Mandy Fletcher

The Blue Earth Area School Board held a work session on Thursday, July 23, and immediately went into closed session to conduct superintendent Mandy Fletcher’s performance review.

When the work session resumed board chair Susan Benz provided a summary of the closed session.

“We evaluated her on the four goals we set with her last fall,” Benz explained. “The first goal was for the strategic plan and she earned a rating of four. The range of the scoring was from one to four with four being the highest possible score.”

Benz continued her report.

“The second goal was the bond and levy campaign and we gave her a 3.43 in that area,” Benz continued. “The third goal was culture of cooperation and she scored a 3.57. The final goal was emotional, health and social needs and she received a 3.29.”

Benz then summarized Fletcher’s scores.

“Her overall rating for the four goals came in at 3.71 for the evaluation,” Benz remarked. “We also discussed superintendent Fletcher’s greatest strengths and her greatest challenge for the year.”

Fletcher’s greatest strength, according to the report, was guiding the district through the refresh process of the district’s strategic plan and has been very effective setting goals for her and her staff. She also worked tirelessly on guiding the board through budget reductions and right sizing the district.

“Developing and implementing social and emotional learning has been one of the greatest challenges for this school year,” Benz said. “This is a new program for our district and given the focus on the referendum, budget reductions followed by the COVID pandemic, this program did not progress as much as we had hoped it would this year.”

Fletcher thanked the board for taking the time to complete the evaluations and said she valued their opinions and feedback.

“I agree the social and emotional programs did not get to the point we had hoped they would for a multitude of different reasons,” Fletcher commented. “We are continuing this summer to explore how we can better implement social and emotional learning and provide additional professional development for the staff to give them additional tools and resources to help our kids.”

Fletcher then moved on to talk about her goals for this next year.

“One of my goals would be to continue working on the social and emotional learning this year,” Fletcher said. “And I would like to hear from the board members, maybe by the August meeting, what goal or goals you would have for me.”

After some discussion, it was agreed to use the time between now and the next meeting in August to come up with possible goals for the superintendent.

Next, the discussion moved to board goals.

“My thought is we just set these earlier. We did accomplish balancing the budget so maybe we can add a different goal,” Benz said.

Board member Kyle Zierke chimed in with his thoughts.

“We need to maintain a balanced budget,” Zierke offered.

The board agreed and made that one of their goals.

Fletcher reminded the board they should continue to revisit the goals on a quarterly basis and stressed the importance of reaching out and communicating with the communities in the district.