On the very day Amherst Superintendent Maria Geryk’s financial demands were unveiled in early July, there was little doubt she was on her way to cashing large checks in an unexpected early retirement.
Geryk needed just two things to triumph in her dispute with members of the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee: a plausible case she’d been treated unlawfully as the district’s leader and a willingness to go to court for as long as necessary to secure a judgment in her favor.
A split committee wasn’t willing to subject the district’s towns and taxpayers to years of litigation. It voted to pay her $309,238.
They made the right decision to minimize the risk of damage to the district’s reputation. The settlement enables the Amherst regional schools to look ahead, with a new leader, to new accomplishments, rather than dwelling for years in acrimony.
We will never know whether Geryk would have been able to prove, in a civil lawsuit, that her constitutional rights had been violated by committee members, as she alleges.
That’s understandably frustrating to the two members her lawyer singled out for pointed criticism – Trevor Baptiste and Vira Douangmany Cage. Both were accused of impugning Geryk’s reputation.
While this week brought the delayed release of public documents, all facts are not yet out in the open. Because of that, fair-minded people cannot determine the merits of Geryk’s argument that she was subjected to a hostile work environment.
While the deal cuts short what would have been a tortuous legal saga of claims and counterclaims, the minutes of several executive sessions officially released this week do shed light on the committee’s internal deliberations. They show the majority of members rising to the challenge of sifting through difficult accusations and not letting personal antipathy get in the way of what’s best for the future of the schools.
That’s why Geryk had this won from the start.. Employment disputes in municipal government are costly. The panel likely saved money in two ways: by reducing Geryk’s original demand from three years of pay to 18 months and by avoiding costly legal fees. Though Amherst cut a check to Geryk for $253,725 this week, on top of an early payment of $42,236, the cost of a long legal fight would have surely gone higher.
The committee’s chairwoman, Laura Kent, deserves credit for working to facilitate deliberations by removing emotion from both sides.
In time, with the release of executive session minutes for the Pelham School Committee, the public could get a fuller picture of Geryk’s handling of the most prominent dispute here – her decision to issue a stay-away order in Pelham against an African-American parent.
Geryk said months ago she was willing to provide more information about the case, if the parent consented. The Gazette this week requested minutes from an executive session in Pelham in which the former superintendent explained why she felt that public safety demanded she act. The parent has declined to allow the facts, as gathered by the district, to be made public. Disagreement over the stay-away order festered for months – and appears to have triggered Geryk’s decision to leave.
Oddly enough, the superintendent’s decision to leave came as she appeared to be on a glide path to a generally laudatory performance evaluation after six years, and with two years left on her contract.
Geryk’s lawyer faulted the regional committee for not taking steps to “repudiate the speculation, innuendo and ‘specious hearsay’” allegedly spread by Douangmany Cage and Baptiste in regard to the Pelham dispute.
Given that they were personally targeted, it is not hard to understand the desire by Baptiste and Douangmany Cage, captured in the meeting minutes, to contest accusations in court. Douangmany Cage said Wednesday the panel “capitulated.” Baptiste, in a separate interview, dismissed Geryk’s official demand letter as “unsubstantiated lies, literally a lawyer trying to throw a monkey wrench in a system we control.”
But other voices on the committee, including Sarah Dolven of Leverett, a lawyer herself, saw no upside to a legal fight, asking, “Does this community want two to three years of protracted litigation, or do they want to find a new dynamic leader who can answer questions the committee has and fill in the deficiencies people saw in the former superintendent?” A good question, that. The answer the committee found, though far from clear cut, was the right one.