Re “The Myrna Coté Factor in Gourley’s Departure”
When Steve Gourley leaves the School Board a few weeks after next November’s election, he will be most keenly missed for the plain talk he was guilty of many days during his only term in office.
Just as he did on the City Council in the last century.
When Supt. Myrna Rivera Coté resigned/disappeared practically overnight last spring with a wooden handshake and a mumble that sounded like something you would choke out at your ex-wife’s funeral, relieved members of the School Board only rolled their eyes after everyone was out of sight.
It has been left for the always-candid Mr. Gourley to roll out unappetizing details nearly a year later, after announcing he is declining to run for re-election in a campaign where he likely would prevail.
“Having to serve for 2½ years with Myrna Rivera Coté challenged me,” Mr. Gourley said, saltily. “She wouldn’t do anything we told her to do, and then she deliberately went out and did things that we told her not to do.”
What recourse did you have?
“As President of the School Board at the time, I got to put together the evaluations of the other four members of the Superintendent.
“According to this nice little chart that they gave us, we all were to write down lines like “Exceeds Expectations,” “Doesn’t Meet Expectations,” “Outstanding,” all that stuff. The year prior to that, when I think Jessica Beagles-Roos was Board President, for whatever reason Myrna was given a Better-than-acceptable, Higher-than-average rating.
“That meant, according to the contract that she wrote and she negotiated, that she got another year on her three-year contract. I think it’s called an evergreen contract.
“You have got to be crazy to sign one of those. Or desperate.”
You mean crazy to approve such a contract?
“As a School District, you have to be crazy to give one of those. But the contract had been given before Scott Zeidman and I had been elected to the Board. It meant, basically, that no one elected to the Board after the Board hired Myrna really had any say in whether she got fired or not.
“Because if you gave her an ‘unacceptable’ rating, she still had three more years on her contract.”
She was unfirable?
“Basically.
‘Well, you could pay, I think it was 18 months of severance, this and that, and given her all of her vacation and everything else.”
Who wrote her contract?
“I am not aware of any counsel who wrote it for her. I think she wrote it herself. The bizarre part to me was that the prior School Board was well-intentioned, but they didn’t hire an attorney to review it.
“So there we were with this untenable contract with this woman who could thumb her nose at us, and then we would have to pay her for 18 months of doing nothing if she wanted out, pay all of her medical, her vacation time and everything else.”
Lifetime medical benefits?
“No, just for the time we fired her until she got a job somewhere else. The point is, you really want to get out there and find a new job after you have been fired. But if she didn’t, and she wanted to take a year off, she could have done it easily.”
(To be continued)
