MANSFIELD — Mansfield City Schools will realign a few administrative positions based on recommendations from the Ohio Department of Education.
Two administrative positions will be created and two positions restructured in an effort to improve student achievement, according to Superintendent Brian Garverick. The Board of Education voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve the posting of the four job descriptions as the first step toward finding qualified applicants; board member Chris Elswick was absent.
The positions of “Campus Director” for the middle school and high school, as well as “Director of School Improvement” were new positions created, while “Chief Academic Officer” and “Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources and Communication” involve a restructuring of current positions.
The positions come directly from recommendations from the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), which first reviewed Mansfield City Schools in November 2015. Garverick stated the district hosted representatives from ODE this week as they conducted a follow-up on the recommendations.
“They gave us a lot of recommendations the last time they were here, in regards to leadership, governance and communication, curriculum and instruction, assessment, human resources and professional development, student support, and fiscal management,” Garverick said.
“They looked at these areas and interviewed people in the district, looked at our documents and reviewed protocols, and came up for recommendations for each area. They’re back here now for an update on where we are after they gave us their recommendations and after we’ve implemented practices to address these.”
The new positions within the district directly address challenges identified by the ODE, including the board of education lacking a collaborative process to evaluate the superintendent, the need to develop assessment strategies for the superintendent’s action plan to improve student achievement, or the district’s lack of a comprehensive teachers’ professional development plan for grades 7-12.
One direct recommendation from the ODE was to “create an administrative position that will be directly responsible for the oversight of curriculum and instruction in the district.” The Director of School Improvement, Garverick said, will be focused directly on academics, while the current position of Curriculum Director will now become Chief Academic Officer, which Garverick said will involve “much broader functions.”
Another recommendation from ODE was to “create a system of operations for the human resources department and an administrative position with a critical role in recruiting, selecting, assigning and managing high-quality teachers and leaders.”
The position of Personnel Director will be revamped to Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources and Communication.
“Personnel is a much narrower focus than human resources, and we want to broaden the scope of that office to take care of our employees,” Garverick said.
In addition, the position of Campus Director for grades 7 through 12 was created to have authority over all operations of the high school and middle school, including the Career Tech program, and use of the building. This allows the building principals to focus on academics, Garverick said.
“I know what that’s like when you are responsible for activities going on in that building and at the same time you’re the educational leader,” said Garverick, a former principal of Mansfield Senior High School. “This director of 7-12 will bring that work together and take some of the burden of operating that building off of the principals.”
After approval from the Board of Education, the district will now advertise for the new positions with the hopes of filling them by the first week of June. The goal of the changes, Garverick said, is to provide more support throughout the district for students, teachers and administrators.
“Any time you can strengthen the services on behalf of our school community, that’s a win-win,” Garverick said. “This was a big year for us in terms of transition, and so will next year. We’re going to put some things in place and move our district forward; our families and kids deserve it.”
