JMCSS Board evaluates King

Eight of the current nine members of the Jackson-Madison County School Board met earlier this month to discuss Superintendent Marlon King’s annual evaluation and also discussed lining up the principals’ evaluation with King’s.

Based on the discussions from the meeting, everyone in attendance – which was everyone except Kenneth Newman – was complimentary of King’s work and accomplishments over the past year.

But officially, it was up to each Board member to fill out a questionnaire with evaluation metrics and send them to JMCSS Attorney Dale Thomas, and he would compute King’s performance according to the Board based on their evaluations.

But that was only part of the evaluation.

“According to what was said today at least, Dr. King will be eligible for $20,000 of his bonus based on our evaluation of him, but he can get a potential $45,000 in bonuses,” said Board Chairman Pete Johnson. “The other part of his bonus is based on grading and scoring of the district that comes from the state.

“Those numbers haven’t been released yet.”

The remaining metrics include reading retention among third- and fourth-graders, math scores and graduation rates.

The overall graduation rate of JMCSS has improved to greater than 92% last year and has been higher than 90% the last three years – rising a few tenths of a percentage each year.

The principal evaluations has been a point of discussion among the board members for a year now to ensure that principals are being evaluated for what’s going on in their schools in a similar manner to how King is being evaluated by the Board and the state based on what’s going on collectively in all of their school buildings.

“I know I’m happy with where things are headed under Dr. King because of his leadership and his approach to education,” Johnson said. “So he deserves to be rewarded for that work, but what I appreciate about him even more is that he will take this evaluation and not look at our evaluation of him at face value.

“He’ll look at the numbers and the metrics and dig a little deeper to see where we as a District can be even better and how to improve on that. I expect the same from him in the coming year.”

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news