Board Bulletins

Evaluating the Superintendent’s Performance…

July 2025

The School Board has one employee: the Superintendent. While the Board approves the hiring of staff and their contracts, the Superintendent is responsible for managing all staff. The Board has oversight of district operations by holding the Superintendent accountable. One of the main ways this is done is through the annual Superintendent’s evaluation.

This year, our School Board took a slightly different approach to the process for this evaluation. We began with the standards identified in the Washington State School Directors’ Superintendent evaluation tool, our Board-Superintendent Team Goals, and the district’s Board-adopted Strategic Plan.

Meeting with Superintendent Parker last summer, we agreed on specific areas of the Superintendent’s responsibilities to be measured by outcomes. These areas are: 1) Academic Achievement Initiative; 2) Fiscal Accountability and Budget Oversight Initiative; and 3) Implementing the Strategic Plan. Additionally, we identified two standards from the Washington Standards-Based Superintendent Framework: Standard 5) Professional Capacity of School Personnel and Standard 8) Collaboration with the Board. For each of these areas, a rubric was developed to measure performance as: needs improvement, basic, proficient, or distinguished.

In our Board meetings this year, we have received numerous reports and updates on the ongoing work across the district, addressing various components of the areas identified for evaluating the Superintendent. Additionally, Dr. Parker has provided the Board with documents and information related to his work in each area including trainings he attended or gave, updated work processes, and results of various assessments of student and staff performance.

The Board met with Dr. Parker in two executive sessions in January for a mid-year review, where he shared his perspective on his progress and answered questions and received feedback from the Board. The discussion identified several areas where Board members were pleased with the progress, and a few where we clarified our expectations, particularly related to collaboration with the board.

The final evaluation occurred in May, in two executive sessions where the Board met with Dr. Parker and he updated examples of his work and answered our questions; after which the Board deliberated alone. Each of the identified areas have subsections, which were rated independently. The Board rated Dr. Parker’s performance as follows:

1. Academic Achievement: IN PROGRESS to PROFICIENT to DISTINGUISHED
2. Fiscal Accountability and Budget Oversight: DISTINGUISHED
3. Implementation of the Strategic Plan: PROFICIENT to DISTINGUISHED
4. Professional Capacity of School Personnel: PROFICIENT to DISTINGUISHED
5. Collaboration with the Board: PROFICIENT to DISTINGUISHED

The Board formally approved the written evaluation at our June 9, 2025 School Board meeting. View the full twelve-page Superintendent Evaluation.

CVSD Career and Technical Education (CTE) Opportunities Abound...

Our CVSD mission is to “prepare students for career and life through high-quality, comprehensive education in partnership with families and community in a safe and inclusive environment." Our CTE programs and courses directly align with our mission, vision, and who we are with a focus on our strategic plan.

One of the four directions in our strategic plan is launching infinite possibilities. Under that direction, one of the actions is to enhance and implement a K-12 CTE model. We always work to tie our board actions and board goals to our strategic plan. It is not just something we wrote, but rather a roadmap that guides our ongoing decision making.

CTE programs and courses connect academic concepts to real-world applications and in doing so, prepare students to succeed in either a job out of high school or higher education. Students learn required academic standards from numerous subjects, all while engaging in hands-on courses that are relevant to them. Some CTE courses allow students to obtain both high school and college credits for the same course, which gives students a jump start in their college education.

CTE courses provide outcomes that our local business community needs in graduates. In fact, in order to offer a course in CTE, there must be an industry need that the course fulfills. Our Director of CTE Jennifer Chase and CTE teachers work closely with local industry experts to ensure courses are relevant, current, and meet the needs of industry in our local community and/or prepare them for higher education. Student apprenticeships are also born from this collaboration.

CVSD offers five CTE program areas students can choose: Business and Marketing; Family and Consumer Science; STEM; Skilled and Technical; and Health Sciences. In each of these program areas, there are sub-categories that include numerous courses. Some examples of sub-categories include computer science, engineering, manufacturing, construction, fire science, and biomedical science. CVSD provides a lot of CTE courses, and actively adds more when possible.

CVSD offers CTE courses in all our high schools and middle schools. Our CTE staff work closely to align middle school pathways with high school pathways. This amazing opportunity affords our students – beginning in middle school – to start taking courses for career exploration that then expands to career preparation in high school. CVSD also offers extra-curricular opportunities that are for career and technical learning in both middle and high schools.

As a board, we have recently taken action on a couple of items related to CTE. We adopted a new middle school science curriculum that provides more hand-on learning. We are also doing a technology refresh, as part of the capital levy, to ensure students have proper working computers to access curriculum, including CTE courses. As our strategic plan states, we want CTE programming at all levels. We offer courses in the middle and high schools and Science Technology Engineering and Mathmatics (STEM) activities in the elementary schools. We will continue to work towards CTE course expansions and other related opportunities whenever feasible.

We continue to support existing CTE courses and projects. Spokane Valley Tech's Tradeshow of Innovation is one of the exciting venues afforded for our students. They work on an innovative project all year long and then present it in May at the tradeshow. These projects require students to apply knowledge from multiple courses for design, project management, implementation, and presentation. They do amazing innovative work!

Overall, CTE is a win for both our students and our community. In partnership with local industry leaders, CVSD is ensuring that our students are afforded many CTE opportunities which are relevant, current, and will lead to successful careers that are needed in our community.

Here is a recent CTE presentation to the School Board to give you an overview of our programs.