Paul Maynard, president of the Hillsboro R-3 Board of Education, is withdrawing from his district’s heavily contested April 7 school board race after sending the Leader a letter to the editor in his name that was actually written by Superintendent Aaron Cornman.
The letter was in response to a letter that ran in the March 12 Jefferson County Leader that criticized Maynard and fellow incumbent Jo Ellen Stringer for their votes to change the nepotism policy at R-3.
Shortly after the change, Cornman’s wife was hired by the district, a decision that would not have been allowed under the old policy. The change did conform with Missouri School Board Association guidelines.
Maynard was on vacation when last week’s letter appeared in the paper. He had until Friday to submit a response to run in this week’s edition, the last in which letters will be printed about candidates or issues prior to the election.
Maynard and Cornman both said, in separate interviews, that Maynard asked the superintendent to research information for a response.
The superintendent emailed a draft to Maynard that was in letter form. It began, “To the editor.” Above the draft, Cornman included this note to Maynard:
“I have drafted the following response for your review. I sent the information to the attorney for review to make sure it did not violate any laws/regulations and she said that it reads very well.
“Please feel free to use this in its entirety if you wish or as a guide to draft your own response. If you decide to make changes please do not change the timeline.”
Maynard pasted his name below the letter and sent it to the Leader. Sadly for him, he included the entire email thread, which had Cornman’s note to him and Cornman’s draft of the letter, which was identical to the one Maynard submitted in his own name.
A school board member serves his or her community in an unpaid, often thankless job. They get yelled at by parents, viewed suspiciously by teachers and staff and sometimes roasted in the press. They must run for election and bear the expense of that. They face all that aggravation and spend hundreds of hours of personal time doing it. Most are trying to make their school districts better.
School board members get in trouble when they forget their main two responsibilities:
■ Setting policy for the district.
■ Hiring, evaluating and sometimes firing the superintendent.
I know Maynard slightly and believe him to be a decent, devout man who made his school board decisions based on what he thought was best for the Hillsboro R-3 District. That said, he exercised terrible judgment on this one.
Copying the letter was bad. Even worse was forgetting Responsibility No. 2.
The line between boss and workers is a hard one to maintain in any workplace. Successful bosses learn to be friendly with employees, but they are not friends. There has to be a distance in case the boss (really, when the boss) has to do something unpleasant. The business has to be protected first. Friendship can cloud judgment.
This is magnified in the boss-worker relationship between a school board member and a superintendent. They are in charge of educating a community’s most precious resource. There are multimillion-dollar budgets involved and the livelihoods of hundreds of employees.
No matter how great you think he or she is, a board member can’t get too close to the supe. No dinners out, except with the whole board. No backyard barbecues or fishing trips. A boss has to be able to be the boss.
When confronted with the situation about the letter, Maynard did the honorable thing. He admitted he shouldn’t have copied the letter and said he was withdrawing from the race.
Despite Maynard’s announcement, it is too near the election for his name to come off the ballot. There is a field of eight candidates, two of whom will be elected to three-year terms.
Maynard also defended Cornman.
“I asked Dr. Cornman for the information in regards to the issue regarding the aforementioned board policies. He was kind enough to respond eloquently at the request of his supervisor,” Maynard said. “This was an inappropriate request and I realize that. As such, I formally withdraw as a candidate for the Board of Education.”
Cornman has been under attack periodically from board members who disagreed with the decisions to change the nepotism policy and subsequently hire his wife.
“The super is a good man with strong family values. He wants to be here 20 or 30 years. I don’t want to be the bump in the road that knocks him out,” Maynard said.
Maynard, who has served on the school board since 2008 and helped hire Cornman in 2013, demonstrated his loyalty to Cornman with that statement. Judge for yourself how it was repaid by the superintendent in his interview about the email.
“If I have a school board member ask me, I’m going to provide factual information,” Cornman said. “My job was to provide facts. I did what I was told.”
Why then, did those “facts” begin with, “To the editor” and have a note that said, “Please feel free to use this in its entirety if you wish?”
I asked Cornman that question twice and didn’t get an answer. I asked if it was appropriate for a superintendent to write a defense for one of his bosses just ahead of an election. Cornman said I was putting words in his mouth and he didn’t appreciate it.
I’ll give the guy points for chutzpah, which is defined classically as a guy on trial for killing his parents and then asking the judge for mercy because he’s an orphan.
We’re not running the Maynard/Cornman letter today because it wasn’t written by the candidate and the candidate said he was withdrawing. It was written in the first person, as if penned by Maynard and it referred to Cornman in the third person, as if he had nothing to do with its writing. And that, dear readers, is poppycock.
When are public servants going to learn? Email is forever and buddying up to the boss usually ends badly for one or both.
