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Superintendent asks for four more years

Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007

Montgomery County schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast has written a formal letter asking the school board to renew his contract for four more years.

Weast, whose pay and benefits package totals around $359,000 annually, is in the final year of a four-year contract. He has been superintendent since August 1999.

‘‘While I won’t stay forever, I would like to stay another contract term because I think there’s more work to be done,” Weast, 59, said during a meeting last week with Gazette editors and reporters ‘‘I’m at a pivotal point in my life [where] I really want to make a difference, and I believe that we can do it here.”

The board has informally discussed Weast’s contract renewal and will continue talks during a retreat on Thursday in Rockville, said board President Nancy Navarro (Dist. 5) of Silver Spring. ‘‘This has to be treated as a personnel matter,” she said.

The board plans to vote on Weast’s contract extension during its Feb. 13 meeting in Rockville. ‘‘He wants a renewal of his contract as it is,” Navarro said.

The letter, sent Jan. 3 to the board, outlines several successes during his seven-year tenure, which includes raising test scores in elementary schools and narrowing the achievement gap for some black and Hispanic students.

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If his contract is renewed, Weast intends to focus on increasing school safety and addressing racial tension in schools.

Board member Sharon W. Cox (At-large) of Germantown introduced a resolution during last week’s meeting, which sets a framework to evaluate the board and superintendent’s work.

It also ‘‘establishes a rubric for the hiring of a new superintendent,” the resolution said.

That doesn’t apply to Weast, Navarro said.

‘‘I haven’t got any communications from my employer that they want me to go. I haven’t [gotten] any signals that ... weren’t anything but positive,” Weast said. ‘‘I didn’t see that as a negative. I saw that as a positive, and I was told that it was coming, and I encouraged it.”