Superintendent investigation report released: Two years later, its findings still strain the district

LACONIA — Two years ago, an independent investigator found that complaints of a hostile work environment and discrimination made against Superintendent Steve Tucker were not legally founded, but that he had retaliated against two of the now-former employees who made those complaints. The Laconia School Board determined he had not committed any wrongdoing, and during that school year and the following, more than a dozen members of the administrative team, including the complainants, either left or were not able to continue their employment in Laconia. 

This month, the school district made the report from that investigation public for the first time. 

The district initially denied a public records request from The Daily Sun in June, stating that, on the advice of legal counsel, the report was exempt from public disclosure. Following The Daily Sun’s complaint to the state office that handles public records disputes, the district released the report, alongside a four-page written statement signed by Tucker and Jennifer Anderson, current chair of the school board. 

The report is at the crux of a lingering conflict between now-former employees and Tucker that has cost the district hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses since 2021.

With the release of the report, district leaders spoke openly about the investigation. Their comments shed light on how the school board and the superintendent received and responded to the investigation’s findings. The disclosure also meant the participants — several of whom are still in legal disputes with the district — were able to review the report in full for the first time.

Report findings

Attorney Debra Weiss Ford, the third-party investigator hired by the school board, wrote in the report that she was asked in September 2021 by a district lawyer to investigate complaints of "unethical treatment of staff and administration." The investigation’s purpose was “to determine whether the allegations were with or without merit.”

Weiss Ford spoke with 15 district employees in addition to the superintendent — six at his request. All are anonymous in the report. It also states she reviewed “a voluminous number” of emails, policies, notes, employee files, contracts and newspaper articles, though they are not specified or included. Weiss Ford’s findings categorize the concerns of nine complainants into five allegations, broadly review their context, then state whether she found they had merit. She also notes a 10th complainant who chose not to speak with her.

The investigator did not find that Tucker’s actions amounted to what the complaints — hostile work environment, age discrimination, race discrimination and “gender identity harassment/discrimination” — alleged.

Weiss Ford did determine that Tucker retaliated against two people she spoke to, each in two ways. Specifically, she found it retaliatory that Tucker had given two administrators negative performance reviews “just after he was interviewed” for the investigation.

While the investigator said the allegations of a hostile work environment did not have basis in a legally protected class, she did make conclusions about the superintendent’s leadership.

“There was an overwhelming belief that Mr. Tucker creates a dysfunctional and toxic work environment and does not engage in collaborative leadership,” Weiss Ford wrote. “All witnesses except those interviewed at the request of Mr. Tucker, stated that Mr. Tucker engaged in bullying and fear tactics to prevent or hinder the administrative team from speaking their minds and engaging in any meaningful dialogue.”

“For the majority of witnesses I interviewed, Mr. Tucker is an ineffective leader,” Weiss Ford continued. “I find that there is among many, a dissatisfaction with Mr. Tucker's leadership style and that he has not met his stated goal of unifying the team. To the contrary, there is evidence of a significant breakdown in communications and a general distrust of Mr. Tucker by many of the witnesses. Based on my extensive interviews, I do not believe that Mr. Tucker will be able to unify the current team of administrators.”

Criticism from the district

The district’s written statement criticized the report and the investigator at length, stating Weiss Ford made “zero attempt at ... fact checking,” that she demonstrated a bias against Tucker by not allowing him to present documentation to rebut the complaints, and that the report was “unfair,” “one-sided” and had “compromis[ed] objectivity and credibility.” Those assertions were repeated in interviews by the superintendent, the school board chair and Bob Champlin — a former superintendent, former school board member, mentor to Tucker and now consultant for the district.

Weiss Ford does not list or exhibit the evidence she reviewed. She performed additional interviews of six employees, in addition to the nine complainants, at the superintendent’s request, whom the report notes described him as a “good leader” and were “shocked” and “surprised” at the allegations. 

Weiss Ford, who also performed a school district investigation in Somersworth this year, is the office managing principal at Jackson Lewis PC in Portsmouth. Her professional biography states she has four decades of experience in employment law. Weiss Ford is also an attorney hired by Primex, the school district’s insurer, to teach seminars about workplace investigations to its clients. She did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.

School board response

The school board met with the superintendent on two occasions to discuss the report, which is dated Nov. 24, 2021. According to Anderson, those meetings occurred on Jan. 11 and Feb. 15, 2022, and the minutes were sealed. 

The board first reviewed the report at the January meeting, Anderson wrote in an email to The Daily Sun, at which point they “took action to ‘hold no harm’ regarding the findings of retaliation.” At the February meeting, the board unanimously voted to indemnify Tucker and pay his personal legal expenses. 

Three of seven school board members at the time, including Anderson, had been elected that November, and, though aware of the investigation, had not been involved in the decision to initiate it.

Tucker told the investigator he had fallen behind on his evaluations and performed those she found retaliatory in an effort to “get current.” 

“I don't look at the attorney schedule and ask when she's doing investigations,” Tucker told The Daily Sun. “An evaluation is to provide feedback, and I provide feedback to every employee that I evaluate ... I don't think it's fair to an employee if I'm not honest.”

Anderson said in an interview the board criticized the superintendent for both the tardiness and timing of his feedback.

“Every one of us was like, ‘This would have not been an issue had those things been on time,’” Anderson said. “I think I was even the one to say it: the optics don't look good.”

“He could see, in hindsight, how that would look, because the investigation was active. And so we were very clear that that can't happen again.” 

Board members had mixed feelings about the quality of the investigative report when they received it, Anderson said; several, but not all, shared the criticisms the district wrote about in its statement. She emphasized the board nevertheless was unanimous in its redress votes.

“The indemnification speaks volumes,” Anderson said. “The reality is that, of the five things, one thing was founded, and we collectively believed that we had addressed that.” 

Participant response

Former district administrators who participated in the investigation were first able to read the report after the district released the report on Dec. 5. They expressed some discontent that the report did not include the “voluminous” evidence they provided Weiss Ford and that it excluded key parts of their complaints.

“The report does not provide any information detailing the actual grievances filed against the superintendent by nine employees, nor the 90-plus pages of evidence and facts she reviewed,” said former grant administrator McKenzie Harrington-Bacote in written comments. She stated this was likely “as a means to protect the confidentiality promised by the board.”

“It was really lightweight,” said Christine Gingerella, former grant administrator and director of the office of extended learning. “When she wrote about my experiences, it was light touch.” Gingerella felt the lack of documentation included in the report made her complaints come across as “dry.”

The allegations “were summarized to highlight what are the most benign aspects of the individual complaints,” said one former administrator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are involved in ongoing legal proceedings against the district regarding a complaint they made not referenced in the report. “These weren’t one-time ‘mistakes’ made by the superintendent. ... People may read the report and think this is the worst of it. Things actually got much worse after the investigation.”

Despite frustrations with the report’s brevity, these former administrators criticized the school board for not having a more rigorous response to what was included, and for not questioning the turnover that followed. 

“It is troubling that after the school board received an investigation report in January 2022 that found the superintendent had retaliated against two employees, that it would allow the superintendent to terminate one of those employees and not renew the contract of the other just a few months later,” said Christine Blouin, a former business and human resources administrator who passed on the original complaints to the school board, in a statement to The Daily Sun. “The board did nothing to stop the superintendent or protect those employees.”

Blouin, whose contract was terminated in April 2022, remains in a legal dispute with the district over a wage claim she filed last year. After the district successfully appealed an initial ruling, the Department of Labor again ruled in Blouin’s favor in November. The district has since again appealed.

The working environment under the superintendent further deteriorated after the investigation ended, Harrington-Bacote said. Part of that deterioration involved efforts by the superintendent “to discredit the professional and personal reputations of the identifiable employees, that continues to this day.”

The school board was responsible for protecting employees from retaliation both during and after the investigation, Harrington-Bacote continued. By indemnifying Tucker and paying his legal fees despite the retaliation findings, she said the board condoned those actions and “only empowered him to expand that campaign.”

Harrington-Bacote also questioned that the school board would direct pointed criticism at the investigator they hired. 

“Attorney Ford is regarded by Primex and districts across the state as an expert in conducting external investigations,” Harrington-Bacote said. “The fact that the district went to significant lengths to bury this report and now feels the need to refute the investigation by personally attacking attorney Ford and the nine complainants in and of itself is very telling.”

A goal of unity

When he was hired, Tucker said he both recognized a need for — and was encouraged by the school board and existing staff to pursue — greater unity and collaboration on the administrative team. He noted there had been five superintendents in the seven years before he was appointed in 2019. 

The district had observed administrators being “territorial” about their responsibilities, said Champlin, who was on the school board when it voted to hire Tucker. 

When reflecting on the complaints against him, Tucker said, he understood them to be rooted in resistance to his efforts.

“The basis for those people being upset was because there were their own personal aspirations,” Tucker said. Many members of the team he aimed to unify were people he had worked with as peers in the past, some of whom he had known for decades. 

“I thought about how it could have gotten to that point,” he said, where he and longtime colleagues could not resolve issues directly. “If I'm an academic coordinator in a building, and I'm on an administrative team and they're sort of equals with me, and then all of a sudden I come and become their boss: I wonder if that was hard for some people. I wonder if that was a challenge.”

Tucker said he thinks the district has since repaired the divisions Weiss Ford described.

“Despite those distractions, we've been able to do the good work [for] kids,” Tucker said, pointing to a major renovation project at the high school and updates to the strategic plan. “People have to understand what happened, and they need to make a decision of whether they're going to want to be a part of that or not. And I think we have a lot of people in Laconia who want to be a part of that.”

“We've spent a lot of time as an administrative team working on that unity piece, working on trust, what it means to trust each other,” said Amy Hinds, who has been assistant superintendent since 2016.

The superintendent has made changes to his leadership, Champlin said, “Not because of the Ford report, but because of other things, because he has had a ton to learn in a very short period of time.”

“The other thing that — I don't know if it's the elephant in the room or not,” Champlin said: of the administrators in the report, several did not live in Laconia, three had relatively short tenures in the district, and “none of them are here now.”

“The team that we're working with now,” he continued, “is focused on kids, focused on what we’re doing. And so that has had an impact as well.”

Moving on

Just before meeting with the board about the report in January, Tucker said he considered whether he should resign or respond legally. Knowing since September that he was being investigated and that several coworkers had filed complaints against him — whilst also fielding community clamor over the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — made continuing his work difficult and draining. 

He decided not to, he said, because of past superintendent turnover and because he wanted to remain in a community where he was born and has lived for 30 years and in the school system where he has spent the majority of his career.

“I'm thankful I have this job. I do like the work,” Tucker said. “When I walk through the halls, one of the things I love about my job is that I get to see the kids.”

Anderson said she respected Tucker’s steadfastness and genuine relationships with students. Part of the reason the board had indemnified him, she said, was because a majority felt they could endorse his character. 

“His level of investment in the face of what have been certainly very intense professional and personal challenges ... is remarkable,” she said. “It comes through in the conversations that you have, and you see the joy that he has just being in [school] buildings.”

Though the report was written more than two years ago, and while district leaders emphasized a desire to move on, the district remains financially and legally tied to what happened before, during and after the investigation: a settlement to former Pleasant Street School Principal David Levesque was finalized this fall, Blouin’s wage claim remains in court and at least one other legal dispute with a complainant is ongoing. 

According to figures from a Dec. 5 school board meeting, the district has spent more than $87,000 on legal fees since July — exceeding its $70,000 budget just under halfway through the fiscal year and totaling more than $335,400 in legal fees since July 2021.

“There is a single reason for the mass exodus of administrators and other employees who have left,” Blouin said in her statement. “Doing nothing has cost the district enormous sums in employee turnover, attorney fees, verdicts and settlements.” 

Regardless of what is in the report — or what the district has to say about it — Gingerella said, the amount of turnover on the administrative team in a two-year span tells its own story.

“Just look at the numbers,” she said. “Look at the data.”