Des Moines School Board the Issue, Not Sebring’s Sexual Emails

Regardless if you were horrified, humored, sickened, disappointed or saddened by former Des Moines Schools superintendent Nancy Sebring’s salacious emails, don’t let the steam heat distract you from the worst of what these emails expose, the Des Moines School Board’s blind trust of the superintendent.

Nancy Sebring broke District policy by using school resources both on the clock and off for, let’s call it, juvenile electronic cavorting. Shame on her and, well, ew. Thankfully, she is gone.

The huffing and puffing by suddenly outraged school board members over these sexually explicit emails and how policy was broken with their transmission is a sloppily choreographed dance to avoid the real issue. Strike all of the sad bedroom talk found in these emails and we get a peek into Sebring’s unfettered and selfish leadership. This school board has been a fervent and breathless group of Sebring backers for the last six years, allowing Sebring to operate with little to no oversight.

Even the board’s handling of this matter shows their unwillingness to do the job they were elected to do. According to Teree Caldwell Johnson, the school board president, as soon as she knew the media was about to be given copies of the emails, Sebring resigned. The very next day the board went into closed session to discuss the matter anyway; something I maintain was in violation of Iowa law since Sebring was no longer an employee or being considered for a position. At the conclusion of the meeting the board president made a statement saying Dr. Sebring had decided to resign her position earlier than expected so she could focus on some personal matters – a kind of “there’s nothing dirty goin’ on” riff. We know now that this was not the case.

The board president was protecting Sebring even at the end by trying to downplay the matter. She was hoping this kerfuffle was going to go away for both Sebring and the board’s benefit. It has not and the board president was wrong to mislead the public.

The school board claims it did not want to violate the privacy of a legal personnel matter. Fair enough, but the board president’s statement was a bald face misrepresentation of why the meeting was called and what occurred. A simple, “Dr. Sebring has resigned and we have no further comment” would have sufficed. The board opted for the smoke and mirrors.

The really scurrilous stuff in the emails confirms a pattern of behavior the school board has rigorously denied and, at times, even defended as appropriate. One needs look no further than the charter school to see an example of Sebring’s active support of friends and relatives in Des Moines. Her willingness to dangle a job under her management in Omaha to her six-week lover proves beyond a doubt Sebring felt little shame in using public jobs to reward those who pleased her personally.

The emails also show Sebring was actively involved with the charter school. This had to be plainly obvious to the school board as it was conducting its own ‘thorough’ review of the failing school. If it wasn’t, one should wonder what exactly the board was reviewing.

It comes down to this, Nancy Sebring convinced the school board to edit, pass and strictly follow a governance model that stripped the Des Moines School Board of most of the activities an effective body conducts in order to ensure the public needs are being met.

During the Sebring years the school board became little more than an out-of-touch, disengaged cheerleading squad. Those who should feel the most shame in the wake of the Sebring emails should be the seven people who sit on the school board. The board has many responsibilities. Chief among them, setting policy and ensuring those policies are followed. It is the board’s obligation to hire the superintendent and to provide effective oversight. This board did not and has not for some time.

The seven members of the school board need to stop gasping about their disappointment in Nancy Sebring and look in the mirror. It is time the board was back in charge of our public schools. The governance model used by the Des Moines Public Schools is an unmitigated disaster. Sebring’s sexual dalliances are a passing story. However, if the school board fails to change the way it governs, Des Moines will soon discover something worse may be going on than sex talk on public time.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com 
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register online essay.