Disgraced Ousted Moms 4 Liberty PA School Board 'Hosed Down' Superintendent Crony With $700,000 Cash
Congratulations to Bucks County, PA, for walloping them with votes.
Last week we all had a good schadenfreudy laugh at the news that one of those “save the children from indocrination” loons, Clarice Schillinger of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, was charged with assault after allegedly punching a teenager in the face for trying to leave a booze-fueled birthday party Schillinger threw for her daughter’s 17th birthday back in September. Well! Yesterday, over at Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall pointed at yet another story of deep weirdness from Bucks County, of which Doylestown, population 8,300, is the closest thing to an urban center. No biggie, just an over-$700,000 golden parachute payout to a departing school superintendent. (The TPM story is paywalled, but the basics are all here in the Bucks County Beacon.)
Bucks County is one of those places where candidates backed by the rightwing zealots of Moms for Liberty took over school boards in 2021’s wave of panic over mask policies and Critical Woke Theory and all that. It’s also where last fall, fed-up normal folks handed the Mad Moms their asses and retook the majorities on those school boards. In the Central Bucks district, the rightwing board made national news for banning LGBTQ-themed books, prohibiting teachers from engaging in “advocacy activities,” and getting the district sued by the ACLU for creating a “hostile environment” for LGBTQ+ students. Along with the book banning and a Florida-style ban on mentioning LGBTQ+ anything in classes, the district prohibited teachers from using students’ preferred names and pronouns unless they had express written permission from parents.
Democratic-backed candidates won all five open school board seats in November, wresting back the majority and promising to undo the old board’s rightwing excesses nonsense absolute insanity. You may have seen the news in early December that the new board president, Karen Smith, took her oath of office with her hand on a stack of banned and challenged books.
Ah, but before the new majority could take over, the old board used the few weeks that it remained in power to give its favored school superintendent, Abe Lucabaugh, that ginormous $700,000 severance package. Lucabaugh resigned the week after the election, and apparently he needed some walking-around money, although just a few months before he left — again, he resigned, for which he got “severance” — the board had also voted to give him a 40 percent pay raise for no particular reason smack in the middle of his current contract, which had several years to go.
Says Marshall, in that TPM piece,
[The] board was basically hosing this guy Lucabaugh down with cash for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me. He was apparently whole hog on board with their anti-woke campaign. But even that doesn’t entirely explain the wild sums of money they dropped on this dude.
There’s also the matter of whether the payout violated the law, which, according to lawyers for the new board majority, it absolutely did. Under Pennsylvania law, the maximum severance pay can be no more than one year’s worth of pay and benefits. But on top of one year’s worth of pay at his new salary of $315,000, and unused vacation and sick days for 2022-23 (a bit over $62,400), the board also awarded Lucabaugh $265,000 for unused sick days prior to the current year — an amount calculated based on his new, higher salary, at that, plus a load of other benefits too, to get him to over $700,000 in compensation.
While the old board was at it, it also tried to protect Lucabaugh from any scrutiny by the new board members, which per the Philadelphia Inquirer, no, it wasn’t allowed to do either. Those restrictions insisted
that no board member or central office administrator can make any public comments about Lucabaugh that contradict a joint statement included in the agreement, which describes his “extraordinary leadership.” The board also cannot initiate any investigation of Lucabaugh.
According to David Conn, an attorney for the new board, departing school boards just plain can’t hamstring their successors like that. At its first meeting in early December, the board voted to authorize legal action against the old board members, to claw back any funds they used illegally, but so far, no lawsuits have been filed. Pure speculation on our part, but maybe the outgoing board followed the example of King MAGA and is storing all its records in a bathroom with a chandelier.
The new board this week chose a new interim superintendent, Jim Scanlon, who recently retired from another area district and is probably not a rightwing loon. He’ll serve for six months while a search for a permanent replacement for Lucabaugh is conducted.
In conclusion, it sure is something how we’ve seen rightwingers seize control of local government bodies, try to turn them into far-right fiefdoms to save the children or prevent public health officials from doing public health, and then suddenly blow huge amounts of public money when their schemes fall apart. It’s almost as if they really don’t have the public good in mind at all. Must be Joe Biden’s fault.
[Talking Points Memo / Bucks County Beacon / Philadelphia Inquirer]
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When we first moved to Medina, OH, the school board ousted a President who had been stealing funds for himself. Among his purchases were books on hypnosis and gaslighting, so….
If someone would like to pay me $700k for being a contemptible fuck up at my job, please let me know. I would be really happy to start literally like right now, today. Because I have some feelings that I would like to vent without immediate financial repercussions.