New allegations of impropriety relating to School Superintendent Thomas Jefferson have surfaced in the past week. Long-time school employee and Harvard resident Margaret Grogan, who spoke briefly at Monday’s School Committee meeting, has accused Jefferson of unfairly intimidating her and cutting her hours of employment.
Grogan spoke to a reporter briefly after the meeting, saying that last December Jefferson had abruptly removed her from her job as special education secretary, after wrongfully accusing her of publicly discussing a controversial special education placement, which was subject to strict confidentiality rules. According to Grogan, residents could have heard of the special education payments from a number of sources, because many people at the school, including the mother of the student, openly discussed the matter.
After losing her position, Grogan was transferred to a job as a preschool aide, and had her hours cut, so that she lost about $10,000 in yearly income, she said. On January 4, 2007, she filed a complaint with the state ethics board. Grogan also wrote a letter to Jefferson protesting his actions and sent copies of it to school board members, she said. After hearing nothing for months from the board, Grogan sent another letter to board members in July, saying she would hire an attorney, or go public with her story, if her complaints were not addressed. When that letter was also ignored, her husband, Mark Beirbower, wrote a letter to the editor of several local papers in support of a vote of censure for the school board and detailing Grogan’s allegations of Jefferson’s actions.
—Willie Wickman, School Committee Chairwoman
In an interview on Tuesday, School Committee Chairwoman Willie Wickman said she recalls getting at least one letter from Grogan, though she doesn’t remember the specific contents. “It is a personnel issue, and those are taken care of by the superintendent,” she noted.
When asked how the board would handle complaints that allege wrong-doing by the superintendent, Wickman said she believes such matters are covered by a grievance procedure, with employees able to request a formal hearing by the board if the matter can’t be first resolved by the superintendent. Generally, such school personnel complaints would be handled by the teachers’ union, but in the case of a non-union employee, Wickman was not exactly sure of the procedure, as no such complaint had come up while she has been on the board, she said. Wickman had not regarded Grogan’s letter as needing a response, she said, because it had seemed “informational” to her. [If Grogan has a grievance], “there’s a procedure she can follow; there’s a policy in place, she has recourse,” Wickman said.
Superintendent Jefferson, in an interview this week, said he could not comment on the allegations Grogan has made. “It’s a personnel issue. It’s governed by confidentiality rules. I can’t comment on an employee contract or performance,” he said, adding that he wishes he could answer the accusations, and give his side of the story.
—Ron Ricci
While Jefferson would not talk about the specifics of the special education placement at the heart of the controversy, he was willing to discuss the general topic of special education placements, and how schools respond when there is a disagreement between parents and the school over the appropriate education a child should receive.
“There are sometimes situations where parents will not be happy with a placement and will do a unilateral placement in a different school,” Jefferson noted. In those situations, parents and the school district may reach a settlement over how to deal with the cost, and there are three ways of coming to such an agreement, he said. First, the parents and district officials can have informal talks and come to a settlement. Secondly, the parents and officials can have a mediation hearing. And thirdly, if the parents are still not satisfied, they can demand a full-scale hearing, with lawyers on both sides involved.
“You can win the hearing,” but still the schools will lose out because the third option is so expensive for the town, Jefferson pointed out. His goal in these situations has always been to aim for the least expensive way to settle the issue and educate the child.
When asked if Harvard runs into cases of unilateral placement frequently, Jefferson said that they were infrequent, but that a few had occurred in the past. He did note that the recently formed special education task force has surveyed a number of towns about special education spending, and found, “there’s one district that has had a flurry of unilateral referrals that the district ended up paying for. It’s not limited to one community.”
Tense encounter
The mood was tense at Monday’s school board meeting, when board members came face-to-face with several other fed-up townspeople behind the effort to win a vote of censure of the board at the October 10 Special Town Meeting. During the public comment section of the meeting, several of those citizens warned the board to take the censure motion seriously, and “to try to understand why so many fellow citizens are unhappy with the performance of this committee,” as East Bare Hill Road resident Ron Ricci put it. “It will be a serious mistake to continue to deny that problems in fact do exist. We cannot move forward as a community until these problems are acknowledged and addressed,” he told the board.
The school board now faces a censure vote at town meeting, because a core group of about a dozen Harvard residents collected 248 signatures on a petition, placing the matter on the warrant. The petition lists three complaints against the board, which boil down to one: the board has not taken seriously allegations that Jefferson improperly authorized payment of $30,000 a year ago to a former school board member, as reimbursement for the board member’s child to attend a private school. Such out-of-district special education placements are supposed to follow certain protocols, but these were ignored in this case.
Specifically, the petition faults the school board for giving Jefferson a favorable evaluation and prematurely extending his contract last June, at a time when the “District Administration is under review by state regulatory agencies for alleged ethics violations and alleged misuse of scarce public funds.” The petition also accuses the board of dismissing irregularities noted in the town’s financial audit relating to payments for the questionable special education placement.
The school board, for its part, has defended its actions by noting that it has never been contacted by anyone official regarding these allegations, and that it cannot base its actions on “hearsay and innuendo” against a superintendent that it believes has done a good job, Wickman said in a recent interview.
The board has a policy of listening to public comments at the start of its meetings but not responding at that time; however, both Wickman and board member Stu Sklar did briefly respond directly to two of Monday night’s speakers, leading to a heated exchange between Sklar and speaker Wade Holtzman of Bolton Road.
Holtzman, after going over the allegations of improper spending, said he knew first-hand that there were “investigations in process by the district attorney, the federal and state departments of education, and the state ethics commission,” and that without knowing the outcome of these investigations, “it seems the prudent course of action would have been to wait” before extending Jefferson’s contract.
—Stu Sklar,
School Committee
Wickman again said her board has not heard from the state ethics commission that there is an investigation in progress, and Sklar asked Holtzman how he knows of such an investigation, when an ethics commission spokesperson had told Sklar in a recent call that it could not confirm or deny whether it is looking into the matter. Holtzmen replied sharply that he knows there is, because he had filed a complaint with the state ethics board himself.
At that point, Sklar said angrily, “You have no evidence,” and Holtzman snapped back, “I don’t like being called a liar.”
Sklar responded to the criticisms of the board at greater length at the end of the school board meeting. He started by praising his fellow board members, saying he is impressed with their “dedication and commitment to the town and school.” However, Sklar said he now realizes that support for the board “has eroded dramatically,” adding, “we have not been effective in soliciting input from the community and communicating our activities in return.”
Sklar then gave a rebuttal of the petition’s three complaints about the board. He said that there was nothing unusual about extending Jefferson’s contract while it still had two years left; according to the school board’s labor attorney, this is standard procedure. In addition, the school board’s favorable evaluation of the superintendent was based on Jefferson’s meeting or exceeding the various goals that the board had set for him a year ago.
“Of course, the decision was made against the backdrop of legal complaints against the superintendent…I must stress that an investigation does not mean guilt, and it should not, and did not, color the outcome of an honest assessment of job performance based on facts, not conjecture. If any substance is found by the investigating agency, appropriate action will of course be taken by the board,” Sklar said.
He also said his board has taken the financial audit’s findings seriously. Sklar noted that the board “clarified points of inaccuracy and responded to the selectmen. This is the appropriate body to respond to since it was a report done for them.”
Toward the end of Monday night’s meeting, the school board did agree to hold a public meeting on October 1, specifically to answer residents’ questions and concerns on the issues spelled out in the citizens’ petition. “It would be good to clear things up,” Wickman said. Board members decided to solicit questions from the public by email before the meeting as well, to hear from people who could not attend the meeting next Monday.
Editor’s note: At its June 25 meeting, the school committee voted 5–0 to accept the superintendent’s evaluation, and to extend his contract by one year. For the full text of the evaluation go to http://www.psharvard.org/SchoolCommittee/07_08_minutes/6.25.07_SC_Minutes.pdf.
