Since July 13, something big has been brewing on the Amherst schools front. That’s when officials went behind closed doors on a night they were scheduled to evaluate the work of Superintendent Maria Geryk.
Twenty-seven days later, after 14 hours of private sessions, Geryk wasn’t graded at all. With two years remaining on her contract, she was promised what many will view as a golden parachute – an agreement that will pay her one and a half years of her salary, plus other compensation, for a grand total of $309,238.
How did the agenda go from evaluation to ejector seat?
School officials have a lot of explaining to do – and are promising answers in five days when minutes of those executive sessions are released.
That’s a long time for stakeholders to wait, and the delay risks deepening divisions over Geryk’s leadership and complicating efforts to find the right successor. Between now and next week, rumors may harden lines of dispute.
Division was already apparent when the members of the Amherst-Pelham Regional and Union 26 school committees came out of an executive session Tuesday night and voted 5-3 in open session in favor of awarding the large sum of money to Geryk in exchange for her stepping down after 14 years.
Due to a hitch with that vote, however, the six members of the Union 26 School Committee will reconvene Monday to vote again on the settlement. (The Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee’s vote stands, since it achieved a quorum, while the other panel did not.)
Come Monday, a bit more information is promised by Laura Kent, chairwoman of the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee. She said the committees will seek to explain to residents the sources of the $309,238 they plan to pay to Geryk, which Kent has said will not come out of funding for classroom education. Still, the settlement will be paid out of town funds, not insurance coverage.
For Kent, this will be a summer for the record books. In her first months as chair, she has had to oversee a high-stakes bargaining marathon between the committees and a lawyer representing Geryk. The process that started July 13 continued July 20, Aug. 1 and Aug. 9.
The night of the vote this past Tuesday, the Gazette handed a public records request in person to Kent seeking access to minutes of the executive sessions. Kent, to her credit, has promised to release documents Wednesday.
While municipal officials are allowed to hold meetings in private for specific reasons, when the circumstances change – as with the departure of an employee – laws stipulate that minutes of executive sessions are public.
After records are released Wednesday, the Gazette will post them on Gazettenet.com and use them, along with interviews, to reconstruct what took place behind closed doors.
Geryk has declined to make herself available for questions. She released a statement Thursday through her assistant, Debbie Westmoreland, in which she said “the decision to leave was extremely difficult.”
That suggests Geryk initiated the dissolution of her contract. She wrote that it is important to her “to work and live in the way that makes you personally happy and professionally fulfilled.”
That implies that factors no longer enabled her to feel that way. That is the light bulb that’s yet to be switched on in this situation. “It was clear to me that I had no choice but to take this step so that I could live true to this belief,” she wrote.
Three members of the regional school committee voted against paying Geryk 18 months worth of salary to walk away: Trevor Baptiste, Vira Douangmany Cage and Stephen Sullivan. Both Baptiste and Cage have been critics of Geryk’s work, particularly over her decision to impose a stay-away order on a Pelham Elementary School parent.
The second-guessing has started. Next week, when people have more facts to absorb, officials, school families and taxpayers must sift for lessons on ways not just to carry on, but to heal rifts and deliver top-notch education to young people.