In a 3-to-2 vote, the Alachua County School Board voted to fire Superintendent Shane Andrew at a meeting Oct. 15.
Andrew’s firing came after recent evaluations of his position were completed by each board member. Behind the scenes, each board member had their own reasons for voting the way they did.
“It’s been an honor to serve the children and families of this community for nearly 35 years,” Andrew wrote in a statement Oct. 16. “I will continue to do what’s best for students through my final day as Superintendent of this outstanding district, and I look forward to helping children in my next chapter.”
Board member evaluations raise concerns
District 3 board member Sarah Rockwell voted against Andrew’s termination because she wanted the board to perform a national search for the best candidate to replace Andrew. She rated Andrew overall “needs improvement” in her evaluation.
Rockwell said she found many parts of the evaluation process were last-minute and violated policy.
The evaluation instrument is supposed to be developed jointly by the board and superintendent, then formally adopted by the board. ACSB raised concerns about the instrument developed by Andrew at a workshop meeting, Rockwell said.
“Some of the language in the rubric was vague, things like ‘most,’ ‘almost all,’ ‘some,’ words that could mean different things by different people,” she said.
After the workshop, the instrument was supposed to be revised and brought back to the board. The board would then formally adopt it as an action item in a public ACSB meeting. That never happened, Rockwell said.
Per the superintendent’s contract, evaluations were supposed to be completed by Sept. 1. According to Rockwell’s evaluation, board members didn’t receive the forms to complete evaluations until Aug. 29.
Over a week after initial evaluations, board members were sent a section on the board’s interactions with the superintendent, which was supposed to be included in the original evaluation. Rockwell said it was in violation of board policy.
The priorities in the evaluation rubrics were also board-adopted, Rockwell said.
“Those priorities included strategic planning and rezoning, which were conveniently omitted from the evaluation instrument,” she said.
Shane Andrew is required to track data and progress throughout the district and provide that data to board members to complete the evaluation. Rockwell said the data she needed to complete the evaluation was not readily available to her.
“You had to extrapolate data, calculate things ourselves,” she said. “I tried to access it through our data system, and because it was last year’s data, a lot of it was no longer available.”
Rockwell said she also didn’t receive any other board member’s evaluation, nor was it attached to the public agenda, until about three hours before the ACSB meeting on Oct. 15.
Rockwell said the ongoing issues regarding the evaluation make her even more concerned about Andrew’s performance, feeling as if he wasn’t tracking his own progress on the goals he set for himself, she said.
“If I as an employee got to create my own evaluation instrument and provide the data proving my performance to my bosses, I would be extremely careful to track the exact and precise data that I was going to be evaluated on,” she said.
ASCB will hold a special meeting Oct. 21 at 6 p.m. to determine and appoint an interim superintendent while it searches for Andrew’s replacement.
Florida doesn’t recognize an interim superintendent. Any superintendent, even in a shorter contract, has duties and powers like the superintendent.
Rockwell said by “hastily scrambling to appoint a short-term superintendent,” the board remains unstable because the short-term superintendent doesn’t have the “buy-in from the community and the skill set to run a large business.”
Board member votes, evaluations differ
ACSB Chair Diyonne McGraw rated Andrew overall as “effective” in her evaluation. However, after a heated discussion during the Oct. 15 ASCB meeting, she was the deciding vote in terminating him. She felt he “had enough,” she said.
“I talked to Mr. Andrew prior to the meeting, he was tired, ready to go home,” she said.
McGraw said when the board does things based on “politics and personality conflicts instead of what is best for children,” the decision to terminate Andrew was not based on his successes, but rather “unethical behavior,” she said.
“Do you think now, with the new board coming in, are they going to treat him with respect?” she said. “Our job is to work with the superintendent, not undermine and work against.”
In the new search for a superintendent, McGraw said she's looking for someone who’s community-oriented, ready to tackle the finances and big on ensuring they’re going to make sure all children have opportunities.
“To our parents and families, know that this is a difficult decision, but it was a decision I think that had to be made for the sanity of Mr. Andrew,” McGraw said.
District One Board Member Tina Certain rated Andrew overall as “unsatisfactory” in her evaluation. However, she voted against his termination to get out of the disruptive “cycle” she feels the board has created, she said.
“Our board has a history of terminating superintendents, hiring an interim, converting the interim to permanent, and then the cycle starts all over again when a new election happens,” she said.
She said she felt Andrew was “learning on the job,” where some challenges and opportunities were missed because he “didn’t have a framework from which to draw and act upon quickly or efficiently,” she said.
Certain voted against the termination because she wanted the board to perform a national search.
“In doing a search, you put an application out, we develop the criteria that we like to see in our next superintendent, we advertise, and we have it open for candidates from all over to apply,” she said.
For a large organization as complex as a school district, Certain said the next superintendent should know it’s more than “teaching and learning.” She said she wants someone who is able to drive change and manage multiple projects simultaneously, she said.
Past, future board members weigh in
Carlee Simon was a past ACPS superintendent, serving from December 2020 through March 2022. She was also terminated without cause, like Andrew, and finds similarities between both their firings, she said.
“To me, it just seemed extremely careless, and clearly not focused on the students,” she said. “It was certainly politically motivated.”
To Simon, transitioning to a new superintendent in the middle of the school year causes instability for district staff, faculty and students. She believed the decision to terminate Andrew was one of individual motivations, she said. She felt like board members voted in their best interests rather than that of the school district.
As a past ACPS superintendent herself, she said she felt Andrew may have been pulled in multiple directions in fear of losing his job.
“I think a lot of the decisions Shane made, a huge amount of them were based on, ‘Will I keep my employment if I don’t do what this person says?’” she said. “That's a pretty dangerous place to put someone in to run an organization as large as the school district.”
In the search for a new superintendent, Simon said the board should consider the community.
“They have to have multiple community engagement opportunities throughout this entire search process,” she said. “When they think they’re communicating enough, they need to communicate even more.”
Thomas Vu, a 37-year-old Gainesville resident, won the District 2 seat in the Alachua County primaries against Diyonne McGraw. He will be sworn into the ACSB on Nov. 19, and a board vote will determine the next board chair.
Vu said he was initially “shocked and confused” at the termination of Andrew, especially since those who ended up firing him were also those who have historically supported him, he said.
“They weren’t making decisions for what’s best for students, teachers and staff, families, the community,” he said. “I don’t think the public, their input, actual outcomes, were taken into account at all, especially in the quick and [surprising] way it was done.”
Vu believes the best way forward is for the board to perform a national search, he said.
“We need to take our time, do it right and find someone who’s effective, who can come in and create that foundation off which we can build,” he said.
To Vu, that transition still involved Andrew, which would have kept things “orderly,” he said. Looking ahead to his future seat, Vu says he still has hope for the future of the ACSB.
“We can do change in a stable, responsible way,” he said. “I still would like to think that the problems we have in this district are fixable, even if there are those who are uninterested in fixing it.”
Contact Sara-James Ranta at sranta@alligator.org. Follow her on X @sarajamesranta.
Sara-James Ranta is a third-year journalism major, minoring in sociology of social justice and policy. Previously, she served as a general assignment reporter for The Alligator's university desk.
