In June, Park City School District Board President Andrew Caplan went on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” and announced he and the board intended to renew Superintendent Jill Gildea’s next two-year contract in August.
Now, the Aug. 20 meeting at which a vote would take place is less than a week away, though a clear majority of people who will be on the school board next year have declared they want to be the ones to decide.
Caplan and the two other incumbent board members whose terms end in December have withdrawn their candidacies for reelection. Yet Wendy Crossland and Anne Peters could join with the school board president to form a majority and pass the contract renewal anyway. Neither has spoken publicly about their intent.
Board members Meredith Reed and Nicholas Hill, who will be on the board in 2025, have made their positions clear against voting now, however.
Candidates Eileen Gallagher, Danny Glasser and Susan Goldberg have said they want to make this decision next year as well. Candidate Kathleen Britton, running against Glasser for District 3, hasn’t taken a public position.
Ten days after Caplan’s comments, residents Josh Mann and Karl Persson started a petition on Change.org asking the others on the board not to go along with Caplan’s plans to renew.
While no one besides Caplan has publicly supported renewing Gildea’s contract now, there are arguments to support doing so.
Leadership continuity while the school board turns over three of five positions is one.
Another is giving the superintendent enough time for the district to right the wrongs addressed last spring in a federal civil rights investigative report on incidences of student bullying and flaws in how administrators handled those. The district has taken numerous steps since then with the aim of improvement.
And there is a tight time frame after the new board begins in January. According to the terms of Gildea’s contract, the school board must notify her by Feb. 1, 2025, if her next contract will not automatically continue for two more years that July 1.
A possible wrinkle can be found in state law: Utah Code 53G-4-301 says, “A local school board that appoints a superintendent in accordance with this section may not, on or after May 10, 2011, enter into an employment contract that contains an automatic renewal provision with the superintendent.”
The Utah Attorney General’s Office did not respond by press time to requests for comment about the code.
Since Gildea was hired in 2018, the district was tested through the pandemic and has achieved high academic success. Park City High School was ranked as Utah’s fifth best according to U.S. News & World Report, and the College Board put the district on its honor roll for allowing traditionally underrepresented and low-income students access to Advanced Placement courses.
In recent years it also has faced a slew of issues, including illegally stored toxic dirt in violation of a covenant with the Environmental Protection Agency, 180 cases of student-to-student harassment that the district didn’t entirely resolve to legal standards, and a state audit in fall 2023 showing the district lacked in its assistance to students who qualify for federal assistance.
Gildea has been the highest-paid superintendent in the state each year since she was hired, as well.
When she started in 2018, she was guaranteed a base pay of $235,000 a year before any benefits, which included a place to live within the district and a vehicle, clauses that aren’t uncommon for superintendents in ski towns.
In 2019, she signed a contract with the district that increased the compensation to $246,750. In 2020, that rose to $257,854. In 2021: $263,654. 2022: $269,566. And 2023: $275,631.
Her 2018 contract also stipulated that if it hit its expiration date in 2020 without the board having taken any action to renew, the agreement would end. In the 2023 agreement, it’s stated that if the board doesn’t take any intent to renew and doesn’t notify Gildea that they intend to end their agreement, it is automatically renewed.
As Gildea’s pay has grown, enrollment in the district has steadily shrunk. In the 2018-19 school year, there were 4,816 enrolled students. Last year, there were 4,246.
The district had yet to post an agenda Friday afternoon for the Tuesday, Aug. 20, meeting. It will begin at 3 p.m. at the district building with a work session. Public comment is scheduled for 5 p.m.. Comments can also be emailed to communication@pcschools.us by 2 p.m. on the day of the meeting.