Hanover County Public Schools (HCPS) submitted a Request for Assistance (RFA) to doctoral students at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) to improve their support staff evaluation system. The doctoral team focused on developing an updated evaluation tool that effectively measures support staff job performance. To do so, the team conducted a descriptive study and developed a framework, Core Evaluation Components (CEC), to support the use of research-informed components in a quality K12 staff evaluation. The methods used in this study were a survey and a qualitative document analysis. The survey was used to understand the opinions, perspectives, and input from both HCPS support staff employees and evaluators. The qualitative document analysis was utilized to compare the current HCPS evaluation tool to those of neighboring school districts to identify the needs of the new tool. Findings revealed the importance of prioritizing the needs of the organization’s evaluators and employees, the CEC elements of accuracy, transparency, equity, and feedback, and performance management concepts in the development of the new evaluation tool. The team created targeted recommendations for HCPS to implement the new evaluation tool effectively and developed job-specific evaluation forms, an executive summary, and strategic feedback forms for HCPS to implement
