Adrian Board of Education rates Superintendent Nate Parker 'effective' on evaluation

ADRIAN — It’s been a bit of a homecoming of sorts for Adrian Public Schools Superintendent Nate Parker the last couple of weeks.

On Monday, the board of education met inside the media center at Springbrook Middle School, the building where Parker, prior to becoming the district’s superintendent in April 2022, was principal since 2010.

Springbrook Middle School also was where Parker’s yearly superintendent evaluation was conducted with the Adrian school board.

The board’s evaluation was publicly shared at Monday’s meeting. With 13 months on the job and 16 months since being hired as superintendent, Parker was rated “effective” by the board.

Parker described the scenario of being back in the middle school, where he spent 12 years as an administrator, as a unique way to close an important chapter of his career with Adrian Public Schools.

When he interviewed for the superintendency in December 2021, one of his main reasons for applying, he said, was because of the team of employees at Adrian Public Schools and the effectiveness of the board of education. He felt the need, he said Monday, to acknowledge all of the team at Adrian Public Schools who “make me look good.”

“I couldn’t do any of that without my team at central office, without the great stuff going on in the buildings, the building administrators and the teachers, and ultimately the board of education,” he said after being rated “effective” by the board. “This community is truly blessed to have people in those roles who are in it for the right reasons. They care about kids, they want to do the right things, they want to support the professionals doing the job, they are dedicated community members and they do it for the right reason.”

Board President Beth Ferguson said the evidence presented for Parker’s performance is “some of the most thorough evidence I have seen” in her six-plus years on the board.

The board, she said, has tasked Parker with focusing on different areas around the district including improvements and promotion of attendance, reading, arts, academics and mental health. Everything across the district is working the way it should be working, she said, and “that only happens if you have a great superintendent at the helm.”

There is an established process the board goes through when conducting the superintendent evaluation, vice president Jon Baucher said. There are a number of detailed elements the superintendent is evaluated on. Months of preparation go into conducting the evaluation.

One of the major changes for this year’s evaluation, Baucher and Ferguson said, was switching to an all-electronic grading and review system. A virtual binder of evidence was studied by the board, Baucher said, which spent plenty of time going over each of the elements and evidence. The superintendent also conducts a self-evaluation.

“That’s important to us, as well, because it helps us if there’s a gap (in scoring),” Baucher said of the self-evaluation. “Because every element we did not evaluate him the same as he evaluated himself. There were a couple of cases during the self-evaluation where we felt the evidence was stronger in support of the score than what he had given himself, and so we evaluated him using the higher score.”

Regarding how Parker does his job, he was rated as “highly effective.”

However, because of the way the state’s evaluation weighting system works, Baucher explained, the largest element for a superintendent to be graded on is student growth and it’s an area Adrian has struggled with in the past. It continues to struggle with student growth and it’s not just an issue at Adrian.

“We’re not the only school in the state to struggle with this, it’s a huge issue,” he said. “Because it’s off standardized tests. And it’s a hodgepodge of standardized tests. It’s not black and white. What is black and white is 40% of (Parker’s) grade comes off that one number.”

There is no negotiation behind that number, Baucher said, because data from the student testing results is what ultimately rates the superintendent in that category.

“It shows that he is ‘effective,’” Baucher said of the student growth tally. “He is ‘highly effective’ on how he does his job, ‘effective’ on our (student) test scores. But because of the weight of that, it takes him to an ‘effective’ superintendent.”

Parker scored an 88 on the evaluation, as shared by the board.

If the rating of student growth was weighted at 25% instead of 40% on Parker’s evaluation, he would have ended with a score of 92 as opposed to 88, which would have been in the “highly effective” rating, trustee Michael Ballard said.

“I think it bothers every single board member tonight that we aren’t ranking you ‘highly effective,’” Ferguson said. “We all know that’s just one mathematical problem that we can’t solve, but we need the Legislature and our state representative and senator to take this seriously. We have been talking about this for years. The 40% growth rate for our teachers and our superintendent is something that needs to be changed.”

There have been and still are talks to see that number change from 40% to 25%, Ferguson said.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Adrian Superintendent Nate Parker rated 'effective' on evaluation