Marsh doesn’t mellow

A punishment has been doled out for Jeff Sloan, principal of Marsh Junior High School.

After a meeting begun on May 5 carried over until 2:30 in the morning of May 6 and for another three hours that night, the Chico Unified School District Board of Trustees voted 4-1 to reassign Sloan to an administrative position at another school at his current rate of pay.

Scott Huber, who dissented, said he didn’t think Sloan’s alleged financial transgressions merited his removal from Marsh.

“We all viewed the information from slightly different perspectives,” Huber said, adding that the board’s private discussion was amicable and he’s uncomfortable with being seen as an “advocate” for Sloan.

At a May 11 downtown rally in support of Sloan, Huber said that, while he agrees that the district should change how it addresses personnel and communication issues, he can’t support threats of retaliation against board members. “I encourage you to work cooperatively rather than combatively for change,” he said.

Following an outside audit, the district amassed two large volumes of paperwork in an attempt to show that Sloan had misused student body funds on staff meals, office furniture and trips, wrongly sold used textbooks and filed false vandalism claims—all in an attempt to pump up Marsh in relation to other campuses.

Sloan countered that the district provided limited training about accounting rules, he thought the purchases were allowed and at any rate—as student government adviser Lisa Reynolds confirmed—they were all approved by student leaders. Also, in the case of the vandalism claims, he said he didn’t know the perpetrators had paid more restitution than they were supposed to. Furthermore, Sloan said, no money was missing and every decision he made was in the best interests of the students.

Hundreds of community members turned out during the last two months in support of Sloan, saying that the sending of notices of potential layoff or reassignment to Sloan and Vice Principal Frank Thompson was part of a vendetta by Superintendent Scott Brown.

Brown said in an interview that it wasn’t until the audit was performed that district officials identified areas of fiscal concern. “The more you look at it, the clearer it gets,” he said. “It sort of all came to a head this spring.”

The district’s second packet of information, released May 5, sought to be even more damning than the first.

Trustee Anthony Watts was troubled that the district report said a greenhouse fan was not damaged by vandalism, as Marsh had claimed. Watts investigated and proved that the fan had indeed been vandalized and replaced. “If there’s one error that I don’t believe, maybe there are others,” he said.

Sloan, who has led Marsh since its opening five years ago, chose not to comment on the record to the News & Review, including indicating whether he would accept another job in the CUSD or just quit.

Brown was scheduled to meet with Sloan this week about where and how he might be reassigned. Brown said he would seek to find a spot where an administrator is truly needed and where the transition would be as smooth as possible. As for Marsh, Brown said he’d like to get an interim principal from outside the district “with no stake on either side of this argument.”

Meanwhile, some of Sloan’s increasingly fractured supporters are considering an effort to recall the board members, with the exception of Huber, and ideally force out the superintendent as well.

Kim LeBlanc, president of Marsh’s Parent-Teacher-Student Organization (PTSO), said she’s not involved in a recall effort and her top concern is greater parent involvement in the future, “so things like this don’t happen.”

CUSD board President Steve O’Bryan blamed Sloan for the public outcry and disruption to the school. Whispers of some financial trouble involving Sloan were traveling through the district in early March, but until Sloan’s attorney released the contents of the audit on March 16, Brown would confirm to the News & Review only that Sloan and Thompson had received pink slips and the district was looking into an administrative issue at the school.

While O’Bryan acknowledged that the district is also concerned that Marsh’s ethnic and socioeconomic demographics don’t match that of its feeder schools, he said the board considered only the audit issue in its deliberations.

The District Office drew the boundaries for Marsh and approved transfers in and out, but O’Bryan said it’s now time to revisit that. "Because nobody dealt with it in the past doesn’t mean we’re not going to deal with it now."