Saugus super chipping away at goals

SAUGUS – The School Committee has been working to put together a list of goals for Superintendent Richard Langlois but he has a bit of a leg up on them.Hanging in his office is a white board with very little white space left. On the board is a list of goals Langlois set for himself when he took over as Superintendent in July and an impressive amount of them are marked by a small neat circled word, “done.””The chart is my guide,” he said. “It’s starting to come together, the first wave of infrastructure.”Langlois said he thought he laid out a healthy dose of goals with 18 items but the committee sought to add a few, bringing the number closer to 22.The list on Langlois’ board includes groups with titles such as all day kindergarten, data assessment, crisis readiness and text book selection, which are then followed by subsets of action items. About 16 of the items have been completed, the rest wait like wall flowers waiting to be addressed.The School Committee’s list includes categories such as personal qualities and characteristics, general management, personnel management, educational leadership and budget management. His committee-mandated goals include taking such actions as producing a transparent budget, building a foundation for improved instruction, professional development opportunities and student performance. He must also, among other things, maintain community involvement, redevelop seamless recruitment and personnel practices and develop an infrastructure for operation of the district and define its management and expectations.Langlois noted that many of the committee’s goals coincided with his own and he is pleased with his progress thus far.With a rewritten hiring guide, a new motto, “Excellence is a Culture,” and a marketing campaign underway that includes attending a teacher fair, Langlois has the task of restructuring recruitment practices in hand.He said he is also developing a data base for staff evaluation to track accountability, something the district has been sited by the state for lacking.Three schools were sited for failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress in MCAS but Langlois is on that as well. After shuffling some resources Langlois hired an assistant principal for the Veterans School, a math specialist for the middle school and reading teachers for the elementary schools had already been rehired just prior to former Superintendent Keith Manville retiring.He has reached to the community forming several partnerships with local businesses that bring both knowledge and resources into various classrooms and he has filed two grants both aimed at bolstering the long suffering middle school.Langlois shrugs off the idea that he has made great progress in a short timespan and is quick to note that the School Committee has yet to officially finalize the list. However, he expects the committee will vote on the list during its regular meeting on Thursday.