Worcester Telegram Reports On Gardner Complaint

Today's Worcester Telegram carries an article titled Southbridge superintendent in hot water over probe of MCAS mistake by Brian Lee.

Superintendent of Schools Patricia Gardner allegedly threatened to "come after" a school employee if that person did not cooperate with the superintendent's desire to assess blame for mistakes made administering the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests last year, according to Raymond Page, a School Committee member.

As a consequence, the School Committee unanimously voted this week to authorize hiring an independent investigator to look into the allegation of "a serious account of unprofessional behavior" against the first-year superintendent. 

The yet-to-be-named investigator will be appointed by committee Chairwoman Lauren McLoughlin and will report findings 30 days after the appointment.

Mr. Page said he received complaints from several employees about Ms. Gardner. On the advice of Mirick O'Connell, the committee's Worcester law firm, he said he gave the written complaints to Ms. McLoughlin on Oct. 17.

Mr. Page, who noted he hadn't passed judgment on the allegations but merely acted as a messenger, said an employee had approached him on Oct. 8 about Ms. Gardner. He said he was told by the employee that Ms. Gardner allegedly told the employee's subordinate that Ms. Gardner would come after the subordinate if the subordinate talked about a meeting the subordinate had with Ms. Gardner and Director of Operations Walter Solzak.

During that meeting, Ms. Gardner and Mr. Solzak allegedly confronted the subordinate about "actions or inactions" on the subordinate's part last school year, Mr. Page said.

Ms. Gardner also allegedly told the subordinate that she would "shred documents related to MCAS testing procedures," according to Mr. Page.

In addition, Ms. Gardner allegedly told the employee she needed to convince the subordinate to produce a statement acknowledging that a former employee instructed the subordinate to sign documents related to MCAS.

When the employee refused, Ms. Gardner told the employee that the employee was trusting the wrong person, Mr. Page said.

Last month, Ms. Gardner reported to the public that serious mistakes had been made on MCAS testing by the previous administration, and that people at that time had been "dishonest."

On Tuesday night, the School Committee meeting's agenda included an item to meet in executive session to discuss a complaint against an employee. Ms. Gardner asked that the item be taken up in open session.

Ms. Gardner's lawyer, Michael J. Long of Hinghan, said Ms. Gardner would ultimately be credited for trying to find out what went wrong with the MCAS testing and scoring last year.

"To the extent that that resulted in some people being taken to task, that's the superintendent's job," Mr. Long said.

In an interview Friday, Ms. Gardner said she opted to have the matter considered in open session because she had nothing to hide.

"We're moving forward," she said. "We got a great report" from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, "and since I began here, my plan has been to turn around Southbridge Public Schools through transparency, and that's what we intend to do."

She declined further comment.

The fallout stems from Ms. Gardner's announcement last month that the administration was "horrified" to learn about last year's missed MCAS retesting opportunities for then 11th-graders.

She went on to say that 38 seniors hadn't passed MCAS.

The following week, Ms. Gardner said that it was learned that fewer seniors than was originally thought had missed opportunities to twice retake the MCAS last year when they were juniors. 

But the superintendent went on to complain about last year's failure to develop Educational Proficiency Plans for students who fell in the "needs improvement" category.

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Addendum: The following comment was appended to the Telegram article.

The Superintendent and Mr Solznak also sent letters out to all the Southbridge homeschoolers requesting information that exceeded legal requirements and they tried to insist homeschoolers needed to report to school to take the MCAS (which is also illegal). The MCAS measures the performance of public schoolers only, not private schoolers or homeschoolers. Many homeschoolers in Southbridge had to retain professional/legal respresentation to help get these two bullies to back off, and stick to the state law as opposed to their new and (illegal) policies.