A Slap on the Wrist for Saunders

On Friday, TBT broke a story regarding Manatee County Schools Superintendent Cynthia Saunders having reached a settlement agreement with the Commissioner of Education’s office, after directing a scheme that inflated the district’s graduation rate. Through the settlement, Saunders was able to retain her education certificate. If you’re waiting for the Manatee School Board to fire Saunders now that’s she’s been given a modicum of discipline for her actions, don’t hold your breath.

In short, while serving in her previous role as deputy superintendent, Saunders directed employees to code more than a hundred high school dropouts as having "transferred" to homeschooling. This exploited a loophole in which the stats from students whose families opted for the home school model were not counted in district data. Instead, they were discarded in the same way as a student who had transferred after relocating out of the district.

As a result, only 6 of the 121 students who withdrew from Manatee Schools in the 2014-2015 academic year were properly coded as having dropped out. During an investigation by the Florida Department of Education, multiple current and former Manatee County School District administrators told state investigators that Saunders personally directed them to miscode dropouts. What’s worse, the district knew about the practice ahead of the state’s investigation and said it had cleared Saunders through an internal investigation. The district also knew about the erroneous grad rates while it used them to help sell a 15-year extension of the optional half-cent sales tax for local education.

Saunders was named interim Superintendent when Dianna Greene left Manatee for a higher-paying position as Duval County’s superintendent and was in that position when the then-education commissioner Pam Stewart notified her that her agency had found probable cause that Saunders had "fraudulently inflated graduation rates for her district by instructing subordinate district employees to improperly code student withdrawals."

Stewart informed Saunders on the Friday before the Tuesday that the board was scheduled to vote on making her the permanent superintendent. Word broke publicly the morning of the meeting that Saunders faced likely disciplinary action, yet then school board members Scott Hopes and Dave Miner moved to hire her into the position anyway. Current school board chair James Golden looked like he might provide the third vote but paused, saying he wanted to give her a chance to "clear her name." Of course, that never happened, and Golden flipped his vote to join Hopes and Miner.

Hopes went on to leave the school board when he was installed as Manatee County’s administrator, following a sort of political coup in which Manatee County Commissioners George Kruse, Kevin Van Ostenbridge, Vanessa Baugh, and James Satcher disposed of Cheri Coryea, much to the liking of politically-powerful developer Carlos Beruff. The Medallion Homes CEO had been an influential fundraiser for Kruse, Van Ostenbridge, and Satcher, all of whom has just been elected to the board ahead of Coryea getting sacked. Van Ostenbridge successfully got Hopes hired as administrator, despite having no relevant experience, and there’s been a steady exodus of senior county employees from his administration ever since.

Meanwhile, Saunders was not only hired as the permanent superintendent but she was given a healthy raise, despite mounting evidence that the state was going to find her at fault in the grad-inflation scandal. Then, in 2019, Saunders oversaw the highly dubious district retaking of Lincoln Memorial Academy, a middle school that had successfully completed a conversion to a district charter school. In a sham meeting that summer, the board voted to use emergency powers to retake the school, a process that denied LMA officials due process. The reasons for using the emergency powers have since been disproven and the case remains in federal court, where it’s racking up taxpayer-funded legal bills and may wind up costing taxpayers a fortune in settlements. Eddie Hundley, the former principal of LMA, has seen his career as an educator eviscerated by the ordeal.

In 2019, Saunders unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate a settlement with the state that would have allowed her to not only keep her educator certificate but avoid probation and fines. The Education Practices Commission rejected it unanimously, using words like "fraud" and calling the proposed punishment "weak." Nonetheless, taxpayers were forced to continue funding the defense of the indefensible, while Saunders kept her job. In 2021, the board even awarded her a 9 percent bonus on top of her $205,000 base salary when each member rated her as effective or highly effective in each category. Hopes, who’d already taken the job as county administrator, went out of his way to stay on long enough to weigh in, praising Saunders for continuing to exceed his expectations. In other words, don’t expect much in terms of the Manatee School Board taking action against its superintendent even now that the settlement agreement is public.

And that’s the way it goes in Manatee County. Saunders gets to keep her job and certificate, while Hundley, whose only crime was turning a failing school into a wildly successful one, has seen his certificate revoked and both his job and LMA made to disappear. Coryea, arguably the most skilled and ethical administrator in Manatee’s history, also had to go away, while Hopes, who’d been rejected by USF and Sarasota County Schools in executive searches, got her job along with more money for doing it. In other words, meritocracy doesn’t enter the equation and until enough residents get wise to the depths of corruption that exist and start turning out at the ballot box to oust the special-interest puppets who enable the whole sham, nothing will change.