Protect new superintendent

I would like to welcome Madeline Negron back to the city of New Haven, and hope for her much success as our new superintendent of schools. I vow to work with her and the school administration to set an environment to improve educational outcomes for the students in our district.

In order to get to where we need to be as a city — all united behind the goal to improve educational outcomes — we first need to clean house of all the negative and ethically challenged barriers. And that starts with the governing body of the New Haven Public Schools, the Board of Education. Made up of nine members, seven voting members and two nonvoting students, it is crucial that this board works together to achieve that goal.

But there seems to be one or two board members who have outsized influence on the direction of the school system, and they are Mayor Justin Elicker and Edward Joyner.

I have written in the past about my concerns related to the leadership of the system and various board members’ ethical lapses. Those concerns have not gone away, but have become even more pronounced recently. I wrote about the need for the community to come together and work towards improvement. I wrote about the need for new leadership and significant changes. I also wrote about the seemingly out of control spending. I wrote about the declining achievement scores and the administration and the board’s lack of a plan to turn it around. I suggested, like others, that we should consider our school system as a patient in an emergency room and immediately treat the patient. I wrote about the lack of real leadership here, here, and here. I wrote about how Elicker’s hire of the corporation counsel, an ethics attorney, should lead towards enforcement of ethics rules. It did not.

Now, with the new superintendent soon to be installed, we have the most ethically challenged board member actually flinging deceptive and false ethics accusations against a newly promoted staff member. At a recent BOE meeting, Joyner first argued that the current superintendent should not fill the position. When that argument failed to gain traction, he then switched gears and stated that the candidate “had ethical concerns” and that he wanted the board to delay the hire.

Why did he believe that he should be able to have that sort of influence on who should fill what positions? Well, it appears from his own words that he has had that influence in the past. He commented that he spoke to the superintendent about the hire in a private discussion and said “I thought I had the kind of relationship with her where I could have a conversation. I thought that she trusted my professional judgment.” He went further and stated that he discusses every appointment with her.

Outside of the mayor, I would bet my last dollar that no other board member has that type of relationship. In fact, board rules and state statutes stipulate that the board cannot act as single members but must act as a whole. Joyner having access to the superintendent to vet new hires is way beyond his role as a board member. It literally stinks of bad ethics odors.

This is the same Joyner who I wrote about his ethical issues here. He is the same board member who had not just one, but two children working for the school, missing work and getting promotions. In fact, his daughter has had several promotions since he joined the board, including to the director of the math department. She is now the leader of the department where our kids are failing the most. And guess where she is today until the end of the school year. On leave. She is not even performing the job she just got promoted to several months ago.

This is not the kind of leadership we need leading our school system. We should not have board members who have children working at high levels in the system. We have enough people in our town of 130,000 people who could fill those seats. No one is expendable.

Joyner has spent nearly eight years on this board protecting and promoting his children and working behind the scenes to destroy anyone he believes gets in his way. It is no coincidence that school funding for my church’s very successful summer program for neighborhood children was voted down by this board. As one board member commented, “don’t punish kids over the political views of the person who is organizing this.” But this board, led by Elicker and Joyner, did so.

We must protect this new superintendent from the political influences of board members, especially Joyner.

It is time for Joyner to resign. If he does not, then Elicker should insist that his ethics expert lay out the case for that outcome.

Madeline Negron must be protected.

The Rev. Boise Kimber is pastor of First Calvary Baptist Church in New Haven.