- January 20, 2025
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The Volusia County School Board hasn't evaluated its attorney for 40 years.
This will soon change. At the board's July 26 meeting, the board will both vote on an evaluation tool and then implement it to evaluate School Board Attorney Ted Doran's performance, a decision made by three out of the five board members during their meeting on Tuesday, June 28. School Board Chair Ruben Colon was absent; Board member Carl Persis left early due to illness.
The board was presented with evaluation forms used by eight counties throughout the state, with the purpose of recommending one to use as a starting point. But Doran voiced concern with all of the forms, saying that from his point of view, none of them matched up to his position.
"If I were to sit down with one of the board members, I could explain each of these different criteria for evaluation, and I could explain why it does or doesn't apply," Doran said. "I think that out of all these, there's definitely one that could be created."
School Board member Jamie Haynes responded that they are at a point where this topic has been brought up several times in the last few months, in the hopes they could create an evaluation tool and the board is down to the "ninth hour," with the item finally on the agenda for them to discuss.
Doran said he wasn't concerned about an evaluation — only that he wanted to know the criteria of the evaluation in advance.
"Somebody needs to be asking what the financial impact of the evaluation will be, because I can tell you that a lot of these criteria that I see [on these forms], I don't spend time of them, and you don't pay me," Doran said. "If you tell me that's what you're going to evaluate me on, I'm going to do everything A-plus. There won't be one category that you will be able to say that I did not complete with 100%."
School district attorney Kevin Pendley said that out of all the forms presented to the School Board, Clay County's model is the only one similar to Volusia's with outside counsel serving as the board's attorney.
"He's not an employee," Pendley said. "He's an independent contractor that provides services on an hourly rate. That's a different kind of analysis than when you have a School Board attorney that is your employee."
Getting Pendley's input throughout the process to choose an evaluation tool was also a point of contention during the discussion, as Doran said that may fall to new superintendent Carmen Balgobin who is set to start working at the district on July 1.
Board members will submit the goals that they would like to see included in the evaluation tool by July 7. A draft will then be presented to each board member by July 14 for feedback, with the hopes of finalizing a document by July 21, five days before the next board meeting.
The only member of the public to speak on the item was Volusia United Educators President Elizabeth Albert, who said other employees in the district don't get to choose their own evaluation tool. She questioned who else in the district is measured by the same standard of having no evaluations done in four decades.
"Do we think that's appropriate?" Albert said. "I don't. When I hear comments made like, 'I'm going to do an A-plus job,' I'm led to wonder, 'What kind of job is happening right now?' When we talk about a financial consequence to actually do an A-plus job, that sounds to me like a threat and it encourages me to perhaps put in a public information request to find out about billable hours, because now, I'm really curious."
