Melissa Bailey Photo
In a last-minute move, the Board of Education made plans to keep Superintendent Reginald Mayo at the helm of the city’s school reform drive for another three years.
Board President Carlos Torre made that announcement Monday evening, after he emerged from an hour-long closed-door session at the board’s regular meeting at 54 Meadow St. Torre said the board had discussed Mayo’s performance on his current contract and decided to extend it for another three years.
“We feel that he’s done his job,” Torre said.
Mayo (pictured in the above file photo) would not get a pay raise next fiscal year, according to Torre. His salary would remain at $226,921.
The zero percent raise matches a pattern set by three reappointments of top officials Monday: The board voted to re-employ Chief Operating Officer Will Clark, Director of Personnel Andrea Lobo-Watley and Assistant Superintendent Imma Canelli each for another three years, without a pay raise for the first year.
Board members reviewed those three contracts over the weekend before voting on them Monday night, according to Mayo. His own contract was reviewed just three days before it expired.
Mayo had been superintendent since 1992. His current, three-year contract expires on Thursday. Because the item had not been properly noticed on the meeting’s agenda, the board didn’t take a vote. They set a special meeting for Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Board of Education building to vote on Mayo’s new contract.
Torre said the board plans to vote yes.
He said members arrived at that decision by evaluating how Mayo “had done on the contract” he currently has. As part of the city’s reform effort, which pledges increased accountability for all parties, the district plans to come up with an evaluation system for the superintendent that would be tied to student performance.
“We plan to bring the superintendent’s evaluation in line with the teacher evaluations,” he explained. In April and May, the district unveiled new evaluations for teachers and principals that link adult success to student performance.
The parallel evaluation system for the superintendent is still being developed, Torre said.
After the board approved the three top officials’ reappointments, Mayor John DeStefano put the vote into budgetary context. The mayor originally proposed adding $3 million to the city’s $173 million education budget, an increase of 1.7 percent. After a series of budget hearings, aldermen denied that $3 million increase and flat-funded the Board of Education for a second year in a row. Aldermen don’t have line-by-line control over education spending, but they said they wished the cuts would come from central office and administrative staff.
Mayo said that the three top appointees are among the hardest-working, and most capable people he has met.
DeStefano said the board needs to do more to communicate to the public about the top administrators’ roles.
“The board’s got to explain what school administrators do,” he said, noting that they have become a popular target of budget critics.
“If there are too many, we ought to discuss that,” he said. “We ought to engage on that in a transparent fashion.”