BULLETIN: Former Basketball Coach Jason Popp Suspended from Richmond Hts Schools

In a move that was both long overdue and absolutely appropriate, Jason Popp was suddenly placed on administrative leave with pay this week by the Richmond Heights School District.

The move was nonetheless startling and possibly troubling in terms of its timing.

Popp is president of the teacher’s union [the Richmond Heights Teachers Association] and teaches physical education at the high school. He was removed as head coach of the boys basketball team in February 2011 when the team threatened to boycott its season because of his repeated verbal and psychological abuse replete with racial epithets.

Timing, manner of Popp suspension

The timing of the suspension is puzzling. The school board met on Monday with the apparent intent to act on the recommendation of interim superintendent Robert Moore to fire interim high school principal Timothy Pingle. Emerging after a three-hour executive session attended by board attorney Christopher Williams of Pebble and Wagoner, the board did not vote for Pingle’s immediate termination pursuant to the simple motion attached to the agenda. 

Instead, the board voted 4-0 [Kaye was in San Francisco on business] “to consider the termination” of Pingle and, based on a lengthy bill of particulars, found that he should be immediately suspended without pay. Pingle had been on administrative leave without pay since early December. 

After the meeting, board president Linda Pliodzinskas told reporters that immediate termination was deferred because the board “wanted to make sure all its ’i’s were dotted and its ‘t’s were crossed.”

It is not altogether clear that the Board has crossed its ’i’s and dotted its ‘t’s with respect to Popp. For one, there does not appear to have been a public vote on the suspension. Nor is it clear that Popp was given due process regarding his suspension.

Counsel for the Board failed to respond to email and phone calls seeking comment.

Pressure building on the District

Popp’s removal as basketball coach brought to the surface tensions and anxieties that have long been building within the school system. Conflicts within and among virtually every group of stakeholders in the system — school board members, administrators, teachers, parents, students, and taxpayers — have long been present in the district but now appear exacerbated in the wake of the lingering Popp affair. Consultants hired by the Board last year submitted a report finding "disconnections among stakeholders". While the findings have not yet been discussed publicly by the Board, the Real Deal obtained a copy through a public records request.

Three months after Popp’s initial removal as coach, Superintendent Hardwick defied a school board majority by making the removal permanent, and essentially forced the board to hire another coach for this current season. This development punctuated what had been a behind the scenes battle, led by board president Joshua Kaye, to reinstate Popp without any disciplinary record.

At the time of the Popp affair, Kaye had already been maneuvering for more than six months to fire Hardwick herself. Although the novice superintendent had some early missteps, even a first time observer of the district could see that much of the animosity had a personal, if not a racial, aspect.

If Popp’s suspension smacks of being hurried, the Board’s haste may be related to actions by one or more of the governmental agencies that have been investigating the district over the past year. The Ohio Civil Rights Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Education have all been investigating the environment of Richmond Heights Local Schools relative to both students and employees. No findings have been released although the findings are expected to weigh heavily on certain individual board members as well as particular employees.

BULLETIN: Richmond Hts school board apparently trying to fire superintendent amid federal investigation

The proverbial stuff is about to hit the fan in Richmond Heights tonight where the school board has called an emergency special meeting in an apparent attempt, once again, to fire superintendent Linda T. Hardwick.

Grounds for the attempted discharge — which we understand requires an affirmative vote of four of the five board members — are Dr. Hardwick’s alleged insubordination for purportedly interfering with what was probably an inappropriate and possibly unauthorized edict from board president Josh Kaye to investigate “theft” of public documents.

These documents apparently consist of a number of immature, ill-advised, and intemperate emails written mostly by none other than the board president himself. Some of these emails evidence Mr. Kaye’s penchant for malevolent micromanagement and reveal a total lack of appreciation for his role as a public official. For instance, in one email Mr. Kaye volunteers to protect a board employee from the superintendent, essentially granting the employee license to disregard the superintendent’s directives.

Most of the emails were written months ago during the in-fighting between a board majority that includes Aaron Burko and Bob Fox, and Dr. Hardwick, over her attempts to discipline former varsity boys basketball coach Jason Kopp for his mistreatment of team members. Mr. Kopp has wielded great influence with the board majority — he taught Mr. Kaye only a few years ago — and is also the head of the Richmond Heights Education Association that only recently concluded contract negotiations with the school district.

Our investigation has determined that while the board majority was posing in exasperation with the superintendent for dithering over whether Mr. Popp would return as coach in 2011-12, the Kaye-Fox-Burko team was actually working to thwart any sanction against the coach, even enlisting the district’s expensive legal team on their behalf.

The board majority appears to some observers to hold the upper hand against its superintendent — it has on several occasions this year chosen to embarrass her, citing her for insubordination and voting to non-renew her contract more than a year ahead of time. But the actions of Mr. Popp and Mr. Kaye have prompted investigations into the school district by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Education as well as the Ohio Department of Education.

These investigations, prompted by a series of complaints filed mostly by parents but also by the superintendent herself, have been vigorously contested by the Board majority at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, all without disclosure to the district’s taxpayers.

Preliminary findings of the federal investigation are expected to show that Mr. Kaye has presided over an environment hostile to the superintendent and the vast majority of the district’s students. The smoking gun for much of the government’s findings is the series of email exchanges cavalierly tossed about by Messrs. Kaye and Fox themselves.

Mr. Kaye’s recent discovery that investigators are in possession of his self-indicting emails is the trigger for tonight’s emergency meeting, whose motivating logic can only be panic. For the board majority to fire the superintendent under these circumstances would only add another to the list of retaliatory charges it is already facing.

The Real Deal has been tracking this story for much of the past several months in preparation for a thorough exposition of the dysfunction over which Mr. Kaye presides. We have outlined here only a portion of our findings so that the taxpayers, students, parents, teachers, and administrators of the district can have a basis for appreciating the truly bizarre nature of the board’s efforts to humiliate the superintendent it hired.

Our next report will detail how many of the efforts Dr. Hardwick has made to improve the district have been thwarted by the controlling board majority.

Edited for clarity, July 28, 2020.

Another special meeting for Richmond Heights BOE; bring the cannoli

I feel like Michael Corleone in The Godfather. 

Just when I thought I had written about Richmond Heights schools for the last time this month, "they pull me back in".

The board has decided to meet in special session tomorrow, Wednesday, June 29 at 7PM "for matters of personnel and negotiations." 

They will of course go into special session.

This will be the Board's third special meeting in the past nine days. Do they know there are fewer than 900 students under their wing?

I would guess this meeting will be to ratify a tentative [?!] agreement with the teachers' union, formally known as The Richmond Heights Education Association. However, they have yet to publicize their earlier tentative agreement, reached earlier this month, to grant the union a two percent raise retroactive to sometime in 2010. 

SB5, the union-busting legislation recently passed by the legislature, takes effect July 1, creating a distinctly anti-friendly negotiating environment for public employees of all kinds, including teachers, police, and fire personnel. 

Consider this report from the WKYC/TV3 website last week:

CLEVELAND -- Ohio teachers, other school workers and their unions are reaching more contract deals with school boards at a faster pace than usual under pressure from districts' budget problems and the state's new law limiting collective bargaining for public workers.

The Ohio School Boards Association found school boards and employees' unions so far this year have reached three times as many deals as last year. Unions are trying to lock in contracts by July 1, before the new law restricts negotiations.

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland reports many of the deals don't include the typical raises for workers. About four-fifths of them freeze workers' base pay for at least a year, and more than one-third don't include the usual raises based on how much experience or education an employee has.

The Associated Press

http://www.wkyc.com/news/article/194493/3/Ohio-school-workers-agree-on-more-contracts-faster

 

It will be interesting to see whether the trend in other districts will be followed in Richmond Heights.