Brockton school committee votes to put superintendent on paid leave

“It’s unfortunate that you pay me all this money and you have me sitting out when you know I can make a difference,” Brockton Superintendent Mike Thomas told school officials Tuesday.

Amid escalating violence at Brockton High School and an ongoing investigation into the city’s multimillion-dollar school budget deficit, Brockton school officials have voted to place the district’s superintendent on paid leave.

Tensions flared at Tuesday’s school committee meeting, held one day after Gov. Maura Healey declared it would not be “appropriate” to send the Massachusetts National Guard to address Brockton High School’s security concerns. Come Tuesday, community members were left searching for solutions and answers, with some demanding the return of Brockton Superintendent Mike Thomas.

Thomas had been out on medical leave since late August, a shakeup in leadership that coincided with the district’s discovery of a $14.4 million deficit in its fiscal year 2023 budget. Brockton has since launched an independent external review into last year’s deficit, which it attributed to transportation and staffing costs, as well as special education services.

Thomas’s paid administrative leave — backdated to Feb. 21 — is intended to preserve the investigation’s integrity and is not disciplinary in nature, explained Sarah Spatafore, the school committee’s attorney. Spatafore said Thomas recently notified school officials that he was well enough to return to work, rescinding his previously announced plans to retire in March.

While the school committee’s vote to place Thomas on leave resulted in boos and expletive-laden outbursts from the audience, the superintendent himself was met with applause and cries of “bring him back!”

“I understand what you had to do,” Thomas told the school committee. “It’s unfortunate that you pay me all this money and you have me sitting out when you know I can make a difference.”

He emphatically denied rumors that the deficit was linked to embezzlement or missing funds, inviting investigators to look into his background and personal finances. Thomas also took responsibility for the district’s overspending last year, though he suggested safety and security would not be an issue at Brockton High School if he were still in charge.

“If Mike Thomas was here, this stuff at the high school — you know it would not be happening,” he said. “Not a chance!”

Later, as the meeting devolved into jeers and shouting, Mayor Robert F. Sullivan, the committee’s chair, highlighted the need for transparency once the external investigation is complete.

“That report is going public. We need to figure out what happened,” Sullivan said. “People can finger-point all they want, but I also want to be clear on this: You only know what you know. I was not made aware of a fiscal ’23 deficit until the date of Aug. 8, and that’s a fact.”

Brockton’s school security plan is a decade old, police chief says

Earlier in the meeting, Brockton police Chief Brenda Perez shed some light on safety and security at the city’s 3,600-student high school.

She said police have received just over 800 service calls for the entire school district during the current school year as of Jan. 31, with about 40 of those calls coming from the high school in particular. In the previous school year, the department logged 1,100 calls for the district and just over 80 for the high school. According to Perez, the Brockton High School calls ranged from alarms to theft, fights, medical emergencies, and missing people.

Perez also raised concerns about classroom keys circulating among unauthorized individuals, noting that some of the building’s sub-master keys are missing altogether. She emphasized the importance of regular safety assessments, noting that the district’s current security plan is about a decade old.

Safety concerns are nothing new for Brockton High School, as community members told the school committee.

“These concerns were brought to the school committee 112 days ago, in November,” said Stacy MacDonald, president of the Brockton Educational Support Professional Association. “Why were there no policies implemented in November, when we came to you?”

Rahsaan Hall, a Brockton resident and president and CEO of the nonprofit Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, asserted that “political stunts” have had lasting consequences for Brockton’s reputation.

“We have felt the impact of those consequences with images of our children being spread all across the nation as ‘violent’ and ‘uncontrollable,’” Hall said. “But that’s not who Brockton is, and instead of using political stunts to create narratives about who we are as a community, a better approach would have been to engage the community.”