Emotions are raw in Richland. School official says he was ‘silenced’ for 1st time in 22 years
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Richland School Board Recall Effort
A high-profile group of voters filed to recall board members Semi Bird, Audra Byrd and Kari Williams after their controversial vote to make face masks optional.
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Emotions already frayed by an ongoing recall campaign continued to run high this week at the Richland School Board.
One elected board member accused other members of “silencing” him while the district’s superintendent said she was “blindsided” in the public meeting by a proposed staffing change.
Some on the five-member school board say they want to hire a new deputy superintendent and draft a formal “succession plan” for leadership.
Vice Chair Audra Byrd asked her fellow school board members Tuesday night to prioritize the two proposals at future meetings, saying that having a succession plan and new deputy superintendent could save the district money, time and limit any disorder during a transition.
Byrd said she would like to have a deputy superintendent installed before this summer.
But Superintendent Shelley Redinger said the district intentionally chose not to fill that expensive position after Mike Hansen retired as deputy superintendent on Jan. 31, 2023.
Hansen was paid $199,000, according to last year’s Washington OSPI data. He’d served in that position for five years.
Redinger said the board has known for about a year now that she would not be filling the position.
“I think that this very premature,” she told the board. “To try to get someone to replace me, that’s a very expensive position. I would like that money to go to the classroom, not a top-heavy position.”
Redinger — who plans to work another seven years as Richland’s superintendent before retiring — said the role of filling and hiring a deputy superintendent falls under her bailiwick, and that it would be a “violation of my contract” if the board superseded her.
“I feel blindsided that this came up at a board meeting when we had never had that conversation. The conversation was we would not fill that position because we were so top-heavy,” she said.
“This district does not have a good track record of having deputy sups. Hiring them ahead of time has not worked out well for this district,” she noted.
Deputy superintendents are usually hired and groomed as successors for superintendents.
That’s how Nicole MacTavish was hired on to take the helm from former Superintendent Rick Schulte.
But in the space of three months, and after tensions with the budget and teacher’s union, MacTavish agreed to step down a day before her superintendent contract was due to go into effect in summer 2019.
As part of the agreement, the district ended up paying the difference in salary from the $258,000 MacTavish would have made as Richland’s superintendent. It’s unclear, though, how much in total the district paid out.
Prior to MacTavish, the district was without a deputy superintendent for six years.
“This to me is not our purview, first, and, second, it doesn’t feel right either,” said board member Rick Jansons. “We’ve known about this for a long time. We haven’t said anything before and there’s bumpy things going on. Regardless of what everybody says, this feels like something more threatening.”
Redinger has served as a political scapegoat for some school activists rallying against COVID masks and vaccines after she was forced to close Richland schools for two days following a surprise vote by a majority of the school board to defy a state mandate and allow schools to go “mask optional.”
At the time, Byrd said in previously deleted text messages that she would “rather fire Shelley” than send Richland kids back to school in masks.
Since those text messages came to light, though, Byrd has said she was “no longer interested” in removing Redinger. Some public commenters, however, have called on the board to fire her in the wake of the controversy.
A current recall effort is underway in the school district for a public vote on the removal of Byrd, Semi Bird and Kari Williams in connection with that mask vote.
But Semi Bird emphasized during the meeting that there have been no discussions of getting rid of Redinger.
“What I’ll say is we are looking at ways, as Audra said earlier, to be more financially, fiscally responsible with taxpayer dollars,” he said.
Board President Kari Williams said she would like to know more about the costs of hiring a deputy superintendent before considering the issue more.
‘Silenced by a majority’
At another point in the meeting, Jansons left his seat at the school board table and walked to the public podium where the visitors stand to make comments.
He said he was “silenced by a majority” of the school board at a previous board meeting and this time he was going to speak up.
“I’ve been on the board 22 years. That has never happened – not even once – when we voted to not let a board member speak on a topic,” Jansons later told the Tri-City Herald.
At the Feb. 28 meeting, Jansons was asking the rest of the board to agree to getting a legal analysis for the district employees who are confused if they are allowed to wear buttons in support of the recall while inside schools or if they can post recall petitions on union bulletin boards.
Recall supporters have been gathering signatures to put the recall question on a ballot after the state Supreme Court found the issue was sufficient enough for voters to decide.
Jansons questions were shut down by Bird, Byrd and Williams, who said the superintendent’s recommendation to follow some guidance from the Washington Public Disclosure Commission were already clear enough.
In an email last month, Redinger recommended staff not wear any political buttons so that they could keep a “safe learning environment,” and she linked to the commission’s online guide for school districts for regular election campaigns.
Krista Calvin, president of the Richland Education Association, said the PDC guidelines alone weren’t clear enough to help school employees know what is and is not allowed on school grounds and they would support efforts by the district to clarify those guidelines.
This week, Jansons said he took to the public podium because it was the only place he could “exercise my First Amendment Rights.”
“Our staff continues to ask what are the rules about recall. Their current guidance is not clear,” he told the board. “Staff have said to me that they are afraid of retaliation, especially after reading Director Byrd’s threat of formal investigation and immediate termination.”
“We owe them an answer. Instead of answering, a majority of this board voted to stop me from discussing this issue further, and did nothing but to vote to silence the superintendent from saying anything toward staff to answer their questions. This is not leadership,” he said.
Byrd has said that violating campaign policies in schools is grounds for firing school district employees, and that she would personally seek to fire anyone caught with a campaign button or petition.
Jansons also used his time at the public podium to refute claims by some of the other board members that the recall vote will cost the school district $250,000.
He said he’s found out that it will cost the school district $75,000 to $100,000 to put all three names on the ballot if it’s on the August primary ballot because the district would be sharing election costs with other measures and with candidates up for election.
It could cost more if the question was the only issue on a special election ballot at another time of year.
This story was originally published March 16, 2023 at 1:11 PM.
