Through a press release to the Record-fournal

Through a press release to the Record-fournal, Board of Education President Mark A. Hughes announced that the Board held its annual evaluation of Superintendent Mary Noonan Cortright. Based on the discussions of that meeting, Mr. Hughes announced that the Board feels strongly that it is crucial to keep Mary in the position of Superintendent of Schools for an extended period of time. It is their belief that this will maintain consistency and keep the district on course with meeting the goals of advancing the Meriden School System.

Since her announcement to resign her position with the Meriden School system, members of the Board have been contacted by citizens, employees, as well as the Commissioner of the State Department of Education, Mark McQuillan, encouraging the Board to begin discussions with Mary urging her to maintain her position for a longer period of time.

The Board made its decision to move forward with an extended contract renewal request based on the improvements that the district has seen while she has held the position of Superintendent of Schools. It is under her leadership that we have seen increased successand improvement on scales such as the Developmental Reading Assessments(DRA), the Meriden District Assessment (MDA), and most recently, on the Matched CMT Vertical Scale Summary Reports. These are areasin which Meriden needs to continue to see improvement and are just a few of Mary's initiatives that have seen success.

Following negotiations in Executive Session, the Superintendent has agreed to a two year contract that will extend her tenure as Superintendent of Schools through the 2009-2010 school year, at which time she will retire having served 32 yearc in the Meriden School System. The Board of Education members in attendance at Tuesday night's meeting voted unanimously to the contract extension.