ERIE, Pennsylvania — Late Wednesday evening, the Millcreek Township School District in Erie County issued a statement noting they may file claims against Ian Roberts and the search firm used during his hiring process, saying they “were incensed by the progression of media reports that have been revealed in recent days regarding former Superintendent Ian Roberts.”
The school said it plans to hold the individuals who “misled” the district accountable, saying it has directed solicitors to get Robert’s documents for employment verification to determine whether the district can “aggressively pursue” action.
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The school board said they were already looking into potential litigation against Ray & Associates, the search firm hired to find a superintendent. An email request was sent to the Minneapolis-based recruiting firm, which has a Pittsburgh-based regional recruiter. As of the deadline, that request was not answered.
In interviews with parents of children in the Millcreek district, they expressed frustration and concern that someone who had not been properly scrutinized was hired to run the district, beginning with his academic credentials. Records have surfaced through reporting by the Des Moines Register that Roberts never received a doctoral degree from Morgan State University, as he claimed.
It is one of several allegations that have surfaced in the past week since Roberts was arrested by ICE last Friday.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has 500 school districts that range in size from 200 to over 140,000 students spread out across 67 counties, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Their pay range from the highest for the Philadelphia school district, which as of 2024 was $340,000, to the lowest for the Philipsburg-Osceola Area School District in Clearfield County at $40,500, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
The common process for school districts in the state, large or small, is the hiring of an executive search firm specializing in educational searches to run the initial vetting of the candidate. The school districts trust that they do all the searches. However, it is on the school district for not verifying that the search firm has done the verification.
Unfortunately, not verifying happens all too frequently.
A professional familiar with the lax oversight said they’ve seen superintendents getting fired from one district before a new district would hire them without knowledge of the firing.
Since COVID, parents have taken a more skeptical view of school boards, educators, and teachers unions as their children have been affected by shutdowns, poor educational performance, and restroom policies. Improper vetting of someone overseeing the education of thousands of children isn’t a political point of view, but a legitimate parental concern.
School boards hire superintendents to oversee the day-to-day operation of a school district. One of the most important things they do is oversee educational policies.
School boards also fire them, sometimes because of poor vetting, other times over misconduct or clashes over district performance.
When Roberts left Millcreek Township for Des Moines, his former assistant supervisor gave a glowing interview about him, just days after the board approved a $250,000 settlement to the former director of human resources related to a personal complaint directed at Roberts.
Millcreek Township assistant superintendent Trevor Murdock told the Des Moines Register that Roberts’s time at the district has been marked by a “relentless commitment to diversity and inclusion” for all students.
It is worth pausing to consider several Western Pennsylvania cases of superintendents who have left “without cause” or been fired or found themselves working once again in a county away. This includes the recent resignation of Pittsburgh School District Anthony Hamlet, who got off to a rough start even before his first day, with accusations that he exaggerated in his resume.
In May of 1996, Dr. John Ross was initially suspended as the superintendent of the New Brighton School District in Beaver County. No public explanation was ever given. Ross retired later that year.
The man promoted by the New Brighton School board to take his place, Robert Dinnen, also resigned abruptly two years later after the state Department of Education later tried to annul the certificate, saying it had been issued in error.
At the time, a Department of Education official said Dinnen’s teaching experience did not meet state requirements for the certificate. Dennis, according to local reports, continued to fight to keep his certification while seeking to accumulate enough teaching hours to meet the state requirements.
Months later, the Fort Cherry School District hired Dinnen as the substitute school superintendent in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Dinnen then served 18 years as the Fort Cherry School District’s superintendent, retiring in 2014.
In 2016, even before he walked into his first day as the Pittsburgh Public School District superintendent, Anthony Hamlet was found to have used words on his resume without attribution during his first news conference after the nine-member Pittsburgh Public Schools hired him. Local news coverage noted that the district’s code of conduct lists plagiarism among the most serious academic infractions.
Hamlet also admitted he fudged one detail in the five-page resume. The discrepancies came to notice when his hometown newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, reported that he exaggerated figures about his accomplishments leading the Palm Beach County schools. According the figures from the state cited in the report, schools did improve, but not at the rate Hamlet claimed in his initial resume given to reporters the day the Pittsburgh school board unanimously confirmed his appointment.
The Pittsburgh school board was heavily criticized at the time for using an untested consulting firm, Connecticut-based Perkins Consulting, to conduct the search.
In 2022, the Woodland Hills School Board in Allegheny County voted to hire Daniel Castagna as its acting superintendent. Castagna was a controversial candidate who was fired from his previous superintendent job at West Mifflin area schools in 2016 after two DUI arrests, a charge he vehemently denied at the time.
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Six months earlier, the previous Woodland Hills school district superintendent, James Harris, was fired without cause. To date, no details have been released as to the reason for Harris’s dismissal.
In 2024, Castagna was hired full time as the Chartiers Valley School District superintendent.
