Sussex Tech teachers assail board members for 'chronic absences,' rubber-stamping spending

Jessica Bies | The News Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Sussex Tech teachers band together, ask school board to resign Teachers banded together to speak out and ask for the resignation of their school board members during a meeting of the board Monday.

Infrequent board attendance and a tendency to rubber stamp purchases without asking questions created an environment where a corrupt administration flourished and was able to operate with little to no oversight, teachers at Sussex Technical School District said Monday night.

At the school board’s monthly meeting, staff once again called for four members —George Torbert, Teresa Carey, Judy Emory and Warren Reid — to resign their positions, as school board president Patrick Cooper did last week.

They asked the same at last month's board meeting, as well, and were met with silence, English teacher DJ Forcucci said.

"Ironically, it was your silence at all of the board meetings for the last six years that allowed our district to be manipulated, bamboozled and corrupted by an unethical and arrogant district administration," Forcucci told board members Monday.

He and a group of 10 or so teachers came armed with numbers and facts, gleaned from school board minutes and meeting records. They went back to 2012, when financial improprieties outlined in a 2017 investigation by State Auditor Tom Wagner began.

Several factors prompted the incident in which local contractor Michael Horsey profited in a land deal with the district and then was awarded nearly $4 million in contracts without proper state approval, the teachers’ research showed.

For one, Emory missed 10 board meetings and Carey missed nine out of 25 held between July 2012 and June 2014, special education supervisor Carol Evans said.

One of the meetings Emory missed was in August 2013, when by a vote of 3 to 2 the board authorized the piggybacking of contracts with Horsey’s construction company, Common Sense Solutions, Evans said.

“Your chronic absences made it impossible to even use your voices,” she said. “This is an absolute dereliction of duty that should come with some severe consequences.

“If our students missed 40 percent of their school days, they would be denied credit. If our teachers missed 36 percent of their workdays, they would be looking for new jobs. Your lack of attendance certainly makes us think that Sussex Tech is not your priority."

Carey objected to the criticism and said when she wasn’t in town she attended meetings via Skype.

Emory was silent and did not respond to the teachers’ claims. None of the board responded to accusations that they frequently rubber stamped motions without asking questions.

Debbie Long, a social studies teacher, said that between July 2012 and June 2017 a total of 564 motions were put to vote before the board. In that time, only 10 dissenting votes were cast, meaning that the board unanimously approved 99.8 percent of the motions put before it.

She qualified that statement by pointing out that Torbert did actually vote “no” to piggybacking contracts with Common Sense Solutions, as well as voting “no” to ceding control of purchase orders to the district’s administration team in September 2015 and “no” to extending the contract with Horsey’s company in July 2016.

“You seemed to be the only one who even attempted to provide any type of oversight, and for that, we thank you,” Long said to Torbert. “Second, shame on the rest of you for failing to do your due diligence and to provide more critical oversight that could have prevented this architecture of corruption from ever occurring."

Jean Johnson, a math teacher, said the school board has claimed it was only working with information provided to it by district administrators and, therefore, should not be held responsible for the decisions detailed in the audit. That, she said, is patently false.

“How is it possible that this board did not realize that it was no longer being presented with change orders or purchase orders despite the ubiquitous construction project going on all around our campus?” Johnson wanted to know.

Chris Aiken said the school board’s own meeting minutes serve as damning evidence it allowed the administrators — Superintendent Allen "A.J." Lathbury, Assistant Superintendent Thomas "Curtis" Bunting and Business Manager Edward Seibert — free rein. Later, the men were allowed to retire and collect their pensions.

“You were either complicit in the district administration’s plan or you were ignorant,” Aiken said. “Unfortunately, neither of those excuses absolve your from your guilt.”

The teachers had other reasons for asking the board members to resign, they said.

For one, there has been a culture of paranoia and distrust at Sussex Tech, social studies teacher Sandy Furbush said. While 15 years ago teachers were allowed to walk across the parking lot and talk to administrators in the district office, now they cannot.

“We have been locked out, literally and figuratively,” she said. “There are locked doors that do not respond when we swipe our employee ID badges.”

In the past year, there have been other transgressions, said Eden Hade, who is chairman of the district’s hiring committee and in December asked that teachers and staff be involved in interviewing and selecting a new superintendent.

Instead, Stephen Guthrie, previously superintendent of the Carroll County Public School District in Westminster, Maryland, was hired without input from district stakeholders, she said.

Guthrie, who started July 1 and attended his first board meeting Monday night, said that going forward teachers will be involved in hiring. He also said that all district employees will be given access to the district office.

He also planned on forming a teachers advisory committee, a budget oversight committee and citizens advocacy council. In August, he planned on holding board workshops once a month, in addition to monthly business meetings.

In addition, Guthrie planned on reviewing the district’s governance documents and believed the district should establish a core belief statement and values.

“What are we going to do for our students?” he said. “What are we going to do for our school community?”

Guthrie said he accepted the job at Sussex Tech completely aware of the turmoil between teachers and the board. He read newspaper articles, blog posts and listened to six months of board meeting recordings, he said.

“I, like everyone in this room, want our school system to succeed,” Guthrie said, adding that one of his main goals would be to establish a more efficient and transparent administrative office.

Also addressed on Monday night was the impact of all the administrative drama on the district’s students.

Virginia Forcucci, Delaware’s 2018 Teacher of the Year, talked about an incident in early May, when a racist, homophobic tweet made the rounds at Sussex Tech.

Teachers and students alike called on the board to address the social media post and condemn it, Forcucci said.

“I personally called Pat Cooper and explained why the matter required swift action from the board,” she said. “I even offered to help craft a statement assuring both students and families that bigotry has no place in our school.”

Cooper assured her that the board would not tolerate hate speech, but when the issue was brought before the rest of the board’s members, they decided to forgo addressing the incident, Forcucci said.

To outline the impact their silence had, she read an excerpt from an open letter written by a Sussex Tech senior that was later published on the Delaware Department of Education’s website.

“Silence slaps the face of the victim and tells her she is not worth a reaction,” the student wrote. “Silence grabs ahold of the tongue, preventing my understanding of how you feel about bigotry. I do not want to believe that your intentions are hurtful, and I recognize the complexity of the system we live in.

“But please know — your silence is consent.”

Guthrie said students and staff alike deserve to feel safe in school and that diversity should be embraced and celebrated. He vowed to create a more welcoming culture and environment going forward.

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Breaking the law?

After several financial improprieties were outlined in a 2017 state audit, the Sussex Tech School Board promised to create financial and oversight committees, but has not followed through, teachers there said.

Yet state law requires that all public school districts and charter schools have such a committee. In 2009, the General Assembly approved a statute requiring that districts appoint citizen budget oversight committees responsible for reviewing all financial documents and financial information, with redactions permitted only to protect confidential personal information regarding students or employees.

In other school districts, those oversight committees report back to the board on a regular basis and present reports, which are then public.

At Sussex Tech, there were only two references to such a committee in school board meeting minutes before the fateful audit took place.

On Dec. 13, 2010, former business manager Edward Seibert informed the board that the district was now required to have a budget oversight committee and that it had appointed Scott Reihm, Randy O'Neal and Pat Ryan to serve in a district-level advisory capacity. Seibert said the new committee would meet four times a year and their first meeting would be in January 2011.

More than four years later, on Sept. 14, 2015, Seibert reported that the "Citizen’s Budget Oversight committee had their first meeting about a week ago." There is no indication of why there was such a delay.

The next reference to any such committee was in July 2017, when the board voted to create an oversight committee that would report to the board. In December 2017, Dorcell Spence, with Neely & Spence Financial and Consulting Services, recommended that the district get back into having Citizens (Budget) Oversight Committee meetings, which suggests that the committee had stopped gathering at some point.

In response, George Torbert, a board member, suggested that the district contact the current members and see if they would still like to serve on the committee.

On Monday, newly hired Superintendent Stephen Guthrie said he would soon be reaching out to those inactive committee members to gauge their interest.

Contact Jessica Bies at (302) 324-2881 or jbies@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessicajbies.

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