Swift Decision

On Sunday, August 6, the Ann Arbor board of education canceled its meeting scheduled for the following Wednesday and called a special meeting for Monday instead. The next day, at a stormy, three-hour meeting, members voted 4–3 to notify superintendent Jeanice Swift of their intent to terminate her contract without cause, and to have the district’s attorneys negotiate a separation agreement.

In an Observer feature in May, then-board president Jacinda Townsend Gides called Swift “an incredible superintendent,” and said that the board’s goal was “to create a situation where Dr. Swift wants to stay.” Teachers union president Fred Klein marveled at her ten-year tenure, the longest in his thirty-three years in the district. Now, just three weeks before the start of school, it was ending.

Swift was silent for most of the meeting, alternately writing notes or watching the trustees furiously debate her fate. By the meeting’s end, Michigan’s 2018 Superintendent of the Year seemed to accept that her departure was inevitable. She announced she was “dedicated to move forward from this evening to a strong transition.”

 “This is what we owe our team, our students, and our families,” Swift said in a voice that cracked with emotion. “I want to believe that that’s the case for the trustees, and I want to believe that we will in good faith work together to ensure a strong transition.”

Swift had started new programs, increased enrollment, and guided the passage of a $1 billion capital bond to rebuild and replace the district’s buildings. In 2020, the board voted 6–1 to extend her contract for another five years. That contract stipulated that Swift would get a lump-sum payment equal to eighteen months’ salary if she was terminated without cause before 2025.

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Former teacher Jeff Gaynor was the only trustee to vote against the contract extension. He said at the time that, “It’s not a statement on Swift’s qualifications. She works incredibly hard.” His objection, he said, was that “the whole [contract] process was out of the public view.”

Yet Gaynor joined Townsend Gides, current president Rima Mohammad, and Ernesto Querijero in voting to remove her. He also endorsed Townsend Gides and Mohammad in last November’s election, but Gaynor rejects any suggestion that he masterminded the removal. He and the trustees he backed didn’t discuss replacing the superintendent at the time, he says. “Never in all of my tenure until very recently had I advocated or talked to anybody else on the board” about that.  

Now, however, the six-year veteran is facing the same criticism he’s leveled at others: acting in secrecy. In an open letter to the board, eleven former trustees denounce the decision as “arbitrary and capricious,” and say that it appears “to have been made, and acted upon, outside of a scheduled Board meeting, in flagrant violation of the Open Meetings Act.”

“Unequivocally it did not,” Gaynor responds. “We were advised by Mr. Comsa [the schools’ former attorney, now in private practice] at every step to make sure we were doing things properly.”

Gaynor says that Mohammad, the board president, “informed me that there was sentiment among several members of the board to start a process by which a discussion and decision about Dr. Swift’s tenure would happen … I believe President Mohammad asked Mr. Comsa to inform Dr. Swift this process was starting. Dave advised us to have a prompt public meeting to ensure that there was no suspicion that we were not following the Open Meetings Act.”

Gaynor reaffirms his high opinion of the superintendent’s ability and commitment. “She’s an incredibly dedicated professional, who’s given her heart and soul to this district.” But while he says he hadn’t made “the final decision” on her removal in mid-August, Gaynor has “lost trust and confidence that she is the best person for this job at this point.”

Asked why he lost confidence, he points to a Facebook post he made a week after the meeting. There, he criticizes Swift’s “overly top-down decision making,” which, he writes, “has only increased over time, and especially since 2020.”

Gaynor writes that “In the past, trustees freely visited schools and spoke freely with staff. Last year I was discouraged from visiting schools, and was admonished by Dr. Swift at times when I did. I was told I was creating liability for the district when I simply listened to concerns from teachers.” In the post, he adds that “teachers and staff are more fearful to speak up than ever [and] have not been engaged in important decisions.”

That criticism, too, can cut both ways. In an open letter to the board, six schools’ unions representing 2,000 employees write that “The two tenured Trustees [Gaynor and Querijero] who supported this action have often criticized the administration for allegedly ‘failing to listen to teachers’ yet moved forward with this major decision without contacting the teachers, principals or other employee groups.”

Calling the decision “appalling” and “egregious,” the unions predict that it “will have a long-lasting negative impact on our entire community.” And like the trustees, they charge that “the last-minute decision to hold a meeting on Monday, August 7 was not transparent and gave the appearance that a last minute, backroom deal was made.”

In phone and email interviews, Gaynor, Mohammad, and Townsend Gides all deny that. Querijero declined to be interviewed.

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In late July, the Detroit Free Press ran a front-page story about a December 2021 assault on a special needs student by a school bus aide. The district had been very slow to respond and the child’s mother is suing, alleging that the assault had been covered up.

At the early August meeting, four parents criticized what they said was Swift’s lack of transparency about the incident, and before the meeting, ninety-seven parents sent a letter calling for Swift to resign over it.

Gaynor says the story was “a catalyst” for the vote, but that “trustees were forming their views [about replacing Swift] for other reasons” long before the story broke. Over the summer, “I talked to two trustees [who said] ‘we think we may have the numbers to do so.’

“I was as shocked and surprised as everybody else,” he says. “I always thought that even with all my disagreements with Dr. Swift, that if the board could come together and direct her, she would follow our directives.”

But the board didn’t come together. After the 2022 election, which returned twenty-year veteran Susan Baskett and added newcomers Mohammad, Townsend Gides, and Susan Ward Schmidt, it took fifteen ballots to elect Townsend Gides president. Approving the board calendar also dragged on much longer than usual. And that was before the 4–3 vote to remove, which saw Baskett, Schmidt, and Krystle DuPree on the losing side.

At the meeting, Baskett sharply criticized the decision. Schmidt told the Observer she would be sharing her thoughts at a future  meeting, while BridgeMI.com reported that DuPree said “she voted against the two measures because she wanted more time to hear from community members.”

The public got only one day’s notice about the special meeting. A rumor among parents says that it was called because Townsend Gides was going on vacation right afterward.

“Everybody was on vacation,” Townsend Gides responds. “It was kind of the only day that all of us were still in town.”

Gaynor says the big reason was “our next scheduled meeting was on the 23rd and if we were to pass a pre-termination notice [then], there could be no action [to fire her] for two weeks.” Once a majority of the board lost confidence in the superintendent, he saw no reason to wait. 

Townsend Gides stepped down from the board’s presidency in July, citing a fall book tour and a new job at Brown University. Another rumor says the board moved when it did because Townsend Gides will soon quit the board altogether and move to Rhode Island.

Townsend Gides says she’s not leaving town, or the board. “The plan has always been that I was going to commute,” she says. “It’s actually an astonishingly cheap flight from Boston to Detroit.”

Townsend Gides and Mohammad ran as part of a slate that was critical of the schools’ handling of the pandemic. “The community was screaming that it needed schools to return to in-person [teaching],” said Townsend Gides at the time. “Those voices weren’t being heard.” She added that “the pandemic is an example of why we need a board that maybe asks more questions.”

“There was that lack of transparency,” said Mohammad before the election. “The pandemic has brought to light many opportunities and gaps and opportunity gaps and inequities in our district.” Asked what she’d do about it, she said she wouldn’t do anything because “I don’t have enough information right now.”

Asked what she’s learned since that led her to conclude that Swift had to go, Mohammad responds with an emailed statement. “I am currently limited to what I can say,” she writes. But “I do believe that to truly address inequities, academic achievement and resource gaps, special education services, mental health crises and other crises that have worsened over time, new leadership is needed.”

Mohammad writes that due to the litigation, she can’t comment “regarding the bus/child abuse situation.” But Townsend Gides says it’s “one of the more shocking instances of a phenomenon I’ve heard on the board for six months.” She calls it “sweeping things under the rug” and says it works because “there’s a culture of bullying people into silence in this district.”

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Former trustee Andy Thomas, one of the letter signers, thinks the incident provided “a very incendiary and high-profile excuse for [the anti-Swift trustees] to do what they wanted to do anyway.”

 He says Mohammad met with Swift “at least a week before the actual board meeting and advised her that there were four votes to get her out and that the board would prefer if she would resign and leave quietly.”

Mohammad didn’t say whether she met with Swift, but calls Thomas’s account “inappropriate and false … There was no counting of the votes or any action or outcome prior to the meeting.”

Swift is also silent, emailing that “We need to leave these matters to our capable attorneys.” Thomas says she played no role in the letter, but “she of course was happy to hear [about it] and felt supported.”

Former board president Bryan Johnson, another signer, knew the showdown was coming because “Dr. Swift reached out to me.” He says she told him that Comsa, the former AAPS attorney, told her that he “has been instructed to negotiate my exit.”

“It was a shock to her,” Johnson says. “She’d never received any notice that this was going to happen.” She had previously received only positive reviews, and was scheduled for another later that month.

Johnson believes removing the superintendent will have a huge negative impact on students, teachers, and administration. “It just crushes morale,” he says. “Imagine if one day the CEO of a company is fired and there is zero succession plan, nobody knows who’s going to take over.”

“It’s been alleged that [removing Swift] would do great harm,” says Gaynor. “Dr. Swift does a lot. She works hard. But she’s also surrounded by a staff that does the actual work. And they are in place, and I trust that everybody will be professional and do their jobs.”

Mohammad writes that the board is “working together with Dr. Swift for a smooth transition.” Gaynor hopes that “everybody does what they need to do to get ready and prepare [for the new school year] and carries on. And there’s no more than a hiccup and that we can focus on teaching and learning.”

Thomas doubts it’s possible, and describes the situation as “a total clusterfuck.” Between the two-week intent-to-terminate notice and the thirty-day separation negotiations, he says, in mid-August he had “absolutely no idea” how Swift’s final chapter might play out. Gaynor and Johnson didn’t either. Neither did Townsend Gides: “That’s like asking, ‘When will the wildfires end in Canada?’”

The notice gave Swift an opportunity to defend herself before a decision to terminate was made. She was expected to do that at a board meeting as the Observer went to press.

Thomas predicted “fireworks”—but nothing that would change the outcome. “We all realize that one way or another, Dr. Swift is going to be leaving by the end of the year, if for no other reason than that she obviously cannot have a good working relationship with this board.”

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Thomas believes that terminating Swift without cause will “make it very difficult to recruit a new superintendent of any standing. And since the pandemic, the pool of potential superintendent candidates is not very deep.”

Gaynor believes it will take “a year” to find a replacement and agrees it will be hard, though for a different reason. “The turmoil that’s being created [by Swift’s defenders] will not help. But ultimately Ann Arbor’s a good city to work in. It’s not an easy city to work in, obviously … The board bears some responsibility for what is or isn’t happening, because personality conflicts have overtaken effective discussions and governance.”

There’s a precedent for newly elected representatives abruptly removing an appointed manager. In 2020, a new city council majority fired Ann Arbor city administrator Howard Lazarus.

The councilmembers who voted to remove him all lost their seats in the next elections. Does that worry Gaynor?

“I don’t care about the election,” he says. “I announced a week after I was elected I’m not running again.”

Asked if she’ll run again, Mohammad declines to reply. But Townsend Gides responds instantly. “Absolutely not!” and laughs. “The dynamics here are such that I just do not wish to be a part of it again!”