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The Judson Independent School District board of trustees voted to finalize the termination of Superintendent Milton “Rob” Fields III Tuesday night in a 4-3 split vote.
Before the vote, Board President Monica Ryan took the unusual step of reading a long list of actions the board had determined gave them “just cause” for termination.
All told, Ryan read 13 reasons with 35 subheads, including “failure of fiscal oversight,” “failure of academic leadership,” “noncompliance of background checks,” and “failure to report allegations of child abuse.”
The list is a result of an investigation the board hired attorneys to complete in January after placing Fields on paid leave.
Trustee José Macias Jr. called the list “nonsense” that wouldn’t have held up to the scrutiny of a third-party hearing.
“I cannot wait to dismantle every one of these arguments. I'll do it personally if I need to, because it's all bogus,” Macias said. “It's all just what our attorneys have to put together to propose termination. We're not going to terminate them just because we don't like them. There has to be reasons. These are the proposed reasons.”
Ryan disagreed with that characterization.
“Those were the actual findings with over 3000 pages of documents to back those up,” Ryan said. “These were the substantiated reasons from the investigation that were documented.”
“When you say substantiated, you mean like they're real. No, it's not. They could have been argued,” Macias said. “I can argue them.”
Fields withdrew his request for a hearing earlier this month, a fact Ryan pointed out.
“Dr Fields was presented an opportunity to be deposed and answer all of the questions, and he declined,” Ryan said. “And then he requested the hearing, and he withdrew it. That was not the board. We were ready to proceed and hear his side of the case, and he chose to withdraw that.”
Macias said the hearing would have cost Fields a lot of money. He made a motion to let Fields resign, but the board majority struck it down.
Trustee Laura Stanford also wanted to let Fields resign.
“We don't have to terminate because that's going to affect his ongoing ability to earn a living. And he hasn't been proven guilty of all this stuff,” Stanford said. “It's a shame that in our system it's very expensive to prove your innocence. And that's a shame, because I would have liked to have seen this gone to a hearing.”
In a statement released after the vote, Ryan said Fields was terminated immediately without any further pay.
Usually when school boards part ways with district leaders, even under adverse circumstances, they cite personnel matters and don’t say why. That’s what Judson did when Jeanette Ball abruptly left the district in 2022.
Boards often also allow leaders to resign and give them contract buyouts. That’s what Judson did in 2022 and what South San ISD did on multiple occasions. South San’s appointed board of managers even let its former superintendent resign after the state took over the district last year.
