It’s rarely – if ever – a good thing when a public board decides to conduct the business of the people it serves without any input or scrutiny.
The Yazoo City Municipal School District board recently took the unbelievable step of hiring a new superintendent during a special call meeting. Unless you happened to be inspecting the door they taped a public notice to, there was no way of knowing that this meeting was taking place.
Now if we would have known we needed to be inspecting a door every day, we’d have done it, but recent history suggested the public would be involved in the process. When the board hired the previous superintendent, Dr. Darrin Edwards, there were publicized opportunities to meet the man who was being considered to lead our city’s school district before he was even officially offered the job.
This time the board went in a very different direction, meeting the bare minimum legal requirement for holding a public meeting. Some of the current board members complained about this kind of attempt to hold meetings and let this newspaper know about it when previous board members tried to do the same thing.
In fact, during the last public meeting that we attended the current board claimed the search would continue and the position would even be advertised in this newspaper so all qualified candidates could apply.
So the question is, what is it that the board doesn’t want us asking questions about? What are they trying to hide?
Maybe it’s the fact that Yazoo City’s new superintendent was just about run out of town when he was in Natchez.
Yazoo City’s new Superintendent Frederick Hill was found guilty by a federal jury of creating a racially hostile work environment during his tenure as superintendent in Adams County. The jury was a majority black jury ruling in favor of white plaintiffs.
That led to him being fired, but it certainly wasn’t the beginning of the controversy. In 2014 nearly 100 Adams County residents protested outside the school district’s administrative building chanting “Hill must go!” Photos of the protest published in the Natchez Democrat showed black and white residents protesting side by side. The president of the Natchez NAACP was among those collecting signatures calling for Hill’s removal, and he was quoted as saying he was glad to see a diverse group uniting in favor of Hill’s removal.
Adams County has similar history to Yazoo City’s school system. It was once a proud district, and now it’s failing. My wife graduated from Natchez High School, and now she’s sad to see what became of the school system she once loved.
Don’t take my word for the questions concerning Mr. Hill’s past. A quick internet search will reveal numerous news articles. Surely our school board members knew that someone would bother to do some research. Or maybe they failed to do any research themselves.
The bottom line is that there are some serious questions about Mr. Hill’s fitness to serve as Yazoo City’s superintendent.
Maybe Mr. Hill has good answers to all of these questions.
Maybe he’s learned from his mistakes, and he’s put the past behind him. Maybe he made a convincing argument to Yazoo City’s school board that they should overlook his recent performance and have faith that he can save our failing school district.
Hopefully our school leaders will find the courage to answer those questions.
We’ll be watching for a note quietly taped to the door in case they decide to call a special meeting.
