Christopher Peak File Photos
Penn (left). Goldson (right).
The New Haven Board of Education is going back to marriage counseling.
That development comes as part of the resolution of months of simmering conflict over a hostile work complaint against board member Darnell Goldson filed by New Haven Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Phillip Penn.
The board finally hashed out all the details of the investigation into Goldson’s behavior at a four-hour-long special meeting on Thursday evening.
“Let’s put this thing behind us, so the board can be going in another direction. It’s in the way of what we need to be doing for students, for our food services, in opening up schools. It’s just taking too much time,” said board member Larry Conaway.
Penn requested the investigation in March after Goldson implied that he and then-Chief Operating Officer Michael Pinto were favoring white contractors.
Superintendent Iline Tracey contacted the law firm Tinley, Renehen & Dost in June. The law firm eventually decided that Goldson’s position did not fall under usual employment laws and was instead governed by board bylaws. The investigation found that Goldson’s statements were not true, that he likely knew they were not true and that he violated a few board bylaws on orderly and respectful discussions.
Goldson maintained that the investigation itself should not have happened and threatened to sue. The board got an opinion from another attorney, Thomas Mooney of Shipman & Goodwin LLP. Mooney opined that Tracey was required to investigate her employee’s complaint of harassment. However, his analysis was that such investigations should stop at state and federal laws on workplace harassment — not go into whether a board member violated board bylaws. Goldson also argued he was asking fair questions about race and hiring.
Goldson proposed a slew of actions to take based on the two legal reports to varying success. He won support to take the Tinley, Renehen & Dost report off the Board of Education website if that is legally allowed. If not allowed, Mooney’s opinion and the response to the investigation by Goldson’s lawyer would get attached to the Tinley, Renehen & Dost report. Goldson argued that the investigation document was flawed and left out key pieces of evidence, so the public would get incorrect information with just the one document.
Read the investigation here and its attachments here. Read Goldson’s response here, and read Mooney’s opinion here.
Board member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur supported taking the investigation off the website, saying it was increasing conflict on the board. She urged the board and school administration to be careful before launching such a thing again.
“Investigations of private citizens are slippery slopes. They create anxiety not just for the persons being investigated but for people serving in the same position — will I be investigated for speaking my opinion as a person of color? There are a lot of things I have spoken up about that did not seem equitable,” Jackson-McArthur said.
“There was another way to go about this. You might not like how Darnell delivers things, but a lot of times he’s speaking up for people who cannot speak for themselves,” she continued.
Board President Yesenia Rivera voted to keep the single document up.
“This could have been easily resolved with a quick apology to Mr. Penn and Mr. Pinto,” Rivera said.
Goldson said that no one asked him to apologize before launching the investigation and that he had asked for apologies before that had gone unanswered.
“I’m not going to apologize for my advocacy for my community,” he said.
Goldson eventually withdrew his motion that the board pay for his lawyer fees and said he would seek those fees through the usual channels. He also failed to win support to remove Elia Alexiades as the attorney from the city’s legal office who helps the school board. He said that half of the board does not trust Alexiades, because his advice often seems to favor Rivera’s side of the board’s 4 – 3 divide.
School board and staff at Adriana’s Restaurant.
The night ended in a 6 – 1 vote to pursue training on board bylaws and board members’ responsibilities to one another. The board has gone on two prior such retreats, once in 2016 and a less formal version (at Adriana’s restaurant, pictured above) in 2019.
“We have to prove to the public that we’re willing to follow our bylaws and that whenever we raise issues, it is out of a request for information or because we have a basis for that information,” said board member Ed Joyner. “If we’re going to move forward, we’re going to have to win the confidence of the people we represent.”
Goldson opposed the retreat because he said that the motion was as much of a “blank check” as requests he had made earlier in the evening that were turned down.
Click below to watch the meeting.