Eagle County School District Performance Pay Program

ackground:
Eagle County School District (ECSD) serves 5,300 students across 16 schools with extreme racial and socioeconomic diversity characteristics of urban schools. More than 30% of the students are English language learners and 30% of the students are from low income families based on free/reduced price lunch eligibility. The area experiences high teacher turnover (21% of teacher spend less than 3 years in the district and 85% of the prinicipals) due to the high cost of living in the area (proximal to numerous ski resorts).

A summary of the Eagle County, Colorado Performance-Based Compensation plan that align with our design elements (listed below)

1) Ongoing, job-embedded professional development;
· Instructional Best Practices
· Increase training in core content areas

(2) Performance-based compensation;
· Pure performance based compensation system, increases are not additive and must be earned each year based on indexed student assessment results and teacher evaluations

(3) Evaluation based on professional standards;
· Eagle County Colorado’s Performance-Based Compensation plan evaluations for teachers are was based 50% on two annual classroom evaluations designed to measure teaching skills, knowledge and responsibility; the other 50% is based on student achievement and growth.
· Student Assessments made up of four components; District-Wide ACT, District-Wide CSAP (Colorado Student Assessment Program), Building-Wide CSAP using “Catch-up, Keep up”model., Building-wide NWEA.

(4) Career advancement options.
· Create tracking system for succession planning purposes for all teacher and prinicipals categorizing them as; master, mentor, career.

Quantitative and qualitative measures employed to baseline and monitor the program’s success are the program’s impact on student achievement, instruction and teacher effectiveness, which includes teacher attitudes; and recruitment and retention.