We are currently in a similar situation with our superintendent. The superintendent's past has been full of situations that has involved the authorities, but the superintendent has never been charge with any crimes. This individual has been disrespectful to teachers, school board members, and nothing ever happenned because of the contract this person has with the school. We did tape a conversation which was given to the authorities, who gave this person a warning. The problem is if this person were arrested it would anger the tax payers, because it would hurt the image of the school and the school would still have to pay his salary for the rest of the time on his contract, which includes a very nice retirement plan. The superintendent is very manipulative and very good at covering his tracks. This person does everything in their power to make it difficult for everyone. Now the school board will not even allow anyone to tape the open public school board meetings. The close door sessions are tape and we are aware of one close door session when the school board members and Superintendent discussed the inappropriate instant messages a young teacher sent to some of the female students. These instant messages included the teacher asking for nude pictures, and asking if the girls knew about certain sexual acts, but according to the Superintendent because this individual resigned there was nothing the school could do. The teacher now teaches at a near by high school. If we ever do find a solution I will be more then happy to post it.

This actually happened at my school except our principal also screamed at the children, a group of parents got together, went to the school board and called the newspaper (Administration never wants negative publicity)It is hard for the teachers to be involved because they can suffer dire consquences. The parents put up a huge fight and finally got her out of our school.

We are somewhat small-townish, which actually complicates things a little--I have personal relationships with several school board members through things like sports and working on other school-related issues. It makes them a lot more accessible, but then again makes it easier for them to be sympathetic, but not truly responsive. I've been trying not to use these relationships to fill their ears with gripes and hearsay, and in the past they've only heard me talk about how wonderful our school is. I hope this will add credibility to our complaint when we're ready to put it out there. I like to think that through our other work together they would see me as rational and able to see the picture clearly. We don't want to have a combative relationship.

The thing is, the school board thinks very highly of our superintendent and so do we. I admire her and think she's doing a great job at a very difficult time--we're one of the fastest growing counties in the nation. I really have been impressed with her ability to stand up to state legislators and focus on her mission of giving our kids the best education despite the politics. And I know through personal experience how hard working and dedicated our school board members are.

So that has played into our reluctance to go public via the newspaper and our desire to give her the benefit of the doubt. This supervisor wasn't here when some of the incidents happened--what if it's not in her file, despite what was told to the parents? We know there was a petition, but we don't know if the superintendent knows or knew at the time. If she wasn't aware of many of these things, I can see where her position would be that this is a first year principal and she needs to be counseled and given a chance to learn from her mistakes. So it's important for us to determine what was known or not known before she was hired for our school. I'm consulting with a group that might be able to help me figure out what we might get from a request, but if it turns out to be nothing, we'll just have to proceed.

We feel it's very important to have a legitimate issue of complaint, not just a presentation of all these stories we've heard, "She did this, she did that...". We do plan to outline all of the problems our school is now facing and show how they're a direct result of her poor administration and poor decision-making. But we don't think that's enough to get her moved out of our school. So we want to take it to the next level and call on the superintendent to fix her mistake of giving her this position in the first place.

I think when this all first began, based on what I wrote above about our relationship with the school board, we probably thought that just our talking with them informally would be enough to get some sort of action or inquiry going. Instead we sensed the circling of the wagons and we realized it wasn't going to be that easy and we were going to have to go about it in a way we didn't want to. I was hoping to find some sort of group that provides advice to parent groups in these situations, but haven't been able to find anything along those lines.

That's good advice. I should have posted that myself, having been there/done that. I have found that when reporters are involved and are asking questions, those who are being questioned know that they have to come up with some kind of answers. This would probably motivate your BOE to do some investigating themselves. I'm sure they don't want to be exposed as having knowingly hired someone with a poor track record, or even worse, having hired someone without having checked into their work history.

FYI - going the FOIA route will probably take much time. Government offices such as this one do not get in a hurry. We filed a request through FOIA once, and it took ten months to get the information.

This is her first full year here.

kmamom--actually, links to some of your posts have been e-mailed back and forth among our board members! At first, it was really a case of liking her personally, but disagreeing with what she was doing at our school, implementing policies based on her own personal baggage as a teacher and bad experiences she had.

More and more I view her as completely incompetent and a pathological liar to boot. One of those liars who really believes what she's telling you as she tells you, but you know she's making it all up on the spot.

I believe she's aware of some of my conversations with our school board rep, probably via the superintendent. When I recently e-mailed the super about an issue, the reply was cc'ed to the principal. In recent weeks she has started to attempt to discredit me in a passive-agressive sort of way through subtle comments to others. Questioning a lack of response on something that the other person would have no idea she never even inquired about, remarking on a parent feeling out of the loop with the implication that this was my fault for not keeping them in the loop--that sort of thing. But that stuff is lowest on the totem pole compared to everything else going on.

It actually is the county school board that we've spoken with, our representative anyway. But on a very informal basis--a mention in an e-mail about other things, running into her around town. The hope was that she would prompt the superintendent to take action. We know that we're going to have to take it to the next level and are organizing to do that, gathering as much information as we can. But, like you said, we know it will get ugly once we do. We want to make it count.

We've been looking into requesting her records through the Freedom of Information Act to see what disciplinary action and prior work history would have been available to the superintendent in making this decision, but apparently our state considers this to be under exemption. So we're looking at other avenues via FOIA--whether or not we can get something useful out of it.

We are in a right-to-work state, so there is no union. I've been told by teachers in other counties that they should contact a certain education association, so I'm going to encourage them to do that. I think they all really thought at first that the superintendent was going to do something about it--she had called the principal down to her office several times and they were told that the super knew about deteriorating conditions. So I think they were sitting tight, expecting changes to come from all that. And then nothing. Fortunately they are beginning to realize that the powers-that-be know exactly what's going on and they still aren't doing anything about it. And they're starting to organize themselves. They have been documenting in detail from the beginning, just like we have. But everyone knows that the most likely way to force change is through the parents.

We've tried to keep our issues separate--they have their issues with her as a boss, we have our own issues as parents. We're trying to focus solely on our legitimate parent issues, but it's really their issues that make us lose sleep at night and give us the sense of urgency that we can't spend years in a letter-writing campaign.

I've been told by another administrator in the county that our instincts are probably right when we say we think she was moved to our school because we probably wouldn't do anything about it. We're generally passive because we're generally happy, have had no reason to be vocally complaining about anything. We love our school and our teachers. We've been told she was driven out of the last school by the parent group, so we know it can be done. We're still trying to find out the details of that and what would have been included in her record about it. I think what the superintendent and the school board are going to find is that famous phrase about awaking a sleeping giant is going to apply here. We're all willing to go out in a blaze of glory fighting to the end, but are trying to do our homework and take the most effective route and find out all our legal options.

Thanks for all the replies--we appreciate any advice.