The families, residents and taxpayers of the Riverhead Central School District deserve answers we know all too well they’re never going to get.
Why was the district’s longtime business official cast aside after more than a decade of diligently and competently performing his duties?
What was the nature of the investigation the district paid a law firm to conduct?
What was so urgent that Sam Schneider could not have been allowed to work through the end of his contract on June 30? Why did the district have to incur the expense of replacement personnel, even as it paid Schneider to stay at home for many months? And if there was something so terrible that triggered all of this, why did the district agree to a settlement that obligated taxpayers to pay Schneider through June 30 even if he found a new job and resigned long before that?
This doesn’t add up and the school board and district superintendent, lawyered up as they are, remain mum.
Our observations about the events concerning Schneider over the last five months are as follows. There was an unexplained “administrative reassignment” — something that has occurred in this district when an employee is accused of some kind of serious wrongdoing.
There were the mysterious hirings — the law firm to investigate (something), the auditing firm to do a forensic audit (to look for something), the business official to undertake Schneider’s duties, the hiring of an acting assistant superintendent to fill Schneider’s job even though he had not resigned.
Then there was perhaps the most baffling expenditure of all: the “electronic security sweep” of the district offices — undertaken no doubt by great coincidence, right around the time when Schneider was “reassigned.”
What on earth made the new superintendent, on the job a little over three months, think someone would be bugging his offices? Who would do that and — more pointedly — how? All he would tell us was that information was being “leaked.” Seriously, now. Leaked? To whom? And what kind of “information” was being leaked? Was it classified? What’s the superintendent running over there — a school district or a national security agency?
And in the “add insult to injury” department, the superintendent refused to say whether the “sweep” uncovered any electronic listening devices.
We’ll note here that electronic eavesdropping is a felony in this state and if the sweep discovered such devices, that would mean the district and the employees who work in those offices were victims of a crime. Considering the expenditure of public funds made to pay those employees and carry on the district’s business operations, we’d argue, by extrapolation, the district taxpayers would have been victims of that crime as well. We think the district would have been obligated to report that felony to the police.
But if eavesdropping occurred — and, again, the superintendent wouldn’t say whether it did or not — the district never reported it to Riverhead Police.
Various people in the district and on successive school boards have disliked and distrusted Schneider for one reason or another. We’ve heard whisper campaigns and rumor-mongering.
But in Schneider, we never saw anything but a competent, thorough business official who seemed to keep his head down and work hard. Maybe he wasn’t a warm and fuzzy presence, but those aren’t traits for which you pay the chief financial officer of a public institution. Traits like accuracy and integrity are more germane to the job, wouldn’t you say? And with the district’s consistently squeaky-clean annual audits, and Schneider’s willingness to provide direct, cogent answers to any question we ever asked of him over the years, we think he exhibited those important character traits without fail.
The school district owes its families, residents and taxpayers a duty of transparency and it failed miserably on that front in its handling of this matter.
The district also owes its constituencies a duty of professionalism — and that means district officials, including school board members, must not be parties to the district or community rumor mills, must not traffic in conspiracy theories and must, above all, eschew the ever-present drama that has permeated and dragged this district down for decades.
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