The Park City School District turned the last page on a fraught chapter when it RIFFed the chief operating officer position, rather neatly resolving a “personnel matter.”I’m impressed and a little surprised, considering the real mess they had on their hands in 2024. In the first quarter of 202 5, the school board made just the right hire for superintendent, and she set a new course for the district while delicately managing the last vestige of a difficult era. I think this bodes well.   The Park City Follies around this time a year ago were withering, but not wrong, mocking then-Superintendent Jill Gildea, who at least metaphorically had locked herself in a bunker; then-Board of Education President Andrew Caplan, who mistook himself for emperor; a civil rights case splotched with unmitigated abuse among students; toxic soil left near children for way too long; iffy management at best of construction projects that seemed to make a habit of missed deadlines and incomplete paperwork.And the real “fun” hadn’t even begun.Soon the school board president, the vice president and another board member quit their campaigns for reelection in quick succession. Soon after that, the president declared that the board would renew the embattled superintendent’s contract, which is exactly what the lame duck majority did over the wishes of the two incumbents who would remain, the candidates for the positions the lame ducks were leaving, and pretty much everyone else with an interest in how the school district fares.Mysteriously, the superintendent’s new contract sweetened a bit without discussion before that vote. But then, the board under Caplan didn’t entertain much open discussion about anything that I could tell. There may not be a more hostile, dissembling and generally unhelpful local board majority, administration or communications team on balance than at the Park City School District last year.Diagnostically speaking, it made covering them frustrating, sure, but also way more fun. When reporters can’t get a story straight up from a forthright and honest leadership, they have to go deeper into the fabric, let’s say. I’ve always found the best work coming from such challenges, and that’s where reporter Brock Marchant, now with The Salt Lake Tribune, did his best, I thought.The superintendent, it turned out, very understandably had been looking for a new job, even if not informing the board violated her contract. The lame ducks rammed through her sweetened contract renewal in August, and she told them a week later she was retiring while she was the only candidate left for another job in Colorado, which she soon took.  The lame ducks’ reasoning for renewing the contract against pretty much everyone’s wishes was they were doing a green new board a favor, like it or not. I’m not claiming they made any sense, and anyway that bit of amateur Machiavellia or whatever blew up soon enough.  Let me just say bravo, by the way, to the new school board for not wasting time this year in choosing Lyndsay Huntsman for the role, exactly the right person with exactly the right attributes for the mission right now. I liked the interim, Caleb Fine, well enough, too, cast in an impossible position last fall with that board in that environment.By then, things had gotten stranger. With Gildea gone, employees in the administrative offices began to quietly share more information, including about a COO who maybe spent as much or more time working in Illinois than Park City, who claimed publicly as late as last July he was in the Air Force Reserves but maybe wasn’t, who had documented permission from the superintendent who created his position and had worked with him before to work remotely in part based on his supposed service in the reserves.Reports floated up of intimidation, confrontational meetings, taking advantage of his position to store and service private vehicles at the district’s bus garage, missing some important events, and possibly more blame than entirely merited for screwups with construction projects and toxic soil mitigation. This is hard to sort through, and the results of an investigation the district launched that would clear so much up have not been shared with the public. At least not so far.Finally, freelance writer Michelle Deininger reported on some of this. Her story’s facts matched the documents, and she had cultivated first-hand sources — the anonymous ones fearing retaliation were known to us and willing to speak in court if it came to that. Her questions were not complicated.I can say it now, but she overcame a lot: refusals to answer, partial answers and what I’d define technically as weasel talk from the school district leadership of the time, all intended to throw her off, I believe. We’re still not getting answers to some basic questions I think qualify as public record, but the tone is much different now.Then it was all duck and dodge. Now it seems more designed to thread a legal needle while letting a problematic COO, the last of the mess, go as gracefully, non-litigiously and least expensively as they can manage. That’s understandable.  In the immediate wake of the story in November, the previous school board president in a remarkable board session taunted the press, shouted down a mom asking about the story during public comment, and crowed about how the lawyers would come for The Park Record.Tellingly to me, the district never reached out to correct errors or to clarify information they thought misleading. Our aim always is to get a story right, especially a tougher story with many facts and documents difficult to unearth, and key sources who treat us as adversaries. We welcome feedback in the interest of facts that might need correction or clarification. I know we’re far from perfect.We did receive a demand letter several weeks later from attorneys who said they represented the school district and would happily sue us if we didn’t retract everything we’d written. The problem was we had the documentation they claimed we didn’t have, talked in depth with the sources they said we hadn’t consulted, claiming we’d misquoted some we’d double checked, and the letter itself was riddled with obvious mistakes.There was nothing to respond to, simply put. It had the feel of a football game when a team tries to draw the other off-sides on fourth down. We didn’t bite, the full board in executive session recognized they didn’t have a case, and what I surmise was an embarrassed school board president quietly let the clock run out on his tenure from there.We accomplished a difficult job. But that’s simply what we are supposed to do. I don’t feel any great triumph beyond the work itself, although I do think the community is in a little better place with respect to education and the leadership of the district. The experience should make us a better paper, as well.I’m also mindful that the same people who I think frankly stayed too long were brilliant during COVID, and the district did as excellent a job as any in the country in weathering the pandemic from the standpoint of education. That bears recognition, too, even with the messy ending.The current leadership surely will trip up a time or two, and we’ll surely bump heads in coverage, and surely we’ll get things wrong sometimes, too. That’s the nature of our respective callings. This is where willingness to learn together from the inevitable lessons to come and having the heart for doing right by the community matters. In that, I see the school district today on a good path, thankfully.Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@parkrecord.com or (970) 376-0745.The post Journalism Matters: Park City School District clears a mess swiftly appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less