nothin Principals Feel Time Squeeze | New Haven Independent

Principals Feel Time Squeeze

Melissa Bailey Photo

Pam Franco wants to spend more time in classrooms to evaluate her teachers, but often finds herself sidetracked” by student discipline or family crises.

I just have to decide to make it a priority one day, and have others support things that come up,” said Franco (pictured), the principal of Clemente Leadership Academy.

Franco is not alone, according to a newly released district climate” survey in which 82 percent of administrators reported not having enough time to focus on teacher evaluation and development.

The district processed the survey information during the summer with the principals, and then put out an action plan” this month, which matched feedback with specific steps to address them.

Ninety percent of administrators, mostly principals and assistant principals, responded to the survey in June, a record high, according to Superintendent Garth Harries. In prior years, the response rate fell below 50 percent.

One of the most striking findings is the degree of time pressure that principals feel,” Harries said.

More than half of administrators surveyed said they wanted to spend more than 40 percent of their time each week visiting classrooms and observing teachers, but only 2 percent said they had that opportunity. Nearly a quarter of administrators surveyed said they were able to spend up only up to 10 percent of their week in the classroom.

Melissa Bailey File Photo

Sound School Principal Rebecca Gratz (pictured) said she started putting teacher evaluations and classroom interactions — instructional leadership” — on her calendar. Getting all three of the school’s administrators in one place regularly to observe and debrief is challenging,” she said.

One potential solution is increasing the number of leadership positions at schools to divvy up the work, freeing individual administrators to budget more time to teacher evaluations, Harries said.

Having more hands helps,” Principal Franco said, but hiring more administrators is a financial burden.” Clemente relies on its coaches to support teachers in the classroom, with veteran teachers helping new teachers, she said.

Melissa Bailey File Photo

But the extra hands don’t have to be administrators, said Dave Cicarella (pictured), president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, who agreed that carrying out teacher evaluations is a labor-intensive process.”

Hiring operations managers to handle non-instructional” matters such as transportation, routine discipline and basic logistical issues would be a less financially taxing way to allow administrators more time in classrooms, he said. These managers would not be paid as much as administrators and don’t need a six-figure salary,” Cicarella said, though they would need to be capable and college-graduated.

So far, this plan has scattered implementation,” he said.

The Commissioner’s Network built an operations manager into the turnaround at Lincoln-Bassett School, he said. A couple of schools such as Hillhouse High School have deans of discipline” to handle its routine disciplinary matters.

Still, this requires finding room in the budget, preventing the district from uniformly hiring to fill these positions.

Individual schools have different administrative needs. Principal Gratz said Sound School has its own specific, time-consuming approach to student disciplinary issues when they come up, involving multiple administrators, parents and teachers. So a dean of discipline would not be useful.

She said she spends a lot of her time on operations, logistics and budgeting, so having an executive office manager would help her handle some of those duties.

Another solution to administrator overload is streamlining communication on various levels, not having different offices asking for different things when we want the priority to be in the classroom,” Harries said.

Principal Franco said that one helpful reform that came out of the survey was the weekly distribution of the district newsletter Leadership Connection,” previously distributed only on a monthly basis. Having that regular line of communication helps her stay informed on large-scale district changes as she runs her building.

Principals consistently gave the highest ratings to their supervisory directors of Instructions,” with more than 90 percent across the board reporting satisfaction with their support and effectiveness. Additionally, 78 percent of all administrators said they felt the district was heading in the right direction, and 91 percent said they thought their work contributed to that.

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