What About This…? 10.27.2016

By Wayne William Cipriano

I attended the October 20, 2016, school board meeting and delivered these remarks to the board:

Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to address you.

It has been a month since our school board placed our school superintendent on paid administra-tive leave and according to members of the media here tonight no reasons for that action have been released for publication or broadcast.

I have some experience with boards of education and I understand that the superintendent of a district acts in concert with and under the direct supervision of a board of education.

If a super strays from those constraints they are not placed on paid administrative leave, they are suspended without pay or fired for cause –– cause that must be demonstrable in a court of law where such actions almost invariably are contested; that is, when such actions are not settled out of court where full contracted salaries are paid and professional damages are compen-sated.

And, who pays those court costs, those attorney fees, those full con-tracted salaries, those professional damages, and now, I’ve been told, the salary of an interim superintend-dent?  I do, and all the other Douglas County taxpayers right along with me.

I have been reading a long time and I have developed some facility with the skill but I was unable to decipher the press release issued by the Board as to why this action was taken.  It seems to me to be inten-tionally evasive, described by a friend as mumbo jumbo or gobble-deguk.  

I have met with the Super on several occasions regarding educa-tional issues and I have always found her to be competent, forthcoming and personable – a fine Superintendent.

I was a professional for quite a while and I know how important a reputation is to a professional.  If any organization to which I had contracted my professional services had done to me what it appears we have done to the super without serious violations of contract or serious violations of law, they would have found themselves in a court room in a heartbeat.

So, I am wondering if the Super’s deportment was so deplorable that she should have had her career dealt such a detrimental blow, and suffer such personal and professional embarrassment, why was the school board’s vote to do so barely a majority and not unanimous?

Indeed, I have been given to understand, although I may be wrong about this, that had the absent member of the board voted, he would have cast his vote with the minority – making the decision of the board that much more difficult to understand.

When does the board intend to explain the reasons we have a Super-intendent on paid administrative leave, an assistant superintendent doing her job as as well as doing his job, an Interim Superintendent for the rest of the school term, and a great deal of confusion throughout the district, not to mention what all of this is going to eventually cost us?

As a Douglas County taxpayer, I, for one, would certainly like to hear those reasons.

Would any of you care to tell us in this public meeting tonight why our school board did what you did?

After I said the above, I sat down.  No school board member responded, publicly.