Natchez — The Natchez-Adams County School Board met Tuesday afternoon to discuss the new ways in which they will be reviewing the superintendent’s job performance.

The routine training session was sponsored by the Mississippi Department of Education.

Laura Jones, bureau manager for school improvement, hosted the seminar and said the new form of evaluation will focus most on technical assistance.

“We aren’t coming in and saying what is wrong and for you to fix it,” she said. “We are coming in and helping you fix it.”

School Board President Harold Barnett said the superintendent gets evaluated every year, and that he and the board wanted some training to help them conduct the evaluation.

“We did not have any training on the evaluation instrument we used last year,” he said. “We used part of the instrument we are learning this year during last year, and we wanted training on the entire instrument.”

The new system will use three different scoring techniques to evaluate the superintendent on a number of standards regarding his performance.

A face-to-face interview with Superintendent Anthony Morris and the school board will be one of the aspects of the evaluation.

The school board will be asked to interview Morris on a number of topics, including what Jones said was the most important, whether or not Morris is an effective superintendent who develops and leads an organization that focuses all stakeholders on academic success for all students.

Jones said a superintendent should celebrate student learning and achievements and assemble an administrative team that has deep knowledge of curriculum, instruction, assessment and evaluation and learners.

Other standards will look at whether or not the board believes Morris develops a customer-focused school system, he develops the human resources within the school system, he manages the school system efficiently and effectively and he manages resources prudently and to the benefit of the instructional program.

There are numerous indicators for each of the standards, and Jones said the board will score Morris from one through four on each, with four being exemplary and one being unsatisfactory.

“The point of the interview is to find out why the superintendent does what he does,” Jones said.

The second part of the evaluation will be a document review of the superintendent said Jones.

“The document/artifact review is a tightly structured collection of artifacts that the superintendent draws from daily work and activities to document knowledge, skill and performance in a given indicator,” Jones said.

Jones said the documents would include things such as newspaper articles, staff evaluation files and district improvement plans.

The documents will also be scored on the same four-point scale as the interview.

The third part of the evaluation will be a questionnaire to be filled out by the board and educators in the district that evaluate Morris on all of the indicators from the five main standards.

Barnett said the school board might not use every aspect to evaluate Morris.

“We may use the whole thing or we may take things out,” he said. “There are some things (Jones) suggested for us not to use.”

Barnett also said the board does not know whether or not they will evaluate Morris’s entire career as superintendent or just this past year.

“We haven’t gotten into specifics yet,” he said. “That is something the board will have to decide.”

In other news:

4 The board voted to approve workers compensation insurance from Louisiana United Business Association based out of Baton Rouge.

The premium from LUBA was $166,341, $61,000 less than the quote they received from competing company Bottrell Insurance.

4 The board voted to advertise for repairs to the roof of the Fallin Career and Technology Center.

The board also voted to employ a local architect to oversee the repairs.