A Matteson school business official who has repeatedly butted heads with her superiors during multiple stints with Elementary School District 159 is facing termination for the third time since 2008.
Finance director Demetria Brown, who was terminated by the district in 2008 and 2016 before being rehired most recently in 2019, was placed on leave earlier this year for undisclosed reasons.
The school board in July approved disciplinary charges and a bill of particulars recommending Brown’s dismissal, meeting minutes show, but the district has declined to provide an explanation for her pending termination.
The board will hold an administrative hearing Sept. 23 before rendering a final decision on discipline, District 159 attorney Matthew Walters said.
Brown, who has worked for the district a combined four years between her three separate stints and sued the district after both prior terminations, did not respond to requests for comment.
She was earning a $135,061 salary under the terms of her 2019 contract, but received an unspecified salary increase in early July, according to meeting minutes.
The reason for the pay bump, which the board granted shortly after it approved disciplinary charges against her, is unclear.
Board member Bernice Brown, who is Demetria Brown’s mother and was one of two board members who opposed taking disciplinary action against her, said Tuesday that she didn’t want to speak about her daughter’s situation until after the disciplinary hearing later this month.
She said only that the complaints her daughter faces have nothing to do with her job performance and credited her financial acumen with having saved the district a considerable sum of money.
Demetria Brown was most recently hired in June 2019, shortly after a new board, which included her mother, was seated and immediately voted to reinstate outgoing Superintendent Mable Alfred, who had been on leave waiting out what appeared to be her own last days with the district.
Brown, who applied for the finance director job less than a week after Alfred’s return, wrote in her cover letter that she believed her educational training, positive work ethic and professional work experience would make her a valuable asset to the district.
Bernice Brown said her daughter wanted to return to work, despite her past experiences, because she really cared about getting the community’s finances in order and was chosen for the role because she was the most qualified candidate.
According to a copy of her 2019 application, Brown wrote that she left her job as the district’s assistant business manager in 2008 to take a “Director level opportunity,” before returning in 2014 as the district’s finance director.
She explained her 2016 dismissal by writing that the board had disregarded the superintendent’s recommendation to renew her contract.
Brown’s personnel records, obtained by the Daily Southtown in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, show that she was terminated in 2008 for numerous alleged incidents of insubordination, unprofessionalism, deceit and willful failure to perform her job functions.
In a 2008 memo from then-Superintendent Ronald Wynn, he wrote that Brown, who already had been counseled for “numerous instances of insubordination and deficiencies in performance,” had recently committed two more infractions that constituted “gross misconduct.”
First, Wynn wrote, Brown had failed to report to work and falsely claimed her absence was due to the continuation of a trial for which she was serving as a juror, even though her jury duty had actually ended the week before.
Then, after the superintendent rescinded her upcoming vacation request because her numerous absences, both excused and unexcused, had made it “very difficult” for the business office to operate, Brown went on her long-planned vacation anyway, Wynn wrote.
“These two most recent incidents involved willful lying to your superiors and willful insubordination, which, in light of the past history of performance deficiencies, failure to perform assigned duties, and insubordination, have led me to conclude that you no longer wish to perform any work for this School District,” the former superintendent wrote. “Thus, I have no choice but to recommend your termination to the Board of Education.”
A few months after her dismissal in October 2008, Brown ran for a seat on the District 159 school board and was elected with more votes than any of the other seven candidates, according to county election records.
While serving on the board, she sued the district over her termination.
In her suit, which was settled in 2014, Brown sought pay and benefits for the remainder of her contract, which she argued the district had violated when it terminated her while she was on vacation.
The terms of the settlement Brown reached with District 159 were not immediately available.
She did not seek reelection to the board in 2013, but was hired as the district’s finance director at an annual salary of $120,000 the following year, records show.
Within a year, however, she’d gotten on the wrong side of another superintendent.
In a July 2015 memo for corrective action, Superintendent Barbara Mason dinged Brown for allegedly disobeying her orders and said any further acts of insubordination could result in her termination.
“Over the past several months it has become apparent to me that you are unable to take direction from me as the Superintendent of Schools,” Mason wrote in the memo, which accused Brown of presenting items to the board without her approval in an attempt to undermine her authority.
Brown responded to an 11-point plan for corrective action that Mason sent her by pushing back on each of the points and calling many of the directives “ambiguous,” and in need of further refinement, records show.
“For the record,” she wrote to Mason, “insubordination is the act of willfully disobeying one’s superior.
“Refusing to perform an action that is unethical or illegal is not insubordination; neither is performing an action that is not within the scope of authority of the person issuing the order.”
Brown went on to tell Mason that she would follow the board’s directions if they complied with board policy, but said she found it concerning that she could be reprimanded for disobeying directives that did not comport with board policy.
The board chose not to renew Brown’s contract the following spring and placed her on paid leave for the final three months of her existing contract, according to a letter from then-assistant superintendent Linda Johnson-McClinton.
At the time, her mother, who joined the board the year prior, alleged that other board members had it out for her daughter because she’d questioned their potentially improper spending, the Southtown reported.
Following her 2016 termination, Brown again sued the district claiming she was fired for expressing concerns about the district’s dealings with an energy services provider.
Her complaint alleged the district provided the vendor, Energy Systems Group, with a competitor’s confidential bidding information, which the company then used to undercut its competition and secure the contract.
After raising the issue with district officials, Brown claimed she was cut out of talks with the vendor going forward.
Court records show that District 159 succeeded in getting Brown’s lawsuit dismissed in 2017, and that an appellate court upheld the dismissal last year.
zkoeske@tribpub.com
Twitter @ZakKoeske
