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First there was the hope: A new teacher evaluation system promised to create a feedback loop to make teachers more effective.

Now there is the fear. Teachers groups worry that they may not have been consulted enough in the development of the new system. This is a particularly sensitive issue because the new evaluation system is ultimately supposed to affect decisions about teacher pay.

But the ultimate question is whether the system will bring much-needed improvements to the education system in Hawaii.

It might. Or it could just create a big mess.

That’s because the clock is ticking and the Hawaii Department of Education and Hawaii State Teachers Association may not have enough time to agree on how to finalize the system and implement it statewide by the start of the school year, August 5.

Officials have just six weeks to fine-tune the so-called Educator Effectiveness System and integrate recommendations from a committee that was appointed in early June.

The evaluation system was a key sticking point in collective bargaining negotiations between the state and the teachers association, delaying a contract agreement for months.

Earlier this year, a teachers association survey of educators participating in a revealed that many educators had qualms about several of the system’s components, especially student surveys.

Hawaii teachers ratified a contract in April on the condition that their association be allowed to create a committee to help the Department of Education and Board of Education finalize the new system.

Wil Okabe, the president of the teachers association, called the contract stipulation a “victory” on the part of union negotiators.

Okabe that he had appointed four teachers association members to a joint committee in a June 4 . He also announced that he was appointing a separate 10-member teachers association advisory group to collect school-level data and to help guide the joint committee. Okabe said the advisory committee is critical for getting teacher input, especially during the summer months.

In the video announcement, Okabe also stressed that the committees would be under intense time pressure to come up with recommendations for the state. “There is a sense of urgency in this,” he said.

Despite that, the committee is only now getting started. And teachers will be back in the classroom preparing for the new school year by July 30, at the latest.

“Teachers are going to be surprised the first day we go back to school,” said Corey Rosenlee, a social studies teacher at James Campbell High School who organized the grassroots Hawaii Teachers Work to the Rules movement. “There are going to be so many questions this year — a lot of growing pains.”

Although the new evaluations won’t affect most teachers’ pay until the 2014-15 school year, they will establish a framework for how the state’s educators will be held accountable for student learning.

The Department of Education, Okabe noted, had already postponed implementation of the evaluation system at multi-track schools from early July to August because the joint committee, which also has four members representing the state, didn’t even have its first meeting until last week.

Officials at the teachers association and at the DOE told Civil Beat that the joint committee still has a lot of work to do before it submits recommendations to the school board. Members are still formulating a basic game plan, including a meeting schedule, they said.

Tammie Pickelsimer, the DOE’s project manager for both teacher and principal evaluations, said the department is currently reviewing data from the pilot schools and devising an improvement plan. She said it remains to be seen whether the revised evaluation system will be much different from the one that was piloted.

Pickelsimer also insists that the process is on track. And Okabe said he’s confident that the teachers association will have its voice heard, emphasizing that committee members can hone the system throughout the upcoming school year.

“We got a whole year to get this thing started,” Okabe said, adding that only new teachers’ salary schedules will be subject to the evaluation system this year.

Pickelsimer also stressed that the DOE has sought teacher input in a variety of ways, including through a 15-member Great Teachers Great Leaders task force that has been meeting every three months, a separate Great Teachers Great Leaders working group and teacher forums across the state hosted by DOE Deputy Superintendent Ronn Nozoe.

Meantime, Okabe cited the teachers association’s efforts to enhance communication with its members in recent months as evidence that their input will be integrated into the new evaluations. The union has relied increasingly on modern communication methods such as social media, video messages and mass text-messaging to get the word out to members.

Last year, Okabe said the then-rejected contract agreement didn’t garner enough votes largely because the teachers association failed to sufficiently explain its contents to teachers.

Still, Rosenlee suspects that the upcoming school year will be marked by widespread confusion among his teaching colleagues, not to mention a host of unforeseen challenges and an overwhelming workload for school staff, especially because the DOE is also set to roll out the new standards to all grade levels during the same time period.

Rosenlee said teachers feel as if they’re being kept in the dark about details of the new system and don’t expect to know exactly how it’ll play into their day-to-day lives until school starts.

And then there is the extra workload that, he added, could mean that school administrators won’t be able to use the evaluations in a useful way.

“It’s just going to be a rubber-stamp process — a lot of nothing,” Rosenlee said.