Wood County’s Educational Service Center board members failed the students they were elected to serve.
And they failed the taxpayers whose money they were elected to prudently manage.
By unanimously voting to give their former superintendent, Luci Gernot, $552,650.14 as a separation
settlement, the board members gave credence to the belief many people have today that government has
lost touch with common sense.
The man on the street would say, if an employee refuses to do what his or her boss tells them to do, the
boss should fire the employee. There’s no golden parachute. If the boss decides the business is going in
a new direction, as the ESC board spokesman said was the case, those who work for the boss have a
choice: Jump on board the redirected train or get off at the next station, with no expectation of any
additional pay coming down the tracks.
Instead, the spokesman made it sound like Gernot did the board a favor when she "agreed to a change
of leadership" due to a philosophical difference between her administrative style and ESC’s
"redirection."
A letter to the editor from the board in March sang her praises, as did the spokesman when he announced
the settlement.
However, those words ran counter to the unanimous chorus of concerns voiced by local school
superintendents calling for greater efficiency – and transparency – in the administrative charges of
their contracts for service while ESC was sitting on a $3.5 million reserve fund.
ESC’s board just wasted more than a half million dollars of that reserve ­- money that should have been
spent on helping ESC fulfill its mission statement to "develop, deliver, and implement quality
educational services and programs." The generous settlement, right down to the 14 cents, did not
purchase one educational service, nor did all that money initiate one program for the benefit of Wood
County students.
ESC’s board also failed both of its constituencies – the students and the taxpayers – when it allowed its
previous superintendent, Douglas Garman, to handpick Gernot in 2007 as his successor in 2009.
It’s time for the ESC board members to finally do the right thing and resign en masse for giving away
$553,000 of taxpayer dollars without getting anything in return.
An entire new board is needed if the Wood County ESC is ever to live up to its vision statement "to
be recognized as an exemplary educational service center in Ohio."
– David C. Miller, Editor