The haters seen the writing on the wall and wanted to give a lot of money to one of them that helped them foment hate and harm to the LGBTQIA kids in schools. Because protecting kids was never the goal, doing the best for schools was never the goal. It has always been to promote and enforce their religious fundamentalist right wing views on students. And they will be back, that was the point of such a huge payout. To make others see the profit in harming the LGBTQIA kids. Hugs. Scottie
This image taken from video shows Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh and Board President Dana Hunter preside over a Central Bucks School District meeting in Doylestown Pa., Nov. 15, 2022. Democrats who swept out a Moms for Liberty majority on the board are challenging Lucabaugh’s last-minute $700,000 exit package. (AP Photo)
Updated 12:26 PM EST, November 22, 2023PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A Pennsylvania school board that banned books, Pride flags and transgender athletes slipped a last-minute item into their final meeting before leaving office, hastily awarding a $700,000 exit package to the superintendent who supported their agenda.
But the Democratic majority that swept the conservative Moms For Liberty slate out of office hopes to block the unusual — they say illegal — payout and bring calm to the Central Bucks School District, whose affluent suburbs and bucolic farms near Philadelphia have been roiled by infighting since the 2020 pandemic.
“People are really sick of the embarrassing meetings, the vitriol, they’re tired of our district being in the news for all the wrong reasons. And … the students are aware of what’s been going on, particularly our LGBTQ students and their friends and allies,” said Karen Smith, a Democrat who won a third term on the board.
The district, with about 17,000 students in 23 schools, has spent $1.5 million on legal and public relations fees amid competing lawsuits, discrimination complaints and investigations in the past two years, including a pending suit over its suspension of a middle school teacher who supported LGBTQ and other marginalized students.
The jostling — and spending — look likely to continue as Democrats who won a 6-3 majority in the Nov. 7 election prepare to challenge the severance package for superintendent Abram Lucabaugh, which was added to the Nov. 14 agenda only the night before.
Meanwhile, several voters in the quaint town of Chalfont filed a court petition Monday challenging the school board election tallies, alleging unspecified “fraud or error.”
Student Lily Freeman, a vocal critic of board policies on LGBTQ issues, decried the district’s spending priorities. She called the severance package a bad deal for both students and taxpayers.
“It’s kind of like a slap in the face,” said the senior at Central Bucks East High School. “Teachers are struggling, and there’s a lot of students that are struggling.”
“There are so many resources out there that we could be putting that money to,” she said, noting her school desperately needs better WiFi.
Neither Lucabaugh, who skipped the final meeting, nor outgoing board president Dana Hunter returned calls for comment. School board solicitor Jeffrey P. Garton said he was not involved in the severance agreement.
“I didn’t prepare it and gave no legal advice concerning its content,” Garton said in an email.
Some of the incoming Democrats tried to warn the outgoing board that the payout violates a 2012 state law designed to curtail golden parachutes bestowed on school superintendents, including one that topped $900,000. The law now caps severance pay at a year’s salary, along with limited payments for unused sick time and other benefits.
“The particular circumstances in this case are even more egregious. The board gave Dr. Lucabaugh a 40 percent salary increase (to $315,000) in late July of this year, making him the second-highest paid school district superintendent in Pennsylvania, and is now using that increase less than four months later to calculate a severance payment,” lawyer Brendan Flynn, who represents them, wrote in a letter distributed to the board before the vote.
Lucabaugh’s package includes more than $300,000 for unused sick, vacation, administrative and personal time during his 18 years in various roles with the district; $50,000 for signing the deal; and health insurance for his family through June.
The package also includes a puzzling ban on any district investigations of his tenure and an agreement that he can keep his district-issued laptop as long as he wipes it of school records.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage nixed that last provision on Friday when he ordered Lucabaugh, a defendant in middle school teacher Andrew Burgess’s retaliation suit against the district, to preserve documents that may become evidence in the case.
“It’s hard to imagine a lawyer drafted that contract,” said Witold “Vic” Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, who represents Burgess. “No lawyer would think that a school board could insulate an employee from any kind of of court action or criminal investigation.”
Freeman, the high school senior, declined to revisit the threats and sense of danger she said she and her family have endured as she took on the board the past two years. However, her forceful public remarks at last week’s meeting, posted to TikTok, have drawn thousands of views and comments.
“It was never about protecting kids. It was about erasing people like me from Central Bucks,” she told the board last week as it voted to make students play on sports teams based on their gender assignment at birth. “You continue to make policy after policy preventing people like me from just living our lives.”
On Monday, Freeman said she’s hopeful the tensions will ease under the new board: “I feel as if we shouldn’t have to worry about a lot of these things if our needs are being met.”
Scottie's Playtime 
The struggle goes on.
Never give up folks, these revisionists and their extremist agendas would snuff out any candle of progress.
(Hoping you Scottie and Ron are having a good Thanksgiving Day,) 🙏
Roger & Sheila
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Hi Roger. We will keep up the fight as long as we have such grand supporters as you and your wife. I know you don’t celebrate the same holidays we do in the US, but did you have a good family meal this week / weekend? Hugs. Scottie
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Thanks Scottie.
Our family is scattered across the UK, not the sort of distances which might matter much in the USA, but enough by UK standards to make physical meetings a bit infrequent, also our three have a lot of commitments of their own, so its text, phone and Zoom for the clan.
Sheila and myself tend to live something of a sedentary life, physically that is.
Sheila being a poet of no mean stature is in contact with a group of poets, and I have my WP friends, so along with our own writing projects our minds are quite busy (and buzzy) places.
Take care you guys
Roger & Sheila.
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Hi Roger. In its way it is wonderful. If that is what you enjoy. It is basically Ron and me now. We have a great meal, helping each other out, but he talks to family on the phone, and watches his stuff and I am on my computers doing my thing. And both of us are happy! That is the good thing. We are happy. Best wishes, thanks again for not only being a supporter of acceptance and tolerance, but in helping me understand things I never learned in school. Best wishes, happiness to your family, and hugs. Scottie
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Hi Scottie.
Thank you once more for your kind words and support.
It’s warming and humbling to get comments like yours, which is promptly followed by an internal dialogue which goes ‘Gee. I hope I did get that right’…. which in turn is followed by a ‘Should I have put a qualifier in there?’…..which in turn is followed by ‘You’re over-thinking again man,’
🥴😀🙃. It’s busy up here in my head.
Sometimes I think I have too many interests.
Anyway, we applaud your relationship and how you guys are making it work despite all the trials and tribulations the world sends your ways.
Blessing to you both.
Roger & Sheila.
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Hello Roger. Thank you greatly, for you and your wife, Sheila. I would ask you to understand that I did not get an education really, and for a lot of my schooling years to both punish me and to keep me from learning my adoptive father forbid me to have any books of any kind including school books in the house. He figured it would make me more of a sports player and outdoor kid, I guess. But all the history you share with me / with the viewers is informative because US schools don’t cover it much, and I never got a chance to learn it. A lot of what you mention is maybe taught in European schools but not even mentioned here, or if so it is taught from the US view point of US superiority only. Thank you. Hugs. Scottie
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Thank you Scottie.
My links with history started out with playing with toy soldiers 😀. Growing up in the wake of WWII most British lads in the 1950s early 1960s had a working knowledge of war, simply as play.
In part I did not grow up, but my interests expanded into different eras of war, and then into the politics. My social and economic history is not so hot though!
Actually our school histories were pretty dull, dusty versions of the Middle Ages. It was there, but it was taught all very dreary, lots of dates and important events- and the dates of battles but none the interesting details (for British boys anyway).
I’m not sure what is taught now, there seem to be hoo-hahs from time to time about what is politically correct, or not, but most of the time that is pretty low-key.
That said there is a lot of interest in the British public about history in all its formats, eras and points of view. The political slant is mostly left to the cheap hack writers, whose books tend only to get bought by the converted of whatever political stripe. Most folk over here tend to get into spats more about facts as to whether ‘that’ battles was fought ‘there’ or ‘there’. Unless it was overseas in which case the argument is over how important was the British contribution.
It is fashionable to knock or wring hands over the British Empire as if it was the only bad empire ever. Some folk might not like to exam their own pasts in that respect.
The good things about history is there is always something new to learn or a different perspective.
AND folk ignore it at their own peril.
Or worse try and re-write it to suit their prejudices…. that did not work out so well for Germany or Japan in 1945.
And anyone with an idea of the Middle East or Afghanistan could have predicted what was going to happen to the US led coalition. (Going back further to Vietnam in the 1960s – reading that nation’s history should have rung alarm bells)
Take care you guys.
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Hi Roger. Thank you. I love your comment. Here the most argued war is the civil war with the right trying to change history over what really the was about. They keep trying to make the Southern Confederate states heroes who were fighting an evil government trying to strip the rights from white people in the south. They go to crazy extremes, and sometimes what they push has no relationship to fact or history. Furthermore, they push ideology over reality, just as the fundamentalist Christians keep trying to make this country founded as a Christian nation a real thing when it clearly was not. Hugs. Scottie
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Well for a start off Scottie these revisionists and their beef about ‘Freedom’, will have to explain the ‘small’ matter of when Confederate troops marched into Union territory they viewed resident African Americans as booty to be transported to the south and sold as slaves.
AND the notion that pre-Civil War some southerners had the idea of expanding into Latin American …you’ve guessed it….Slave plantations.
Now it is an accepted fact that Slavery is not an invention of the the Southern US states, and a number of native African rulers were involved in the trade with Europeans.
However trying to mix ‘Rights’ and ‘Freedom’ with Slavery or discrimination…wellllll.
‘That hound don’t hunt’
OR
‘Is that the hill you’re going to die on,’
Finally.
Both History and BS are messy, and not pleasant to wade through, but the former doesn’t have favourites.
Hope you are enjoying the holidays Scottie and Ron.
Roger & Sheila
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His Roger. We are enjoying the holiday, thank you. I hope yours is also going well. Hugs. Scottie
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Glad to read that Scottie.
Yes ours is going fine thanks
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