School Committee Gives Olsen Positive Reviews During Evaluation

As the school year comes to a close, Westford's students are seeing the their final grades for the year, but they're not alone.

Each summer, the School Committee gives their grades to Superintendent Bill Olsen on his progress toward a series of goals set for the school year.

Presented during last week's meeting, the six members of the Committee present throughout the year was generally pleased with his performance on the five overarching goals set for Olsen, as well as his overall performance.

Although he "exceeded" expectations only twice (with School Committee Member Arthur Benoit saying his performance fell between "meeting" and "exceeding" expectations on implementation of the new DESE Education Evaluation System, none of the members gave him a "did not meet" expectations grade on any of the five goals.

Out of the five goals, Olsen's weakest score came on development of a systemwide educational model for accelerated learning opportunities to be rolled out next school year.

There, five of the six School Committee members said that only "some progress" had been made, with School Committee Member Terrance Ryan noting "significant progress", but also issuing concerns over what is still left to be done.

During the meeting, Benoit remembered the time when his daughter met Olsen in her classroom, calling him "Bob," urging the Committee to remember Olsen's work ethic beyond the evaluation process.

"Those stories just show the amount of personal effort that you put into it," he said. "And no matter what we do here, I ask that amount of personal effort never get lost."

The full evaluation is available as a PDF on the town website, the discussion on the evaluation can be seen on Westford CAT's video of the meeting (starting at the 30:00 mark)

A recap of Olsen's 2012 evaluation can be seen here.