The Cedar Grove-Belgium School District has updated its superintendent job listing to remove the illegal religious request

A Wisconsin school district is backtracking after posting a job ad for a new superintendent that said the eventual hire must have “conservative, christian values” to match the make-up of the community.

That “should not have been in the report,” said a consultant involved in the district’s search, and an updated listing no longer has that listed as a preferred qualification. But the ramifications are still being felt.

All of this happened in the Cedar Grove-Belgium School District in Sheboygan County. According to reporter Corrinne Hess of Wisconsin Public Radio, a potential applicant spotted it and passed along to a retired superintendent she knew.

(Follow above article link to view photos/PDFs that accompany this article.)

Notice that WPR’s screenshot below, from the original document, highlights the problematic “conservative, christian values” but there’s also an item in the middle column that says “Conservative politically/fiscally” which is equally disturbing.

Upon hearing about this, that retired superintendent immediately contacted Mike Richie, who works with Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, the Illinois-based firm hired to find the district’s new leader.

“Help me understand how a public school district can legally limit its hiring to people who are Christians?” [retired St. Francis Superintendent Carol] Topinka wrote in an email obtained by WPR. “My mentee is not a Christian and is frankly gobsmacked that a public school district can blatantly and prejudicially flout the law.” 

Richie wrote back and admitted it was a mistake. He explained that several preferred traits were jotted down after conducting 12 different focus groups with members of community. Those were the personal opinions of community members, he added, and should not have made it to into the final “Leadership Profile Report.”

I would add, however, that those were the “desired characteristics” identified by the school board. There are separate charts in the document identifying requests made by the community, staff, and students, and they’re all generally fine. That makes it much harder to blame this issue on random kooks in the community.

Still, once they realized what they did, they removed those items from the document.

[Cedar Grove-Belgium School Board President Chad] Hoopman told WPR he realizes publicly listing “Christian” as a desirable characteristic by school board members would give candidates the impression they would not be considered if they weren’t that religion.

“That is why the search firm chose to remove that comment,” Hoopman said.

Hoopman doesn’t go far enough. Is the problem that people who aren’t Christian might not apply? Or is the problem that “Christian” was considered a desired trait at all, because they just treat it as a synonym for “moral”? And what about the reference to politically conservative?

The updated version of the document no longer lists the overt religious and political characteristics. However it still mentions the ambiguous “Similar values to the community” (which would have been far less concerning before this recent incident).

Obviously, a public school district cannot have a religious prerequisite or preference for a new superintendent. The ACLU of Wisconsin told WPR it’s investigating the matter. WPR filed an open records request for “all correspondence related to the superintendent search.”

There’s been some additional drama over the past week too. A scheduled community event to meet the “finalists” for the position was postponed due to a “shift in timeline in the hiring process.” A local newspaper said that the postponement occurred because the “first round of candidates didn’t [closely] enough match the profile determined by the district.”

Were those candidates rejected because they weren’t Christian or conservative enough? We don’t know.

These sorts of hangups wouldn’t be major stories in most school districts. It can be very hard to find a qualified superintendent and candidates who seem promising at first may turn out to be bad fits. That’s not weird! But given the backstory here, it’s fair to wonder why certain candidates were rejected… and whether the original job posting pushed away good people.

That may have happened in at least one case.

Topinka said her colleague was excited about the possibility of working in the district. But when she saw the listing, she decided not to apply for the position because she’s not a Christian. 

“I can’t imagine why the Board generated these characteristics, if that is not the type of superintendent they are looking for,” Topinka said. “It’s troubling from my perspective.” 

I don’t want to play conspiracy theorist here. I can accept that people who were part of the district’s focus groups made laughable suggestions (which were still written down), and I can even accept that the consulting firm and the school board didn’t catch the mistakes in the application. But the district now has an obligation to go out of its way and make clear, very publicly, that religious and political affiliations are irrelevant to their candidate search. They need to hire someone who cares about students and won’t get sucked into “culture war” battles.

Basically, they need to find someone who’s about as far away from Oklahoma’s disgraceful Ryan Walters as possible. The students deserve better than a leader who perpetuates right-wing propaganda under the guise of faith—and whose leadership steers kids away from the knee-jerk belief that “Christian” and “conservative” are synonymous with goodness.