INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — The Indian River County School Board meeting Tuesday evening was, itself, a model of one of the school district’s main goals for the coming years: promoting collaboration.
It began with an invocation by School Board Vice Chair Carol Johnson in which she expressed this hope: “May we all be willing to bear the burden for a better tomorrow for the Indian River County School District.”
That spirit of shared struggle and hope was evident throughout the meeting. But it was the case made by Gifford Middle School language arts teacher Luke Flynt that most strongly brought it home.
It is well-known to the school board members and district administrators that this is a time of great stress for most teachers in the county. Teachers are paying more toward benefits and retirement and they haven’t had a raise for several years.
On top of financial worries, they’re facing several new gargantuan evaluation programs that tie their future worth as effective teachers to how much their students improve on standardized tests. That worth will be rewarded in dollars.
While the board members and administrators see the strengths in these new evaluation systems, they are also ready to listen to teachers — such as Flynt — who point out weaknesses.
Speaking to the five School Board members and Superintendent Fran Adams, as well as to her top assistants, Flynt described his situation: He teaches language arts to gifted middle school kids at Gifford. Because they tend to do well on tests in the first place, it is very difficult to see improvement.
He described in detail how that worked against him as a teacher despite his students’ impressively high scores on a standardized test.
“In 2011, 45 of my 110 students earned a perfect score on the vocabulary (test). In 2012, 41 of my students earned a perfect score. This meant that the average student performance score of 92.4 percent dropped to 91.06 percent, causing me to be rated as ‘needing improvement.’”
With the new evaluation system based on student improvement on tests, a teacher who ‘needs improvement’ will be denied a raise — even teachers whose students do very well on the tests.
“Last year, my evaluator gave me a perfect evaluation,” said Flynt. “But with this new value-added evaluation, I am suddenly ineffective.”
And, “ineffective” means no raise.
“You need to know what the state (with Senate Bill 736) is doing to teachers,” Flynt concluded.
School Board member Claudia Jimenez was the first to respond — not in protest, but in strong support.
“We are very aware of how these legislative mandates are demoralizing our teachers,” she said. “It’s disheartening.”
Johnson seconded Jimenez’s support of Flynt.
“It’s individuals like you who make a difference,” she told Flynt. “We’ll walk with you on this one.”
Superintendent Adams said after the meeting that she was going to describe Flynt’s situation to the Florida Department of Education in Tallahassee to see what state administrators have to say.
“We’ll tell them it seems like a valid concern and we’ll ask if there is something we’re not getting that explains how this could happen,” said Adams.
At the close of the meeting, Flynt and two teachers who joined him in support, high-fived one another and seemed a lot less weary than they did earlier in the night.