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Superintendent Carol Birks: No deal yet.
Carol Birks still hasn’t agreed to give up her current position as New Haven’s superintendent of schools.
In the last week before the Board of Education’s offer expires, Birks still hasn’t signed off on the paperwork needed to finalize the buyout — worth just over $160,000 in severance pay — that board members near-unanimously approved earlier this month.
Darnell Goldson, the board’s president, said after a committee meeting on Monday night, that lawyers are currently tweaking the language in about six sections of the deal, mostly “semantics” to make clear that Birks wasn’t pushed out of the position.
Goldson said that he expects Birks will send back a finalized document by Friday.
“I guess she’s using every possible day,” he told reporters on Monday evening. But “it wasn’t anything, at the end of the day, to stop this from going on.”
But if Birks won’t sign off, Goldson added, the board will resume her evaluation at its regularly scheduled meeting next Monday.
“We will make some decisions on where we go from there,” Goldson said.
Birks’s lawyer, Margaret Sheahan, did not respond to an email from the Independent on Monday evening.
Iline Tracey: Ready to step up in the interim.
The board is looking to appoint an interim superintendent: likely Iline Tracey, who has already stepped into the role in the meantime as Birks uses up vacation days until Nov. 1.
Already, the delay has nearly put the Board of Education at risk of losing $330,000 for violating Birks’s three-year contract. Members nearly called off last week’s meeting because they didn’t have an explicit sign-off to go ahead on approving hires and contracts without her.
But just before the meeting, Birks sent in a letter providing her “written consent” to assign her duties to Tracey — “provided that Dr. Tracey is also assigned all responsibility and any liability from performance of such duties,” Birks wrote.
Tracey said on Monday that she’s willing to step into the role of interim superintendent.
After Birks’s predecessor as superintendent, Garth Harries, negotiated an exit in 2016, the board said that any interim superintendent would not be allowed to put their name in as a permanent replacement.
But this time around, Goldson said he thinks the board should ditch that rule, especially for Tracey, who applied for the top job in 2017.
“I’m going to learn from my mistakes. I’m going to suggest to the board that we don’t put that stipulation in place. I’m certainly not going to support doing that again,” Goldson said. “I think if she does a good job in the interim [Tracey] should have the ability to apply again. I mean, we’re putting her in the interim because we need her. She should not be limited when we have basically recruited her for this job.”
Board members have said that they don’t intend to begin a search until after the mayoral election.
At this point the BOE need not flounder regarding Dr Birks' inevitable departure.
Basically, Dr. Birks has two options: accept the buy-out arrangement or be terminated and get nothing.
The Board, school administrators, teachers, parents, students and members of the community are ready to move on, and in many respects, have already moved on.
The saga of Dr. Birks is a sad, pathetic story of a politicized board which ignored the collected wisdom and recommendations of members of this community, and selected the least qualified and experienced person for the job!
Shame on them for doing so!
The failure of Dr. Birks was predictable. Month by month, board members who voted for Birks, except for one, began to realize the gross error of their decision. Three board members subsequently publicly admitted they were wrong in their selection of Birks, but their awakening was far too late.
Birks must go sooner than later so that she and the NHPS can move.