SHERBURNE – Employment contracts for the offices of superintendent and assistant superintendent of the Sherburne-Earlville Central School district will be for three years again, but salaries and benefits will be negotiated annually.

A vote was taken on the contracts for Superintendent Gayle Hellert and Assistant Superintendent Todd Griffin at a special meeting of the SECS Board of Education Tuesday evening. All but one current member in addition to the two, newly-elected board members participated in the executive session.

The board voted unanimously to award three-year contracts from June 30, 2011 to June 30, 2014 and to determine salaries and benefits annually based on performance and fiscal responsibility.

School board President Doug Shattuck said the superintendent’s previous contract had a paragraph in it that indicated the board would begin planning toward tying wages to performance.

“Now that the perimeters for the state’s Race to the Top process are becoming a little bit more clear, we are in a better position to tie wages and benefits to performance,” he said.

New York State Education Department’s 2010 evaluation system, an initiative of the Obama Administration, is designed to rate teachers based in part on student scores in reading and math.