“You’re out of order” was one of the most popular phrases of the night at Tuesday’s Christina School District’s Board of Education meeting. The sentiment was directed toward board members and attendees alike.
Although the nearly four-and-a-half-hour meeting was certainly shorter than last month’s nearly eight-hour-long meeting, tension between the board and community members was felt immediately.
Within the first 35 minutes of the meeting, Board President Donald Patton explained the rules of public comments and called attendees “guests” while doing so.
“Let me take a few minutes to remind our guests that you are our guests,” he said. “We have a session coming up called Opportunity for Public Comment if you’ve registered, and I will read the guidelines for correct participation. But as a guest, you cannot be disrespectful to the process.”
The audience and community members didn’t take being labeled as guests lightly.
“It was stated in the past that we are guests. We are not guests. This is a public body, this is a public meeting. You are elected officials. These are not guests. These are the bosses,” said Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton (D-Newark) as the audience applauded her. “We have a First Amendment right to speak in public meetings, speak our minds. You can put policies in place that say you can't say certain things, but you can't police how we speak because you don't like it.”
Within the last year, boards of education from Delmar to Brandywine have been subject to controversy, particularly around their most important duty: hiring, working with and overseeing a district’s superintendent.
None have been more volatile than Christina, which voted last month to remove its superintendent after a meeting stretched more than seven hours into the middle of the night. Controversy in the Newark-area district has become so frequent that state legislators mandated that a Delaware Department of Justice attorney attend all meetings for the next year.
Schools’ governing authority
Issues occurring within boards are unusual, said Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs, the executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association. It’s more typical to see tension when a board deals with issues like budgets, boundary changes or closing schools.
“With 90,000 school board members on 15,000 school boards across the country, by far, most are doing good work, and they're focused overall, on the vision for the school district,” McCotter-Jacobs said.
A local school board essentially is the governing authority for a school district, said Paolo DeMaria, the president and CEO of the National Association of State Boards of Education. School boards can fulfill tasks like hiring a superintendent and approving budgets and curriculum priorities.
Board members aren’t paid, but some receive reimbursements for incurred expenses.
McCotter-Jacobs also compared board members to members of Congress, as they typically don’t have term limits. Board members are typically elected for four-year periods and can run for reelection as many times as they’d like, but some do have term limits.
State school boards are similar to overseers for local school boards, in the sense that they have regulations that local school boards have to follow, McCotter-Jacobs said. The state school board isn’t involved in how a local board carries out its regulations unless they receive a complaint or an appeal that they’ll review.
How do Delaware’s local school boards work?
While independent, each Delaware school board has many of the same basic characteristics: members don’t receive a stipend or salary, they have no term limits and the state school board sets regulations that might influence how the local school board decision-making.
School board members must be Delaware residents and U.S. citizens, be 18 or older and must live in the nominating district, said David Tull, the executive director of the Delaware School Boards Association. An individual cannot be a paid employee of the district and must never have been convicted of embezzlement.
After being elected to a school board, members have two state training sessions that they’re required to complete within their first year. One session is for financial training and the other is due process training, which is for dealing with special education, Tull said.
The Delaware School Boards Association also offers its own boot camp for board members every July, covering a variety of topics like financial training, due process training, board member responsibilities and the need to follow Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) rules, among other topics.
Other organizations like First State Educate, a nonprofit that aims to engage families and communities on education issues, share information about student outcomes and encourage school board candidates, also work to provide different resources and training sessions for board members.
“We're trying to train the public and the community and potential school board members, and then we're trying to train the board members themselves,” said Julia Keleher, the executive director of First State Educate. “Ultimately, if both people have the same knowledge and information, they're going to be able to operate much more effectively.”
The organization recently announced its Center for School Board Excellence in Governance, to provide school board members with resources to “lead with confidence and integrity.” Their first set of courses will focus on parliamentary procedures, ethical decision-making and financial management.
First State Educate is also pushing out information to help people understand what boards of education are supposed to do, and will recruit people for board elections starting in January, Keleher said.
The organization also has a school board consultant in New Castle County and is aiming to hire additional people to develop the same role downstate.
“We want to develop those roles and put that resource there so that those communities also have exactly what we built in New Castle County,” Keleher said.
DelawareCAN, an advocacy group that works on public education improvement and equity, partners with First State Educate to run trainings and to help get qualified people interested in running for school boards, said Executive Director Britney Mumford.
Christina board tensions cause divide
The Christina School District’s Board of Education has seen a tumultuous few weeks, with some public commenters labeling the board as “an embarrassment.” Tuesday’s meeting did little to ease lingering tension.
The board’s discussion information items in its Aug. 13 agenda included a “referral to the Public Integrity Commission for an opinion on whether targeting of the superintendent by the board violates public trust and reflects unfavorably on the district,” a second referral to the Public Integrity Commission for an opinion on whether engaged in self-dealing with the district “through alternative entities,” and a third referral on whether a board member’s prolonged absence from the district undermines the public’s trust.
Other points included nullifying the July 2024 board officer votes and holding a new vote on board officers, reinstating Superintendent Dan Shelton — who was placed on administrative leave during the July 9 meeting — as “the latest investigation uncovered no wrongdoing,” and recommendations for an interim superintendent, among other items.
However, a simple majority of board members voted to strike discussion on all items except naming an interim superintendent.
It later selected former Christina and Red Clay Consolidated School District Superintendent Robert Andrzejewski to head the district this coming school year – despite questions over whether he even knew he was being nominated.
Five members of the state legislature who represent the Christina district — Reps. Madinah Wilson-Anton (D-Newark), Paul Baumbach (D-Newark), Cyndie Romer (D-Newark), Sophie Philips (D-Bear) and Eric Morrison (D-Glasgow) — also filed a FOIA violation against the board with the Department of Justice.
“As legislators, we generally try to stand back and let [the board] do their stuff, but when things have a problem, we start looking into it,” Baumbach said. “The closer you look into it, you realize how bad that the district board is being led.”
FOIA violations
In June, the DOJ found the board violated FOIA laws by holding an unannounced executive session for an improper purpose and failing to provide adequate notice in its March and May meeting agendas for votes regarding the contract rescission and vote of no-confidence in Shelton.
If a meeting is not noticed properly, meaning there will be items considered that were not on the agenda, then the public wouldn’t know whether they need to attend the meeting or for how long they’d need to attend, said Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies government transparency.
Fenster added that sometimes an agency might use vague wording in a public agenda because they may not know exactly what they’re doing with the issue or what to anticipate, but know they will cover it.
“Members of the public are not being paid for going to these meetings, having other things to do and busy lives,” Fenster said. “If this is a trap or a trick that the agency is playing, this seems both kind of duplicitous and shady, as well as potentially illegal, because it's not really following along.”
The DOJ is required to send a report to the General Assembly after its year-long observation. The report will include any FOIA matters observed and recommendations it has for necessary changes to ensure the “proper operation” of the board.
Patton declined Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment on the controversy, citing the “potential for litigation.”
Patton made it a point to apologize to the public during the Aug. 13 meeting for “a number of things,” admitting the board should be functioning differently. Patton also said he’s been working with a parliamentarian to help provide a stricter structure on Robert’s Rules of Order to help streamline the meetings.
Patton also acknowledged the FOIA violation complaints and said the board will be having a lawyer speak to them about the open records laws and violations.
“You have to remember when boards are put in place, folks aren’t trained on these specific things,” Patton said.
Although Christina has been a longtime member of the Delaware School Boards Association, they decided to drop out this past year, said Tull, the DSBA executive director, who added that Christina's newest board member paid to attend DSBA’s boot camp though.
Although there’s been a bit more public awareness in Christina, Mumford, of DelawareCAN, hasn’t seen the average parent in the district become more interested in the board.
“There has been some of it, but it's really been to the extent of, ‘Why are they acting crazy and not actually focusing on policies that affect my students?’” she explained.
Mumford added that the public’s perception of the board “acting crazy” might cause families to see board members as something separate from the community.
“When things like this happen, people get the perception that, ‘Oh, these are just another group of power-hungry policymakers that don't care about my family and my students,’” she said.
Brandywine also faces FOIA accusations
The Brandywine School District’s board faced its own FOIA allegation this spring, following the district’s former superintendent’s retirement. One month after former Brandywine Superintendent Lincoln Hohler announced his retirement, then-Board President John Skrobot announced that then-Deputy Superintendent Lisa Lawson would be replacing Hohler.
Skrobot then asked board members Jason Heller and Kim Stock to volunteer for a small working group to deliver contract proposals to the full board.
The request caused a debate over whether the board was violating FOIA guidelines as the working group discussion wasn’t on the agenda. During the meeting, board member the Rev. Shawn Jegede called on the public to file FOIA violations against the board if they felt the board went against open record laws.
“I have tried over and over again to encourage this board to no longer continue these violations of FOIA so that we can focus our attention on educating our students and supporting our staff and not wasting our time on lawsuits,” Jegede said during the meeting.
The board moved to executive session to consult legal counsel and when they returned, Skrobot made the volunteer request again and clarified that the working group discussions would happen in a public meeting.
Current Board President Ralph Ackerman said there was no open records violation. Their attorney instructed that the subcommittee could be made of three board members or less.
“It's when you reach four and you have a quorum that that becomes unacceptable, so I think it was misunderstood by the person who had chatted with the attorney as to what was acceptable and what was not,” Ackerman said. “It is certainly acceptable for the president to ask a couple of board members if they would volunteer to help negotiate a contract, which I believe, is exactly what Mr. Skrobot did at the time.”
Brandywine’s board of education doesn’t have an attorney at every meeting, it instead uses a “strictly representative model,” Ackerman said. He also noted that almost all of the board members have gone to the DSBA’s boot camp in recent years.
Capital super leaves after ‘hostility’
When former Superintendent Vilicia Cade announced her departure from the Capital School District on June 11, she thanked the Board of Education for the opportunity to serve the district and highlighted some of her achievements.
On June 12, the district published a joint letter between Cade and Board President Felecia Duggins, showing gratitude from both parties. Duggins thanked Cade for her service to the school and Cade expressed that “under the esteemed Board of Education the district will remain the heartbeat of the first state.”
However, in her resignation letter to staff, Cade cited a hostile work environment and interference in her ability to carry out her role.
“I have consistently asked for us to work on fostering trust, mutual respect and jointly explore ways to work more intently toward improving communication between the board and superintendent,” Cade wrote. “Subsequently, my request was met with aggressive hostility on the part of some board members, including acts of intimidation and intentional misuse of authority.”
Both Cade and Duggins did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment.
The public’s perception of their school board could make it more difficult to find candidates in the future, Mumford added.
“The folks that run for school board are not generally people that see that as a political steppingstone. In my opinion, they are people that really want to invest their time in the district, that really care about student outcomes, and when things become so polarized, it becomes difficult for them,” Mumford said. “Situations like this make it tougher to find good candidates moving forward because they don't see the school board as creating positive outcomes, as looking to really make a true impact. They just see it as this polarizing political entity.”
Most Popular
Comments / 0