SOUTH BURLINGTON — Alex McHenry announced his resignation as chair of the South Burlington Board of School Directors during a brief special session Wednesday evening.
The unexpected announcement preempted a planned vote of no confidence in McHenry, as The Other Paper first reported. He joined the board in 2017 and has served as its chair since March.
The five-member board voted unanimously Wednesday to appoint Kate Bailey, who had pushed to remove McHenry, as its new leader. McHenry will continue to serve on the board.
The amicable tone of Wednesday’s meeting was in stark contrast to recent ones during which Bailey had expressed her dissatisfaction with McHenry’s capabilities regarding board training, communication and meeting structure.
Bailey, who has been on the board for a year and a half, had nominated McHenry for the leadership role in March, but in recent weeks she publicly aired concerns about his performance. After a contentious discussion, the board voted 3-2 on Aug. 2 to start Wednesday’s meeting with a vote of no confidence. McHenry and Bryan Companion voted against that motion.
At Wednesday’s special meeting, board members promptly went into an extended executive session to discuss “labor negotiations and (a) personnel issue.”
After more than an hour, the board reconvened for five minutes, at which time McHenry announced his resignation and called for a vote to install Bailey as the new chair.
In a brief statement, he said his few months as chair had been “challenging and fun” but had limited the time he had to spend with his family, manage properties and keep up with his hobbies. “So what I’d like to do right now is resign from being chair so that somebody else has more time to do it,” he said at the meeting.
In a statement to VTDigger on Thursday, McHenry said, “The extra work of being chair of the School Board demands more time than I have in my day. Taking all this into consideration, I am stepping back from the chair so I can serve effectively and completely.”
Superintendent Violet Nichols thanked McHenry for his dedication and commitment to the students and the community at Wednesday’s meeting.
“I know that the role of chair is one that has an incredible amount of responsibility and I have a deep appreciation for that work and what it entails,” she said. “I’m grateful that you’ll continue to be by our side as a member of the board.”
Bailey is South Burlington’s third school board chair this year.
“She’s had a lot of energy and I think she’s up for the task,” McHenry said at the meeting. He congratulated her and shook her hand afterward.
In an interview Thursday, Bailey said the entire board was on the same page about getting back on track. “So I’m hopeful that we can set direction and am optimistic that we can focus on the issues that are actually happening in the district rather than our own governance,” she said.
As chair, she said she would like to implement regular training for board members, review and update policies, and make meetings and documents more accessible to the public.
“I understand the task at hand but I’m hopeful that we could get to some more engagement around budget season and try to build trust around our financial stewardship of the district,” she said.
She thanked the board and McHenry for working with her. “Alex is an upstanding guy. He’s a very committed person to our school district. So this has never been anything personal. It’s just about accountability to the tasks at hand and what we need to accomplish in our volunteer, public servant, elected position,” she said.
Bailey declined to go into detail about the issues she raised regarding McHenry’s leadership, a matter board members discussed Thursday night in executive session, she said.
At the board’s July 12 meeting, Bailey said she would like McHenry to step down as chair and asked the board to vote for her to replace him. She said McHenry had delayed certain processes, hadn’t communicated effectively and had turned down repeated offers for help.
At an Aug. 2 meeting, Bailey took issue with McHenry seeking help from Joe McNeil, the district’s attorney, on the concerns about his leadership. McNeil said that, historically, it is not inconsistent for the chair to request counsel to provide advice to the board.
McHenry was visibly upset at that meeting, saying that he thought Bailey was rushing the process. He said he would prefer to defend himself in writing and claimed he did not have enough time to respond to the allegations.
“I want this to be open,” he said at the time. “I want to be able to share my responses publicly because I want South Burlington to know what’s going on.”
Bailey countered that he’d had enough time to respond. She said the issue of board function and reorganization has been an ongoing conversation since March.
“It is difficult to get any work done because what I’ve experienced in the last year and a half on this board is a cyclical conversation about how we don’t know how to do our jobs,” she said at that meeting.
“That has felt very inefficient and incredibly frustrating. And so I am trying to offer a different solution,” she said.
“It’s important to remember that our School Board is doing its job well, despite the distractions of the past few weeks,” McHenry said in an emailed statement.
Those duties include hiring a superintendent, monitoring the district’s progress and negotiating contracts with labor unions, all of which the board successfully continues to do, he added.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated which board members voted against a motion to hold a vote of no confidence.
