FAIRMONT – The Fairmont School Board heard from Special Education Teacher and Q Comp Coordinator Kristi Bulfer regarding the Q Comp teacher plan results at its Tuesday School Board meeting.

This report follows a data collection from teachers conducted by Bulfer.

“Every year we send out a bunch of surveys for every paid position in our Q Comp plan,” she said. “I collect all that information, and then that helps us determine what we need to change or adjust.”

This year, Bulfer said they worked very hard to align with Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports, including peer review and evaluation systems and reflective, data-informed instructional practices.

In career advancement, placement of teachers in MTSS and PLC meetings where they can have a voice and impact netted positive results.

“The impact staff reported was it improved a lot of communication and collaboration through this component,” Bulfer said. “We’ve increased the instructional consistency because we have opportunities to have conversations about what we’re teaching, how it’s working. We strengthen the reflective teaching practices, so we get the opportunity to have conversations with our peers about how effective our instruction was, and it maintains the focus on student achievement.”

Job-embedded professional development was also implemented through MTSS and PLC meetings, as well as intervention teams and instructional coaching cycles. Bulfer said staff reported this helped with collaboration and consistency.

“This is where we got a lot of support for our research-based best practices,” she said. “When we are doing interventions, we need to be using research space. It’s where we’re able to learn about that and support increased opportunities for reflection and problem solving come through a lot of our job-embedded staff development as well. Teachers valued most about this the peer observations, coaching conversations, collaborative planning and data discussions focused specifically on student needs.”

Teacher evaluation was done through classroom observations, reflective conversations and instructional coaching, among other tactics. Bulfer said teachers identified constructive feedback, coaching relationships, constructive feedback, reflective conversations and the opportunity to observe colleagues as strengths to this approach.

Multiple opportunities were offered for performance pay and alternative salary schedules, potentially earning up to $2,000 extra through activities including participation in PLC, peer review and professional development. Bulfer said they were just shy of reaching their goals in this department.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people who participated in PLC earned their pay,” she said. “Peer reviews 100 percent. The third optional one went down to like 65 percent at the high school, which wasn’t required, so they could put it in, but didn’t have to. The professional development, 99 percent of our staff takes part of, and the framework proficiency is 99 percent as well. That really would be 100 percent but there are cases where either somebody didn’t complete it or maternity leave, things like that.”

From these results, Bulfer said there are some things they want to work on moving forward.

“We want to increase our opportunities for peer observation,” she said. “This is a big one at each site. What they’ll do is expand different differentiated professional development opportunities coming, so as those teams are working together in their MTSS groups, making some differentiated opportunities that support teachers was important.”

Superintendent Andy Traetow said this program got a lot of attention at the legislative level this year.

“Potentially restructuring those funds or rescinding the program,” he said. “We just received notice from our representative who oversees the Q Comp program in that, for the 2026-27 school year, to expect no structural changes in the plan. That’s positive for our school district as a recipient of those state funds, and how we utilize them to support our teachers.”

In other news:

–A change to the Online Instruction policy was approved. It laid out that students participating in a home school environment will be able to participate in their resident district, such as Fairmont ISD.

— This was the last school board meeting for senior school board members Bel Lutterman and Wendy Medina Ambrosio. Lutterman said she has really enjoyed the conversations she’s had over the years, focusing on making the student experience better.