March 13-19 is Sunshine Week in Missouri, an event designed to celebrate open government and public access to that government. As one of our favorite cliches goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant.
Sadly, there must be an eclipse of the sun over the Fox C-6 School District.
As you may read elsewhere in this issue, a lawsuit brought against five Fox educators, including former superintendent Dianne Critchlow and her husband, Jamie, has been settled with (payments to?) three Fox residents who said they were defamed by the Critchlows and two current employees, Dan Baker and Angela Burns Baker, as well as retired employee William Brengle.
This unhappy quintet was accused of posting nasty comments online about the three plaintiffs, Sam Ferry, Michelle Tyler and Richard Simpson Jr., who were outspoken critics of the district during the last year or so of Dianne Critchlow’s nearly 10-year run as superintendent, which ended in October 2014 with her early retirement.
These comments were made on private computers and not from school property, and the school district was not named as a party to the lawsuit. Somehow, though, one of the district’s insurance companies defended at least some of the five and negotiated a settlement with Ferry, Tyler and Simpson.
The Missouri Sunshine Law, which we celebrate this week, clearly states that any use of public money to settle a claim is a public record. The law specifically includes insurance settlements.
The Fox administration, however, says it does not know how much, if any, money was paid to the plaintiffs. It notes that the district was not a party to the suits, so how could it know?
When reporter Kim Robertson first began researching the story, district officials would not even acknowledge that the settlements had been defended and funded by Fox’s insurance policy.
Eventually, she dragged that out of them.
So if the employees and retired employee made those disparaging comments on their own computers, on their time and not on school property, why did the district’s insurance policy cover and defend them?
Another curious point is that the district’s policy, a copy of which was provided to Robertson, seems to say that charges of libel and defamation are excluded from coverage. Yet, the suit filed by the trio of plaintiffs specifically said they had been defamed and libeled.
Just as curiously, the policy seems to say that it will only cover employees’ actions that occurred during the performance of their duties. One of the defendants, Brengle, had been retired since 2009. The others, the district took pains to note, did their commenting on their own time.
How could that have been covered as actions taken in connection with their duties?
In addition, the policy lays out limits of liability and deductibles, which are $10,000 per claim under the Educators Legal Liability policy. Yet Fox, in saying it had no expenditures to report, said it paid no deductibles.
What a generous insurance company Fox must have hired, willing to overlook exclusions and cover stuff that happened when these people were off-duty, including one who didn’t even work there anymore!
As ridiculous as all that sounds, it may be topped by the abrupt abandonment of the Fox pledge to be open and transparent to the public, particularly after the tumultuous close of the Critchlow era.
There already is one large shoe hovering over Fox C-6. Sometime within the next month, a state audit of the district, 18 months in the making, is expected to be delivered. It will cover the waning days of the Critchlow dynasty, when the school board pretty much took her recommendations unexamined on pretty much everything.
Later, when new chief financial officer John Brazeal was hired, he began digging through expense reports and other records, finding numerous questionable expenses made by the Critchlows, including the purchase of logging equipment with district funds shortly after the Critchlows, coincidentally, started a logging company. After that revelation, the equipment was returned to the district.
There also were allegedly improper reimbursements to Dianne Critchlow for golf tournament fees, mileage and meals.
Some of this – maybe all of it – is expected to turn up in the state audit report.
Brazeal was like a dog on a bone in digging out this stuff and making it public. It’s curious why the public’s right-to-know the details of settlements arising from the actions of the same cast of characters has such a lower priority.
John Brazeal is a smart guy. All the tiptoeing he and new Superintendent Jim Wipke are doing in finessing their response to information requests for this story probably are within the limits of the Sunshine Law. They did ask the district’s insurance company for a copy of the settlement agreement, and a lawyer for the insurance company declined to give it to them, citing the same reasons point-for-point that Brazeal gave us for not supplying the information.
That may tightrope just inside the sideline of the law, but it sure doesn’t jive with the spirit of it, which is to let the public know how its money is being spent on lawsuits and settlements. I give Fox an “A+” in Loophole Finding.
This is the cloudy sky obscuring the celebration of Sunshine Week at Fox. We hope the state audit will generate enough breeze – and disclosure – to chase those clouds away.
