Superintendent Shows Strength and Leadership in Moving the Board on Personnel Decision

On Tuesday night, the Manatee School Board was expected to make what looked like a politically-motivated decision to amend an agreement it had made with a former employee who had previously been allowed to resign in lieu of facing termination, while agreeing not to reapply for future positions. Instead, the board reversed course and did the right thing behind a recommendation from Superintendent Diana Greene.

Two weeks prior, the board had narrowly voted to move forward in drawing up an amendment to its agreement with former district investigator Debra Horne, though because of the way the item was phrased (as direction to the board attorney to draft an amendment), along with the absence of a recommended action from the superintendent (as required by statute), it needed to come back before the board for a final vote. Dr. Greene recommended that the board deny the amendment, and in a surprising vote that seems to demonstrate the strength of the superintendent’s leadership, members voted 4-1 to follow her guidance.

Horne resigned in 2013, facing a felony charge of failing to report suspected child abuse, following investigations by the Bradenton Police Department and the State Attorney’s Office for the 12th Judicial Circuit. Responding to multiple accusations that former Manatee High parent/teacher liaison and football coach Rod Frazier had been having inappropriate sexual contact with female students at the school, Horne cleared Frazier after only a cursory investigation that did not include talking to the students that teachers at the school had said they had witnessed Frazier being inappropriate with. She did not report the allegations to the state, as required by law.

Frazier was allowed to return to the school after just half a day’s paid suspension and just in time for a big football game. Later, a parent of one of the students delivered a letter to administrators at the school, alleging a host of illegal sexual abuse. Again, the investigation went nowhere, the Dept. of Children and Families was not notified, and it wasn’t until the Herald Tribune broke the story that police were made aware of the allegations. Horne was also later found to have conducted a similarly brief and superficial investigation into a case involving a school employee who impregnated an underage student.

Rather than request an ALJ ruling, Horne and Martin resigned from their positions without disciplinary action. The agreement with the district allowed them to do this under the condition that they forfeit their right to come back to work for the district in the future. As a result, they ensured that they would not have to answer in the affirmative when asked if they had ever been terminated from a previous position in another district–a common question on employment applications.

On the criminal side, Horne, who had plead not guilty, avoided going to trial by entering a Pre-Trial Intervention program with the State Attorney’s Office that required her to cooperate with their investigation, including testifying in the trials of the other administrators. The terms of the program allowed her to apply to have the charges dropped once she completed the PTI, provided that she fulfilled all of its requirements, including community service.

By the time the final administrator’s trial had ended, she had completed the other components and the state attorney’s office released her from the PTI. The felony charge was dropped and later expunged from her record. This was used by a majority of board members to justify taxpayers being put on the hook for over $18,000 in somewhat questionable legal fees Horne had incurred in defending herself, including $1,800 in fees related to press conferences and other media matters that had nothing to do with her defense.

Board members Bob Gause, Charlie Kennedy, Mary Cantrell and Dave Miner argued that because the PTI program resulted in the charges being dropped, it was like they never existed and somehow equated to a "successful defense," to which she would be entitled to reimbursement. Kennedy and Gause even argued that they felt the State Attorney’s Office had discovered evidence during the other trials that led them to believe that Horne should have never been charged in the first place, a suggestion Gause reiterated again Tuesday night, even after it had long been rebuked by Assistant State Attorney Dawn Buff in a TBT exclusive one year ago that can be read here.

Nonetheless, despite repeating much of the rhetoric, Kennedy and Gause, who'd both voted in Horne's favor at the last meeting, said that they were reluctant to go against the Superintendent’s recommendation. Gause, speaking directly from the dais to Horne, told her that no matter his personal feelings, at the end of the day, she’d made a deal and agreed to its terms.


The board’s newest member, John Colon, who was appointed to finish the term of the late Dr. Cantrell, voted against the measure last week, noting that he had not been part of the board during the incidents and was not comfortable moving so quickly on the item, especially without a recommendation from Greene. Colon, who had served on the state board of education prior to his appointment, was the only board member to point out that the Education Commissioner Pam Stewart’s office not having found probable cause to go after Horne’s teaching certificate had nothing to do with whether or not she violated district policy or should have her agreement with the district amended.


That brings us to Dave Miner, the lone board member to go against Greene’s recommendation in Tuesday’s vote. Miner clumsily fumbled through a meandering and largely incoherent argument as to why the board should go in the other direction, stubbornly echoing Gause’s demonstrably false claim that the state attorney’s office had all but said it never should have filed charges against Horne in the first place, while insisting that the Department of Education’s unrelated review of whether there was just cause to revoke her certificate trumped all other information.