the betraying the public trust. Our board, decided to reward him instead.

The Journal reported as well, Brooks will not be asking for a raise, though he will accept a $5K per year increase in the district's contribution to his "retirement annuity", bringing it to around $35K per year. Apparently the $35K is not included in his "salary" of more than $250K per year.

The Board made no attempt, apparently, to include any manner of subordinate evaluation of the Supt, figuring they know more than the District's 11,500 employees, 6,500 of whom are teachers who between them have the better part of 100,000 years of teaching experience (that Brooks is ignoring).

The whole process is a sham, and the Journal dutifully reported upon it with scrutinizing the process in the least




photo Mark Bralley