Senate Bill 1521, which is expected to pass this week, prevents a board from directing a superintendent to take actions that conflict with state or federal law (including executive orders and Oregon Department of Education policy) and limits it from taking action against a superintendent for following state or federal law.
Additionally, the bill would require that a school board has to provide a superintendent at least 12 months notice of termination when firing them without cause and only if certain conditions are met. Interim superintendents are also covered under the bill.
While SB 1521 was carried by Senate Committee Chair on Education Senator Michael Dembrow, a Democrat from Portland, and backed by some of the state’s school superintendents, some parents and advocates wanting more control over their children’s education aren’t happy.
“The public education system has left parents out of the decision-making process for too long,” said MacKensey Pulliam, co-founder and president of the Oregon Moms Union. “Senate Bill 1521 only makes this problem worse by taking school district staffing decisions from local school boards, elected by their local communities and parents, and putting them into the hands of Salem politicians.”
Pulliam’s political action committee was formed in 2021 in the wake of COVID-19 school shutdowns and distance learning. It seeks to provide statewide leadership for parent involvement and a student-first education.
However, Dembrow said the bill, which passed out of the Senate Committee on February 8, then the Senate on February 10, House of Education on February 22 and the House on February 25, is needed due to recent board decisions across the state.
“We need to make sure that school district superintendents are protected from extreme board decisions,” Dembrow said in a news release during the second week of February when the Oregon State Senate approved the bill. “Our school superintendents have a difficult job and should be able to focus on keeping our kids safe in schools and improving the quality of public education in their communities.”
Newsweek has reached out to Dembrow for direct comment.
Several firings of superintendents within the past year are behind the momentum for the bill by lawmakers.
In November, Newberg School District Superintendent Joe Morelock was ousted while his district was entangled in controversy over its school board’s ban on political symbols, including Black Lives Matter.
The Adrian School Board, which is in the state’s more rural Malheur County, dismissed Superintendent Kevin Purnell last August after refusing to follow a board directive defying the state’s mask mandate. Purnell had expressed he personally didn’t agree with the mandate.
That’s as Alsea School District Superintendent Mark Thielman did follow through on his school board’s commitment to make wearing a mask optional. That led to state education officials to announce they would withhold over $300,000 in COVID-19 relief funds to the rural district.
Other high-profile firings of Oregon superintendents since the beginning of 2021 include those inside the Greater Albany Public Schools and the Woodburn School District.
“In all cases, these superintendents were removed because the board wanted its superintendents to ignore the laws both state and federal and to codify to the board’s values,” said Tigard-Tualatin Superintendent Sue Rieke-Smith, who along with Coquille Superintendent Tim Sweeney, the Oregon School Boards Association and the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators, supports the bill.
She reiterated that it was the actions taken by a number of boards across the state from July to November where she said three different superintendents were “removed without cause” that instigated the bill.
“First and foremost, in this state, boards have three responsibilities: One, to to set policy, two, to mange the budget, and three, to hire and evaluate the superintendent,” Rieke-Smith told Newsweek.
“It’s the job of the superintendent “to manage operations and set an academic vision and to manage it,” said Rieke-Smith. “It’s not just that buses run on time and kids are fed, but also those look to their superintendent to provide a vision to how their children will be successful.”
“It’s also to understand of their board that what must we teach, must we do and what can we do to wrap ourselves around our kids when they walk through the door. Parents—it’s not them that exert that control,” she added, noting what she said are ongoing “multiple opportunities” to gather with parents and provide opportunity for transparency in her district’s educational policy.
Still, others that argue against the bill say the measure goes directly against the authority of which school boards were intended to have.
Annalee Waddell with Oregonians for Liberty in Education questioned the bill’s definition of law, which includes any executive order, “declaration, directive, or other state or federal authorization, policy, statement, guidance, rule, or regulation.”
“Once you get into children and you’re putting an ideology into the classroom and you put the weight of law behind it we’ve got a problem,” Waddell told Newsweek, noting that the school board is for parents—that they’re elected by them and they hire the superintendent.
“A lot of issues are really unsettled debates in society—these really are highly contested in the community in large. What this is doing is giving more power to the state,” said Waddell. “We want to support our duly elected officials but we feel we are losing our voice.”
Said Pulliam, “This law would essentially make school boards powerless over superintendents who don’t follow their guidance, which should represent the opinions of parents in the district.”
Pulliam also noted that if the legislature truly cared about parents’ rights, they would put priority on bills like Senate Bill 1552, which would allow more students to attend charter schools, giving parents more choices in their children’s education.
