You wouldn’t suspect it strolling through its quaint, historic downtown, but Cedarburg is split in two. The fault line is a school district where 67 of 230 teachers have left in the last two years, including 41 retirees and 26 who resigned.
“You’ve got a mass exodus. The district is in a terrible situation,” says Pat Connolly, director of North Shore United Educators, a union group.
In recent years, an embattled superintendent, a politicized school board and pricey legal disputes have pushed Cedarburg into the headlines.
School officials downplay the problems, saying the district is hiring great replacement teachers. “We’ve never done better,” says Vice President Pat McComis. Superintendent Daryl Herrick cites high ACT and standardized test scores.
The alternately respected and reviled superintendent was a football star at UW-River Falls who signed a contract with the Cleveland Browns but ended up in the minor leagues for a decade. Herrick went on to get his doctorate while gradually rising from a teacher at Hamilton-Sussex to Cedarburg superintendent in 2001.
In 2004, the teachers’ union voted no-confidence in him, with only 5 percent of teachers calling Herrick trusted as union leaders charged him with fostering hostilities and wasting funds. Herrick and board leaders called this a union tactic by teachers miffed over unmet salary demands.
But money is not the main issue, say critics like Darci Ketter, a nationally certified teacher who took a job in another district last year after spending 13 in Cedarburg. “I saw good people dragged through the mud, and it made me sick,” she says.
Herrick first upset teachers in 2001 when he led the board in spending $1.5 million on a new field house after it had rejected a union salary demand. The district had surveyed 7,000 Cedarburg households in 2000, and two-thirds of respondents ranked the field house as a low priority.
In 2003, Herrick tried to remove the popular high school principal, Jay Grieger, who had been well-regarded by previous administrations. “The majority of the board felt there was unlikely to be a case against Mr. Grieger,” says Phil Vollrath, then a board member.
On May 1, 2003, the board held a marathon public hearing lasting from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m. Herrick hired an outside attorney (which cost the district more than $67,000) to help prove Grieger had failed to complete many teacher evaluations. Teachers disputed the allegations, and Grieger brought a stack of completed evaluations to the hearing, testifying they had been provided to the administration but not included in its totals. The board voted by a slim margin to give the principal a one-year extension.
Herrick and the board also targeted Ben Siebert, a teacher and basketball coach whose zero-tolerance alcohol policy angered parents of children kicked off the team. The board voted to not renew Siebert’s coaching contract after a closed-door meeting but later paid him $10,000 to avoid a lawsuit.
But no dispute triggered more headlines than Herrick’s push to ax Robert Zellner, a respected teacher, a vocal opponent of Herrick and the union president during the no-confidence vote.
Zellner admitted to viewing adult pornography on a school computer, but a state arbitrator ruled the firing was unjustified, accusing Herrick of misleading board members with “inflammatory” information. The board backed Herrick and has appealed the ruling.
District legal costs have exploded due to personnel problems. Between June 2004 and July 2006, the district paid about $350,000 in hourly fees to attorneys. That’s an average of more than two hours per day, every day. The business office has budgeted $200,000 for legal expenses in 2006-2007.
Three board leaders are up for reelection in April, and Dan Carr, an organizer of a successful recall election in 2004, intends to run for a position. The recall arose when the divided community voted to remove two board members following the Siebert and Grieger controversies.
Meanwhile, teachers continue to leave. Longtime English Chair Richard Cass says he felt disrespected by the administration and decided to quit in 2006, adding, “I left much earlier than I had envisioned.”
