Dr. Magda Parvey met or made significant progress towards goals in her first year as superintendent of Andover Public Schools, according to the annual evaluation completed late last month by the school committee.
The goals, including professional practice, student learning and district improvement, were set in October. In a composite of evaluations by school committee members, the board said Parvey had met the goals under professional practice and district improvement and made significant progress on the student learning goals. The composite evaluation is sent to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary Education.
Committee chair Susan K. McCready called the annual superintendent’s evaluation one of the most important tasks undertaken by the school committee.
In its evaluation, the committee outlined the challenges Parvey faced in her first year in the position, including transportation issues, substitute teacher shortages, changes in state guidance, students returning to their first full in-person year of school since 2018-19 and “significant tensions in collective bargaining negotiations and refusal by the [Andover Education Association] leadership to engage in a professional…instead unnecessarily taxing her focus on students by utilizing the grievance process for issue resolution.”
“Despite all of this, Dr. Parvey hit the ground running as Andover Public Schools’ new chief executive, successfully rising to the challenges above, spending time assessing the district’s strengths and weaknesses, and setting a foundation for improvements,” the committee wrote. “We have evaluated Dr. Parvey’s first year through this lens and conclude that she has successfully led the district through a time of transition and trial. Her performance over the last year is a model for any superintendent new to a state and to a district experiencing all of that noted above along with a lack of district-wide, consistent adherence to process, policy, and district defined management roles.”
The school committee unanimously approved the evaluation in a 5-0 vote at its June 27 meeting. All the materials used in the review, including evaluations by individual school committee members, are available on the APS website.
Parvey came to APS in July 2021 after serving as chief academic officer for the public school system in Middletown, CT. Before that, she was interim superintendent for the City School District of New Rochelle, the second-largest school system in New York’s Westchester County.