The Brownwood ISD school board unanimously extended Superintendent Reece Blincoe’s contract for an additional year at a special called school board meeting Tuesday night.
“I’m really happy and I am proud of the board because the board gave me some really good direction and we need to work on a few things,” Blincoe said. “I am going to continue to work on my visibility in the community and working with the community on certain projects, and then we are also going to work on counseling and trying to help our kids get more scholarships.”
BISD school board president Michael Cloy said that many hours went into this year’s superintendent evaluation and it helped set a direction for the next year.
“This is the hardest part of what you do is evaluating the superintendent,” Cloy said. “This is our main job and we are evaluating one man on the behalf of 3200 and something students and staff. I am proud of Dr. Blincoe; I think he is doing a good job. I think we have some issues that we still need to work with, but I think there is no distinct in Texas that doesn’t. I think his leadership in the community is going well and we’re going to continue to promote that.”
The board changed the format of this year’s superintendent evaluation into two parts. Last week they held the formative evaluation and on Tuesday conducted the summative evaluation.
“I like this procedure better and I hope we are going to keep that procedure,” Cloy said. “He is able to present his information then we are able to deliberate, and then we are able to present him with a document and then he can come back at this meeting and we can review it.”
Last year, three board members abstained from voting on extending the superintendent’s contract. Blincoe said there were some specific issues the board was reviewing at the time but were able to overcome. This year, the board made the joint decision to add another year to Blincoe’s contract, extending it through 2016.
“When you get a unanimous vote, then everybody’s on the same page regarding their feelings, regarding his evaluation, and so I will tell you personally as a president there are times that I struggle with personal issues that may be related to me only, and that may have affected me in the past,” Cloy said. “I will tell you by looking at his evaluation, there was no way on this earth that I could not renew his contract. His evaluation was too good.”
This year, there was only one area on the evaluation that showed needing improvement related to the new End of Course exams.
“We’ve got to do better on our EOC scores,” Blincoe said. “That’s our new exam and our specific goal was to be equal with the state or above in both passing and the commended, which means essentially you made an A on the test. We’re 3-4 points behind in almost every area. We have just absolutely got to work on that. It’s a new test, but none of us are happy; none of us should be happy.”
Blincoe said that the district will also be working on programs and plans to make it easier for students to go to college.
“We also talked about bringing in a program where we can help our first generation college goers and our underprivileged kids work towards going to college,” he said. “There are a couple of programs we are going to look into that will work with Howard Payne hopefully to make that happen.”
Cloy said that as a board member, looking at the district from the parent’s perspective is vital, but it is difficult to make everyone in the district happy.
“When you’re on the board, what you’re dealing with are people’s children and their money; the two most precious things you can deal with.” Cloy said. “It is really hard to make everybody happy. If we can succeed with these kids and keep them where they are supposed to be, then we are doing our job.
Blincoe will travel to Austin on Wednesday to testify in the Senate Finance Committee which is the first preliminary hearing on the state budget.
“First and foremost, we can’t pay our teacher what we know they are worth. I am going to bring that up along with a lot of other areas,” he said. “Our ADA (average daily attendance) is down this year by 85 kids which is going to end up costing us about $240,000. We have a lot of families moving to Midland and the Metroplex for jobs. I’ve got 6 or 8 things I’ve lined up to talk about.”
