Rockwood School Board Candidates Talk Teachers' Tenure, Other Perks

Rockwood Board of Education candidates have more to discuss than budget issues.

At Tuesday’s candidate forum at at , which was sponsored by the League of Women Voters, in the 2012-13 fiscal year.

But they were also asked about the district’s gifted program, special education, the voluntary transfer program that allows students from St. Louis City to attend Rockwood schools and more.

Six candidates are vying for three, three-year positions on the board. The candidates are:

• Keith Kinder, a former Rockwood high school principal and current assistant professor of education at Maryville University
• Stephen Smith, an incumbent and former administrator at Saint Louis University School of Law
• Roger Stock, a former principal of Chesterfield Elementary School and recently retired district administrator
• Kevin Mabie, an English teacher in the Parkway School District
• Matt Doell, an engineer
• Mike Geller, a political consultant

Chesterfield Patch will run several stories about the candidates’ responses to other forum questions and will also run candidates’ written responses to five questions before the April 5 election.

This time, we’re focusing on their responses to a current bill in the Missouri House that impacts teachers’ contracts and a program that allows Rockwood teachers’ children to attend Rockwood schools, regardless of whether they live in the district.

Pending legislation could end tenure

Most expressed some disapproval when asked about Missouri House Bill 628. The bill would eliminate tenure for teachers and create an evaluation system to determine teachers' salaries. The system would rely half on student performance measured by test scores and half on state teacher standards.

Stock said there needs to be a way for any school district to address teachers who are ineffective, but that ineffective tenured teachers are not the norm in the district. “We have our own culture, such that someone who doesn’t fill the bill just doesn’t make it in Rockwood,” he said.

Kinder agreed that tenure didn’t matter at Rockwood, but felt it was important for tenure to continue in rural school districts. He said the formula for teacher evaluations was unfair because it would evaluate teachers of Advanced Placement students the same way it would evaluate teachers of special education students—on test scores.

Doell said he disliked basing teachers’ evaluations on someone else’s test scores and balked at the bill’s specification that each school’s top teachers—the ones up for the largest salary increases on a salary schedule—could amount to no more than 40 percent of the school’s staff. “It’s a bad bill,” he said.

Smith also expressed concern at dividing teachers into ranks. He said it didn’t make sense to him to evaluate Rockwood’s bottom third of teachers the same way the bottom third of teachers in a less effective school district would be evaluated. Smith added that he supports keeping tenure. “I think that we provide tenure because we entrust these people with our most valuable resource, and since that’s what we entrust them with, we have to provide them with protection,” he said.

Mabie said he didn’t support cutting tenure. The wrong way to get a teacher to be effective is to scare them into being effective, he said. Geller said he disagreed; tenure shouldn’t be as important as it is, he said.

“Anyone who works for a living fears losing their job. When you stop fearing, you don’t do as well,” Geller said. He said test scores shouldn’t be the only way to evaluate teachers, though.

Teachers’ children can attend Rockwood schools free of charge

Aside from discussing the pending legislation, the candidates were asked about one more item that directly impacts teachers. The district allows teachers’ children to attend Rockwood schools for free, regardless of where they live. When candidates were asked if they supported this incentive, all but Geller said yes.

“It’s a perk. Teachers don’t get many perks, and it’s a wonderful one we need to hold on to,” Stock said. Other candidates agreed, saying the incentive draws teachers to the district.

Geller said he’s fine with teachers’ children attending Rockwood schools, but doesn’t agree that it should be offered for free. “We, who live in the district, pay our taxes. We are in a crisis right now; we could use that money,” he said.