First Up: Mike Tiedeman
In October 2006 the Jewell School Board was in a dilemma. Serious allegations were made against their superintendent and principle, John Seeley. The board put him on administrative leave, with pay, as a criminal investigation was conducted. The board then began looking for an interim superintendent/principle to take his place. One person who quickly came to mind was Mike Tiedeman.
Tiedeman was a Jewell alumni with family ties to the area. A Jewell basketball star, still listed as number 58 in the top 100 leading scorers in the state of Oregon, he was recently retired yet still had his teaching and administrative credentials. With an emergency declaration from the Northwest Educational Service District Tiedeman was awarded a one year superintendent credential and, as the first interim to take Seeley’s place, was considered a perfect fit for the temporary position in the Jewell School District.
The Jewell school board at the time consisted of Teri Greenwood, Carrie Thompson, Oly Schockelt, Ann Samuelson and Karl Meier. According to board minutes, the members had been at loggerheads for most of the previous year with the vote on a majority of the major decisions being made at a fractured 3-2 decision. It was hoped that while the investigation of Seeley took place a familiar face in the role of the interim administrator would ease tensions. Tiedeman lasted two and half months.
Mike Tiedeman says he came to Jewell with the intension of staying through the school year or until the Seeley situation was resolved. He encountered a strong faction that supported Seeley. According to news accounts of that period Carolyn Eady indicated to reporter Kara Hansen that she found it hard to believe the charges against John Seeley. Whether or not people supported Seeley did not concern Tiedeman, he was there to run a school until an issue was resolved. What did concern Tiedeman was the fact that there were a lot of uncharacteristic administrative issues happening within the school district.
Tiedeman said that many people were submitting requests for reimbursements without the proper documentation. They weren’t using the purchase order system that was an established board policy. Most troubling of all, according to Tiedeman, was the fact that test scores were staying at the same level or declining when state levels were raising the standards. Statewide assessments are based on student performances on common curriculum standards. Tiedeman asked to see the written curriculum that the teachers were using. A search of several days finally turned up a curriculum dated 1989.
On Tiedeman’s first day of work, Halloween day, on his desk was a form titled Statement of Assurances, from the state of Oregon’s Department of Education. One of the first questions on the form was, “Does your school use a written curriculum?” The answer, according to mandates from the Oregon Department of Education, should be, “Yes,” yet Tiedeman could not answer it affirmatively. In checking over the past years’ forms Tiedeman found that, impossibly, Seeley had answered in the affirmative, yet no written curriculum correlating to the years in which the forms were filed materialized. Furthermore, apparently Seeley had reported to the school board that the school was using a written curriculum. A request for the school board minutes has been submitted by NCO.
To Tiedeman this was a glaring omission of duty to the patrons of school district. Each school district is required by law to have a written curriculum. This assures that the content standards and curriculum goals are the same at all schools and that all students are receiving an equal opportunity to a standard of education. Schools may implement the curriculum in different manners, using different materials but those materials would still be approved by the Oregon Department of Education as being able to provide the student with the ability to obtain the required education for that grade level in order to proceed in an orderly fashion. This makes the transition from one grade to another complete, flowing efficiently and effectively. The teacher knows where the child’s education finished and where the teacher needs to begin it in the next grade.
As the Jewell school district was doing it, when Tiedeman took over, teachers were left to their own devices. Highly competent teachers had to work harder to figure out where the children were at in their learning of subject matter. Teachers didn’t have written curriculums to look at to base their lesson plans on for the group of children coming into their grade and they were unable to adequately prepare their students for the standardized testing required by the state. As the Jewell program “Guaranteed Success” took off, and homework assignments were completed, the mandated testing scores were either stagnate or in decline, showing a dramatic difference between state standards and Jewell students’ skills.
Chillingly, students transferring outside the school district could not be guaranteed that they would be entering a grade with the skills necessary to succeed. The Jewell School District was not taking part in the statewide curriculum updating system and none of its text books had been approved by the state for use. There was no scholastic area in which Jewell was in state compliance, and this worried Tiedeman. In bringing concerns to the board he found that in split three-two votes the majority of the Board did not share his concern in regards to flouting state requirements for public schools.
Tiedeman wondered where else there were anomalies in the administration of the district and asked for the contracts of the staff. In going over these contracts he found one which didn’t follow the format of any of the other contracts. This contract was full of spelling and grammatical errors. He put the employee on administrative leave and called for an executive session at the following board meeting. It was mid-January and the district, as far as Tiedeman could tell, was in a lot more trouble than the Board had realized when he was hired in October. Tiedeman is not allowed to discuss what happened in the executive session. What the public knows, and what has previously been reported, is that the school district’s business manager Patti Drew was placed on administrative leave in January 2007 and her contract was not renewed when it terminated in June. At the end of the meeting in January Tiedeman tendered his resignation. When asked whether that was because the Board elected not to follow his advice in regards to sanctioning or terminating an employee Tiedeman remains silent.
Mike Tiedeman stated that the Jewell School District is on the correct course now. “It takes at least a year to implement the curriculum program that Jerry Jones is now engaged in,” Tiedeman said. “Jewell can’t stop this process midstream and throw someone else in as superintendent. It should be completed and then handed over to the permanent superintendent. Plus, you are not going to have the best people applying for the job if they are walking into a situation where their first task is to put a school district back into state compliance.”
When asked about the conditions when he arrived in October, Tiedeman said, “It was a difficult situation. The transfer to the new school was supposed to take place in February and there was a lot of tension because of the investigation of John Seeley.” Asked if the situation got any easier Tiedeman said not really because the longer he was there the more he found out what was wrong with how the district had been functioning administratively. When asked if the reason he left was the lack of support from the school board Tiedeman was again silent. His only comment on that subject was that the minutes of the school board meetings should be read, going back a few years to see who had voted for what. “You will see how often the vote was three to two and who those three people were that endorsed, or were willing to overlook, unorthodox procedures.” The school board that Mike Tiedeman was referring to consisted of Teri Greenwood, Carrie Thompson, Oly Schockelt, Ann Samuelson and Karl Meier on the other.
Monday: Jim Mabbott, Jewell’s second interim superintendent
Tuesday: Gerald “Jerry” Jones, Jewells’ current interim superintendent
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