On Nov. 10, Penny Hargrove, Ph.D., resigned as Mingus Union High School District superintendent.
The MUHSD board had suspended Hargrove two weeks earlier pending investigations by the law firm Gust Rosenfeld into her handling of the school’s AZMerit testing last spring, which was marred by a computer failure and led to a significant decrease in the school’s rating by the Arizona Department of Education.
In the course of Gust Rosenfeld’s investigation into Hargrove’s conduct, they found further evidence of unrelated wrongdoing involving conflict of interest, as well as issues in handling of a school safety grant from the Arizona Department of Education.
Gust Rosenfeld prepared three reports on Hargrove’s misconduct, which the board felt were enough to warrant her removal from her position. At a meeting on Nov. 28, the Mingus board voted to release the reports on the investigation to the public.
All three reports detail instances of alleged falsehoods and deliberate intention to hide issues from the governing board.
The conflict of interest report concerns Hargrove’s conduct overseeing the employment of her husband, who was hired in July 2017 as temporary staff. According to the memo prepared by Gust Rosenfeld, “Dr. Hargrove represented to at least one board member and to the local media that she would not participate in supervising her husband’s work, which was not the case.”
“In fact, on at least one or more occasions, Dr. Hargrove, as the director of Human Resources, assigned and directed her husband’s work,” the report reads. “Additionally, on numerous occasions, she approved his pay and assignments.”
According to the report, Hargrove defended her actions by saying that she had been confused by the strictness of Arizona law, having previously worked as a school district superintendent in Kansas. The memo states that “she did not make any attempt to understand Arizona law.”
The conflict of interest report expresses an intention by attorneys for Gust Rosenfeld to inform the Arizona Attorney General’s Office of its findings.
The report on the Department of Education school safety grant focused on issues relating to a training that was required of administrators. Under the terms of the three-year grant starting in the 2017-18 school year, all principals in the district were required to attend a Department of Education training session.
Mingus Union High School Principal Genie Gee was approved for the position by the governing board on Jan. 11. Under the terms of the grant, that would require her to attend the Department of Education’s training session for that spring, on Jan. 22. According to the memo, Hargrove did not however inform Gee of the necessity to attend the training session.
The report included emails between Hargrove and Arizona Department of Education School Safety Lead Jenny Walker discussing Gee’s nonattendance. When Walker emailed Hargrove asking when Gee began her position, and whether it was after Jan. 22, Hargrove replied:
“I pulled Genie’s principal contract to confirm the date of transition from assistant principal to principal. She was approved by the board on April 18, 2018. The principal duties were officially transferred to her on April 19, 2018.”
Gust Rosenfeld expressed at the top of the report the intention to inform the Arizona Department of Education of its findings.
The AZMerit report found that, as Hargrove had expressed to the MUHSD board there had been a problem with the school’s internet servers and Chromebooks on the day that students were set to take AZMerit tests, leading to a failure of the school to be graded via AZMerit testing. It also found that numerous other administrative issues, including scores for eighth grade students who took math classes at Mingus, contributed to the lowered grade.
However, further findings of Gust Rosenfeld highlighted problems of school district administration in handling that problem, including a failure to inform the district board:
“The board was not notified of the testing irregularities and the effect of the irregularities until well after the fact. Members of the board have stated they were not notified of the low scores until October 2018, although the district administration knew as early as May of the low scores.”
In addition to a failure to inform the board, the report highlights a failure by school administrators to inform the Arizona Department of Education of the issues, or to attempt to fix the scores:
“The district failed to notify ADE of the Chromebook problems until well after the fact. The ADE Deputy Associate Superintendent for Accountability and Assessment stated that the district could have but failed to seek assistance with testing during the week of testing or shortly thereafter. She stated that ADE could have and would have provided assistance with every problem that occurred that contributed to the D grade.”
The report recommends testing of the school’s computer systems, along with a protocol for informing Arizona Department of Education of future issues, in order to prevent a repeat of this years’ AZMerit problems.
According to Susan Segal, of Gust Rosenfeld, though the law firm initially set out to investigate only the AZMerit issue, they found district employees interested in telling them about the other issues. “It came up in the midst of the investigation,” Segal said.
“When we interviewed people they would raise these as concerns while the superintendent was there. We of course didn’t go off on our own to investigate things. We talked to the board president and others. They authorized us to go ahead since employees had raised these.”
For the Mingus board, the revelations that Hargrove may have misled the governing board and others was at least as much of a factor in seeking an end to her tenure as the underlying misconduct.
“Credibility is everything, right?” MUHSD board member James Ledbetter said. “And it created some significant credibility issues. So that was surprising and unfortunate.”
Ledbetter said that if the board had known about these issues sooner and had not been misled, they probably would not have engaged in the investigation into Hargrove’s conduct at all.
Also at the Nov. 28 board meeting, the board voted to contract Gail Malay, a former superintendent for the Lake Havasu Unified School District, as an advisor for Gee, who is currently serving as acting superintendent.
Malay will be paid $55 per hour for her consulting services and an additional $27.5 per hour for travel time, not exceeding a total of $10,000.
The process of finding a new MUHSD superintendent will fall to the upcoming board that takes over in a few weeks.
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551, or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
