The Board of Education conducted its annual evaluation of Supt. Madeline Negrón orally, and not in writing, thereby side-stepping open-records laws that require written reviews to be released to the public.
“I think inherently if you have a written document that’s going to be in the newspaper,” Mayor Justin Elicker told the Independent, “it doesn’t facilitate a very honest and frank conversation and it certainly doesn’t facilitate a back and forth.”
Elicker, who is also a member of the Board of Education and who appointed Negrón to her top schools role in 2023, confirmed on Thursday that the superintendent’s private evaluation in August was spoken rather than written.
He said that conducting a written review — which would have to be released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request — is not “as productive a way to actually get better results” when considering a superintendent’s performance.
The Independent spoke with Elicker two days after filing an appeal with the state Freedom of Information Commission because the city and the public school district did not provide a copy of the superintendent’s 2024-25 evaluation in response to this reporter’s Freedom of Information Act request in September.
A school district spokesperson was not able to confirm earlier this week whether or not that evaluation, which took place during private executive sessions held across two Board of Education meetings in August, was written or conducted orally. Board of Education President OrLando Yarborough did say during the public portion of a Sept. 8 school board meeting that the school board’s review found Negrón to be “highly effective” in her role.
New Haven’s Board of Education isn’t the only one to hold oral rather than written evaluations of a superintendent in order to avoid public disclosure of a detailed, honest review of the leader of a school district. School boards across Connecticut have argued that detailed evaluations shared with the public may limit board members’ ability to provide candid feedback to a superintendent. Critics of such private evaluations have argued that not writing down a superintendent’s evaluation can lead to a lack of public accountability for both the Board of Education and the superintendent.
Elicker told the Independent in a phone interview Thursday that, after the Board of Education discussed the performance of Negrón during several executive sessions in August, the school board’s executive team sat down with Negrón to share the information that the board discussed during her evaluation.
“In general, we wanted to have a very frank conversation with Dr. Negrón and felt like an oral evaluation, sharing that information directly with her as more of a conversation, is the best way to do that,” Elicker said.
He argued that Negrón is effectively “tested” daily through community feedback, and that the board’s evaluation is intended to offer a more formal, structured form of assessment.
He explained that evaluations occur in several forms at board meetings, where school board members respond to Negrón’s presentations on topics like chronic absenteeism with observations, opinions, and critiques. He also said he provides feedback during his own regular, focused check-ins with the superintendent.
Elicker said both the school board and the superintendent acknowledge ongoing challenges, including the district’s financial instability and the need for improving facilities. Still, he said, he considers Negrón’s performance “excellent.”
He concluded by saying that the “most important component of accountability is results, and while we have a lot more work to do, Dr. Negrón is full of great results.”
When asked about the city’s responsiveness to FOIA requests, Elicker said, “We get hundreds and hundreds of FOIA requests and work very hard to follow the law and be as responsive as we can as quickly as we can.”
Update: At 4:23 p.m. Friday, Board of Education President OrLando Yarborough also confirmed for the Independent that Negrón’s evaluation was oral and not written. “Oral evaluations have been the past practice of the Board of Education, and the Board once again collectively decided to provide Dr. Negron’s evaluation in this manner,” Yarborough wrote.
The Board scored Dr. Negron as “highly effective” or “effective” across all seven leadership categories, Yarbrough said about this years evaluation, then it had in-depth discussions on each topic.
The evaluation rating options included; highly effective, effective, developing and ineffective. (Read the Board’s review guide provided by Yarborough Friday below.)
“The absolute evaluation scores are important, but also very limiting,” he said. “However, with an oral evaluation, you’re able to provide much more feedback and have a back-and-forth conversation on a much deeper level.
He concluded: “Every BOE meeting, board members, parents, educators, students and members of the public provide Dr. Negron and her team with very public praise and constructive feedback. There is also an incredible amount of data on how our students and school district is doing. There are few positions that I can think of that are more publicly accountable than our superintendent.”
Meanwhile, on Friday, state Freedom of Information Commission Director of Education and Communications Russell Blair told the Independent that the key to Freedom of Information law is that records have to exist, rather than requiring entities to create records for a request. “Truthfully, if nobody ever put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and there is no written anything about the evaluation, then credibly they can say, ‘I don’t have any records.’”
He noted that if executive session minutes or recordings exist, they can be requested through FOIA.
“It’s not a frequent thing that I get a lot of calls or questions about,” Blair said about school boards’ oral evaluations of superintendents. “One of my guesses that the reason why is in some communities this has been the practice for a while…doesn’t mean that people still aren’t interested.”
Blair pointed to Connecticut General Statute 10-151c., which states teachers’ performance and evaluation records cannot be disclosed publicly. However, that nondisclosure rule applies only to those school district employees “below the rank of superintendent.”
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