At last night’s school board meeting, school board directors and the Seattle school district’s executive administrators (including Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson) gave their annual disclosure of affiliations with other organizations.
If you were holding your breath for Goodloe-Johnson to spill her deepest, darkest secrets, then too bad. She did, however, disclose that she’s a board director for Alliance for Education and Council for Great City Schools, information that had not appeared in her 2010 annual disclosure statement, and which led to an ethics complaint being filed by local blogger and education activist Charlie Mas. Mas wrote on his blog Dec. 29, 2010 that he had filed a written complaint with the district’s Ethics Officer Noel Treat that MGJ’s non-disclosure of her relationship with organizations the district conducted business with was a conflict of interest and a violation of the district’s ethics policy
Yesterday, Goodloe-Johnson announced that she’s a board director for Alliance for Education and Council for Great City Schools, neither of which reveal a conflict of interest. The district’s memorandum of understanding with the Alliance states that the superintendent will hold a position on the board. The Seattle school district is a member of the Council for Great City Schools and its board of directors includes the superintendent from each of the 65 member districts.
So just how serious is MGJ’s failure to disclose her positions on these boards last year? We’ll probably have to wait for the ethics complaint to come to the school board before we can find out.
Last fall Goodloe-Johnson resigned from the board of directors of the Northwest Evaluation Association—which entered into a contract with SPS to sell them the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) software—amid criticisms of conflict of interest. Parents are still sore about the fact that she forgot to disclose her relationship with the board until after the deal was sealed.