On July 1st, Carpenter formally took over as superintendent of the Hickman Mills School District.
After his contract was “wrongfully terminated” on June 30th, 2013, Scully described in court documents how he had to reapply for his job for the next school year. The court documents allege the district engaged in “a systematic pattern of selecting less qualified, substantially younger, female, and/or non-white employees for its secondary administrative positions.”
Scully was not hired to be assistant principal within the district, and court documents allege that Hickman Mills administrators said they would only “throw Scully a crumb” by offering him a teaching position requiring a 50 percent cut in his salary.
Scully’s attorney told 41 Action News that after Scully was not rehired for the job, he was replaced by a “dramatically younger, less qualified” candidate.
A jury awarded Scully $297,582 in compensatory damages as well as $450,000 in punitive damages for the case.
“He (Dennis Carpenter) was given a blank slate (by the school board) to hire a new team of administrators and secondary principals as he preferred,” said Scully’s attorney, Eric Smith of Siro Smith Dickson in Kansas City. “And the results showed that a dramatically younger group of people were hired, passing over more qualified older candidates.”
A search on Case.net also shows that another employment discrimination suit was filed against Hickman Mills School District in 2015, directly naming Carpenter as a defendant by former staff member John Baccala.
According to Baccala’s LinkedIn profile, he served as Director of Media Relations for the Hickman Mills School District up until the time Carpenter took over as superintendent.
A call to the Employee Rights Law Firm, who represented the former Hickman Mills staff member, had not been returned as of Monday evening.
White also responded to the lawsuit that served as the primary focus of the 41 Action News story last week.
The lawsuit against the Hickman Mills School District, filed by 27 current and former teachers with over 500 years of combined experience, describes a salary schedule put in place during Carpenter’s term as superintendent that cut the salaries of the longtime teachers, while increasing the salaries of younger, less experienced ones.
According to the lawsuit, the salary schedule for the Hickman Mills School District was changed for the 2015-2016 school year, resulting in some teachers seeing pay cuts as high as almost $13,000.
In a statement, White said the Hickman Mills salary schedule change was put in place as a way to deal with the issue of losing teachers to school districts that placed a higher value on teachers with graduate degrees.
White cited “extensive collaboration” between Hickman Mills teachers and administrators, and said any age discrimination claims did not come up until the lawsuit was filed.
“So it is grossly unfair for the media, or any member of our community, to suggest that Dr. Carpenter engaged in that sort of conduct,” White said in the statement. “Rather, the Hickman Mills board was faced with making a difficult choice in order to retain what it believed to be its most-qualified teachers. Deciding how much to value experience vs. education is fundamentally a policy choice that every board of education must make when setting salaries.”
Last week, 41 Action News spoke to a teacher named in the lawsuit.
Former Hickman Mills English teacher Leta Hogge said she tried talking with the district and Carpenter to keep her then-current rate from falling, but her efforts proved unsuccessful.
“We never asked for a raise,” she explained. “We asked to be grandfathered in at our current salaries. It felt personal. It was my livelihood."
White said a question-and-answer session will be held on Wednesday to address the age discrimination lawsuits dealing with Carpenter’s time as Hickman Mills superintendent.
It will be held at 5:15 p.m. at the Stansberry Leadership Center.
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