Superintendent: Hire 6 Middle/High School Dept Chairs for $265,000

At Darien High School and Middlesex Middle School, 12 teachers coordinate six different academic departments in each school, spending about 20 percent of their time doing it.

But a better system would be for the school district to hire six department chairs, each of whom would spend 80 percent of the time running an academic department across both schools, and 20 percent teaching a class, Schools Superintendent Dan Brenner says. He wants to change to that system in the next school year. It would cost about $265,000 more each year.

Brenner introduced the proposal to the Board of Education and the public during the marathon, all-day budget meeting of the board on Saturday. (The meeting went from 8:30 a.m. to after 4 p.m. — about seven hours with some short breaks.)

One of the biggest changes that the proposal would make involves teacher evaluations. The department chairs — each of whom would run departments in both schools — would do half of the teacher evaluations now done by administrators (principals or assistant principals) in the two schools, Brenner says.

Since the department chairs will know the (overall) academic subjects being taught, the evaluations should be better, according to Brenner. That should help improve teaching in the schools, he said.

The six departments involved in the proposal are English, World Languages, Math, Science, Social Studies and Special Education.

Currently an administrator who may have taught math in the past is put in the position of evaluating someone teaching world languages — a subject the administrator may know little about, even if the evaluator was taught a language in high school or college.

There are other aspects to teacher evaluation than judging how well a subject is taught, including teacher/student interactions, but a gap in the evaluator’s knowledge of the academic subject is still a gap in the evaluation, Brenner indicated.

The evaluator “can’t teach the content. He doesn’t talk about how the content is organized” in the evaluation, the superintendent said.

An administrator typically does 40 evaluations in a school year, which involves not just sitting in on a class, but work beforehand, work afterward and writing up the evaluation, Brenner said. Each evaluation takes four or five hours of work, he said.

And administrators have a much different job than teachers or than a department chair would have. A school administrator has “daily management issues” such as dealing with a student pulling a fire alarm as a prank.

The administrator will be reacting to the fire alarm, possibly finding out who pulled it, then dealing with the prankster, Brenner said.

That will interrupt their concentration on a teacher evaluation.

“Their day starts with management — they deal with crises; That’s what they do,” Brenner said. “And when it happens, everything else goes on hold. They’re managing moment to moment.”

Administrators would do only about half of the evaluations they now do, with the department chairs picking up the rest, Brenner said.

And when the department chair does the evaluation, the teacher will be more familiar with that person, so the evaluation will tend to be easier to handle. A department chair who also teaches will be seen more as a “first among equals” and will be familiar with many of the same situations that the teacher is — possibly with the same students. This could make evaluations more collaborative and possibly more helpful for the teacher.

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Brenner introduced his proposal with a slide presentation. These pictures show most of the slides, but the entire presentation should be up on the Darien Public Schools website by Monday, he said (and those slides should be easier to read than these images).

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A single department chair should also help departments follow through with changes in the curriculum, perhaps try new teaching practices in a subject and keep curriculum coordinated between schools (reducing possible gaps in what is taught or wasting time teaching the same thing to students), all of which can improve education for students.

If a parent has a problem that can’t be resolved with a child’s teacher, the department chair would be the next person to go to, rather than a school administrator, Brenner said.

The department chair would probably teach one class at the high school one year and another at the middle school the next year, the superintendent said.

In special education, a department chair familiar with both schools will be particularly helpful because communication between teachers about students transitioning from one school to the other is particularly important, Brenner said.