Superintendent retention bill flawed

There are already elected officials who oversee Utah schools. They're members of state and local school boards. If patrons don't like how their schools run or how their respective school districts operate, they can vote out board members. Recent history suggests they do.

One Utah lawmaker has filed a bill that would also require superintendents to be elected. Under HB144, sponsored by Rep. Kenneth Sumsion, R-American Fork, the public would vote every two years whether superintendents should be retained.

There are a lot of pitfalls with this proposal. School superintendents work at the pleasure of their respective boards of education. Their contracts are renewed every two years. School board members conduct evaluations and consider public input in their deliberations whether to renew their contracts.

Perhaps the greatest danger with this bill is that a superintendent's job could be on the line over an issue that might impact only a few people. Rarely do parents or other school patrons attend school board meetings unless there is an issue that affects their neighborhood school. As the process works, school board members are the final arbiters of these matters. In the case of a controversial boundary change or school closure, some people will walk away from the experience unhappy. Their anger could fester into a full-blown campaign to remove a superintendent who can make recommendations in these matters but, in the end, cannot vote.

The reality is, school boards can pressure problem superintendents to step down, or they can fire them outright. In 1998, for instance, the Tooele Board of Education, after meeting in executive session for four hours, accepted the resignation of Superintendent Jim Buckley. Buckley had been charged with operating a vehicle while in possession of an open container of alcohol. In a separate case, Buckley pleaded no contest in 5th District Court to telephone harassment of a Cedar City woman.

The fatal flaw of this bill is that it does not respect the role of superintendent. They are, at their core, educators. They are administrators responsible for multimillion-dollar budgets and very large staffs. They are not political creatures.

School board members face election every four years. They decide whether to close schools, shift boundaries and whether to hire or fire superintendents. The Legislature needs to respect Utah's long history of the buck stopping with elected school boards and ax this bill.