Mills Tells Board He

BRADENTON – Manatee County School District Superintendent Rick Mills sent an email to the school board Friday, asking them not to consider extending his contract past its expiration of June 30, 2017. When reached, Mills declined to comment on the matter.

The issue would have likely come up this spring, as superintendent contracts are often reviewed well in advance of their expiration in order to prevent instability at the helm of the district.

It was also revealed this week that one of Mills' top administrators, Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum, Dr. Diana Greene, was a finalist in at least two different Superintendent searches and therefore could be leaving at the end of the school year.

Mills was hired by the district in 2013 after an exhaustive national search for candidates. The district was in financial shambles and being run by its third consecutive interim Superintendent after Tim McGonegal resigned in disgrace, following an admission that he and his team had been hiding millions of dollars in financial shortfalls from the board and public. It was also continuing to slide academically, falling as low as 47th in the state’s ranking of its 67 public school districts.

Mills and his team made deep and sometimes unpopular cuts in order to regain financial footing for the district; however, they managed to keep the cuts from impacting the classroom and simultaneously achieved impressive performance improvements, shooting up to 37th in the most recent state rankings.

In 2013/14, 24 district schools improved by at least one letter grade in their state assessment, while 7 improved by two. Whereas 60 percent had been C or higher, that figure rose to 80 percent while the district led all like-sized school districts in Florida in turnarounds for schools designated as troubled, with 11 of 18 being released from the Differentiated Accountability program, which provides special intervention for the state’s most under-performing schools. MCSD was even singled out by Florida Education Commissioner Pam Stewart for its unique improvement.

Financially, despite beginning millions of dollars in the hole and encountering nearly $6 million more in fines from the state for past financial misdeeds that were only discovered during the process of establishing a new budget, the district still managed a turnaround of just under $30 million and is currently projecting a year end surplus of more than $16 million.

While the news was overwhelmingly positive, there were some missteps along the way. Mills attempted to respond to a community survey citing a desire for increased security in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings by placing armed guards in elementary schools, where Sheriff’s Deputies had been cut for lack of funding before he’d taken over the district.

It was unclear whether or not the plan contradicted a decades-old Florida statute, and the district also failed to properly notice one of the public meetings involved in the process (prompting a lawsuit), though the meeting was recorded and not ”closed“ to the public.

Mills also ran into public backlash when he brought to the board an offer that had been made for school district property which had been maintained as a park adjacent to one of its schools. Though no actual action was recommended or taken up, members of the neighborhood protested the idea and the superintendent quickly assured the community that the district would find other ways to balance the beleaguered budget.

Mills took over a district that was not only in dire straits fiscally and educationally, but also suffering through a colossal scandal, in which a coach at a district high school had been accused of abusing a female student there. News of the story broke the very day Mills and other candidates were interviewing for the job.

The allegations were never thoroughly investigated or reported to law enforcement as required by Florida law and ultimately led to four more arrests of administrators on charges of failing to report them to the proper authorities. The coach, Roderick Frazier, copped a plea deal, while one of the administrators was found guilty and two more resigned before facing an investigation.

Mills replaced virtually the entire top tier of the administration with outsiders like Dr. Greene, immediately positioning himself at odds with a tight-knit group of current and former board members, Manatee High alumni and retired administrators who'd long held influence over district brass.

One of the board members who did not vote to hire Mills, local attorney Dave Miner, took an immediate and public disliking to the new superintendent, asking for his resignation just days into his tenure, over what Miner alleged was a "plagiarism" scandal (Mills had attributed parts of his 100-day plan to another Superintendent, though arguably in a manner that wasn't technically sufficient).

Mills and Miner next butted heads publicly when the district's new Office of Professional Standards investigator responded to multiple complaints about remarks Miner acknowledged making at a local school which female teachers there found offensive.

Miner disputed the district's ability to investigate complaints made about board members, even when they are guests on district property, and soon after began a public campaign to terminate Pumphrey on grounds that he allegedly misrepresented himself on his employment application. This resulted in the former DC area police officer filing EEOC and Florida Bar complaints against Miner, while also naming him personally in a hostile work environment lawsuit with the school board and school district.

Miner even sent emails to the Bradenton Police Department and the FBI in an effort to have the superintendent investigated after claiming to have received a vague and somewhat cryptic phone call from someone he claimed not to know, citing possible improprieties regarding a canceled contract with the aforementioned security firm.

Miner himself has been the subject of several sunshine law record requests, which he has failed to comply with, including one that resulted in yet another lawsuit being filed against the district this week.

Mills has also had a frosty relationship with board chair Bob Gause, who was also chair back when McGonegal admitted the financial cover up. While Gause voted in favor of Mills being hired, he had previously made a strong push for McGonegal's former Assistant Superintendent, Bob Gagnon, who was also arrested in the Frazier case, though he was found not guilty on a felony failure to report charge.

While Mills seemed to enjoy solid support from Karen Carpenter and Julie Aranibar, two outsiders elected to the board in 2010 who helped bring the district's financial pitfalls to light, and longtime member Barbara Harvey, Harvey retired last year and Aranibar was defeated for reelection in November by Mary Cantrell, a former director of the district's technical/vocational school, who had been "non-renewed" by Mills a few months before, under a cloud that formed when the school’s books were deemed ”inauditable“ on more than one occasion.

Cantrell, who has long lived in Pinellas County, was largely seen as running a revenge campaign for the seat and has already twice joined Gause on controversial votes not to follow the Superintendent's recommendation on personnel matters.

The first time was when Mills recommended the termination of the assistant principal who had been convicted in the Frazier case. The superintendent had on his side: a recommended order from an administrative law judge supporting the termination, the opinion of the district’s legal counsel and the advice of the board’s own attorney. Nonetheless, Gause and Cantrell voted not to terminate, while Miner and newcomer Charlie Kennedy abstained and Carpenter dissented.

The second time was when the board voted 4-1 to pay the legal fees for its former OPS investigator who was also arrested on a felony failure to report charge. Deborah Horne resigned from the district before it investigated her role in the Frazier scandal and entered a pre-trial intervention program for first time offenders.

While the district would have had to pay Horne’s legal bills had she successfully defended herself against the charge, they were under no obligation whatsoever to cover Horne’s costs, which was again made clear by both the district’s attorney, as well as the board’s. Nonetheless, all but Carpenter voted in favor of paying Horne $18,600 in reimbursed costs.

The board also made an end run on still another recommendation, voting to allow the other assistant principal to resign retroactively, just moments before they were scheduled to vote on the superintendent’s recommendation to terminate. Again Mills had an ALJ’s recommended order and both the district and board’s attorney supporting his position, only to see the board go in the opposite direction.

Many of Mills’ supporters in the community fear that the board is positioning itself to get rid of the superintendent prior to him renewing the contracts of those on his administrative team, which expire June 30. Mills’ contract allows for his dismissal without cause, requiring only a 3-2 vote of the board at any time. Many of those supporters, including Citizen Advisory Group member Linda Schaich (who lost a close race for Gause’s seat in 2012), have publicly voiced suspicion that the board plans to bring back Gagnon and other members of the McGonegal administration to run the district, which is still being audited on a 2009 bond issue in which millions of dollars were spent on unauthorized expenditures and millions more remain unaccounted for, according to reports from the district’s internal audit firm.

In the event that Dr. Greene is hired away from the district, Mills will likely face pressure from the board in choosing a replacement. Greene’s position essentially replaced Gagnon’s in a 2013 reorganization. Gagnon was non-renewed when his contract expired in 2014.

Mills could of course change his mind prior to his contract’s expiration in mid-2017, especially if the 2016 elections, in which both Miner and Gause’s seats will come up, result in a more supportive board. Meanwhile, the board’s actions in the coming weeks and months could bring the relationship to a head long before that.