Hinsdale D86 violated law by suspending Prentiss: State

The attorney general said the board should not have acted in secret. A former board chairman said his successors had acted “hasty and sloppy.”

July 30, 2024, 11:58 a.m. CDT | Updated July 30, 2024, 12:07 PM CDT

HINSDALE, IL – The Hinsdale High School District 86 board violated state law when it suspended the superintendent on May 15, 2023, a state agency found.

In a letter dated Friday, the attorney general’s office responded to a complaint Patch filed a month after the decision to place then-Superintendent Tammy Prentiss on paid administrative leave. Patch argued that the law required the board to conduct the vote in public.

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In the letter, Deputy Attorney General Shannon Barnaby said the committee violated the Open Meetings Act by taking its final action in closed session. The committee also failed to provide the public with the required notice of its planned action against Prentiss.

Barnaby noted that the board held a public vote on the suspension nine days later.

At the time of the vote, the board was advised by attorney Joseph Perkoski of the Chicago-based law firm Robbins Schwartz.

His company defended the closed board meeting, arguing that the board’s original vote did not represent a final decision.

However, Barnaby said the effect of the vote was immediate and thus constituted a final decision. She pointed to previous court rulings – some of which the district’s attorney cited – as precedents showing what a final decision is.

The board announced its decision to suspend Prentiss in a public statement the following day. It also announced that the acting superintendent was Chris Covino, then-assistant superintendent for academics.

Patch also said in his complaint that the board should have publicly voted on Covino’s appointment.

But Barnaby said in her letter that the district had informed the attorney general of the process for appointing an acting superintendent in a “confidential” written response.

Because the response was confidential, the Attorney General could not disclose it, she said.

In his public response to the Attorney General, the district’s attorney wrote, “Dr. Covino assumed the role of acting superintendent by virtue of his position and in accordance with his employment agreement. No steps were taken to select him as acting superintendent.”

Barnaby found no violation of the Open Meetings Act in Covino’s appointment. Nine days after Covino took the helm, the board publicly voted to make the appointment official.

Six of the seven current board members did not respond to Patch’s emailed request for comment on the attorney general’s letter on Monday. Member Jeff Waters acknowledged the request but declined to comment.

The May 15, 2023 meeting took place twelve days after a new board majority took power. At the same meeting, the board hired Robbins Schwartz to help oust Prentiss. Invoices show that the firm received $457 to prepare for the May 15, 2023 meeting before it was officially hired.

At the end of June 2023, the board made a deal with Prentiss. She agreed to leave in exchange for an additional annual salary of $277,000. She is now retired and receives a pension of $19,000 a month.

The majority of the old school board supported Prentiss. When asked about the attorney general’s decision on Monday, former school board chairman Erik Held said it was the expected outcome.

“The brief five-member board majority that came into being in May 2023 existed for one purpose only: to fire Tammy Prentiss,” Held said in an email. “Compliance with the rules was not a requirement.”

Held said it was irrelevant to the new board that there was a valid contract with the superintendent or that an investigation into Prentiss’s dealings with an anti-racism consultant found no misconduct that would warrant firing. (The district spent nearly $40,000 on the investigation, but both the old and new boards have refused to release the report.)

“The board acted hastily and sloppily, took shortcuts and ignored all prior legal advice (from the former law firm Hodges Loizzi) just to avoid having to work with someone they personally disliked,” Held said.