A school superintendent who serves four Hancock County towns has been suspended by another board in that district.
Sedgwick’s school board voted unanimously Monday to instruct Daniel Ross, the superintendent for School Union 76, “to refrain from conducting any business” for the town’s elementary school — which serves students from pre-K to 8th grades — until further notice.
The vote followed another one last week by Deer Isle and Stonington’s joint school board to suspend Ross from his duties overseeing their elementary and high schools.
Ross, who has served as the school union’s superintendent for two years, has come under scrutiny in recent months by staff and town officials in the district, which also includes Brooklin.
Staff at the towns’ four schools held no-confidence votes in Ross last week, and some school administrators have abruptly resigned their posts. Two administrators in Deer Isle left their posts in August, on the eve of the new school year, while Sedgwick’s elementary school principal resigned in May after only a year on the job, The Weekly Packet reported.
And in August, Ross called police to Deer Isle-Stonington High School to report that board member Darrell Williams was disrupting a staff meeting, according to the Island Ad-Vantages weekly newspaper.
On Monday, the Sedgwick School Board voted 5-0, without any discussion, to suspend Ross. Allen Cole, the board’s chair, declined to comment afterwards about the reasons for the vote. Public sector personnel matters are considered confidential under Maine law, which restricts how much officials can say about government employees.
Ross was not at the meeting because he was sick, school officials said.
It was unclear Monday evening if Brooklin’s school board may be considering a similar vote about Ross. Its next anticipated meeting is on Tuesday, Dec 10.
As in Deer Isle-Stonington, the Sedgwick school board also on Monday indicated it wants to review a contract that Ross approved with Mechanical Services to make upgrades to the local school.
Deer Isle-Stonington’s board voted on Nov. 21 to rescind a decision it had made just one week earlier to pursue an agreement with the Maine-based energy systems contractor to oversee planned upgrades at the high school due to concerns about how Ross handled bidding for the project, according to Island Ad-Vantages.
In Sedgwick’s case, Mechanical Services already has largely completed work changing the elementary school’s heating system from oil to propane. The Sedgwick board said it would review how that contract was awarded to see if any similar concerns come to light.
“We just want to make sure it was done appropriately,” Cole said.
Ross was serving as school superintendent for the town of Cherryfield in Washington County when he was hired to run School Union 76, according to the Ellsworth American. His tenure in Deer Isle, where his office and the district’s high school both are located, began in July 2022.
Before working in Cherryfield, Ross worked three years as a school principal at Woodland Junior Senior High School in Baileyville, for one year as principal at Penquis Valley High School in Milo, and held a dual role as assistant principal and athletic director at both Katahdin Middle and High School in Stacyville and at Southern Aroostook Middle and High School in Dyer Brook, according to media reports. He held the dual posts in Stacyville and Dyer Brook for 10 months, according to his LinkedIn page.
