Why we wrote this article:
After the Akron Board of Education decided to give Superintendent Michael Robinson $200,000 to resign, we checked in with board members and outside experts to see if they thought it was a good use of taxpayer money.
Ousted Akron Public Schools’ Superintendent Michael Robinson is walking away from the district with $200,000 following his April 28 resignation. That’s a far cry from the $900,000 the Board of Education president said Robinson could have expected had the district bought out the remainder of his five-year contract.
It’s also far more than some members of the public school board wanted to pay him to leave.
Robinson’s exit comes after Akron Public Schools hired a law firm to investigate allegations of misconduct against him. Brennan Manna Diamond’s 24-page report concluded that Robinson bullied, harassed and retaliated against district employees and others. Robinson was suspended with pay for two weeks before the school board, in a split vote, accepted his resignation and appointed his replacement.
Why was Robinson paid that amount? Why wasn’t he terminated? And why did the board move so quickly to name a replacement? Signal Akron talked with current and former school board members and legal experts to help understand why the board made the decisions it did.
How much was the school board willing to pay Robinson to leave?
When school board members first discussed what to do about Robinson, there were two options on the table, said Gregory Harrison, a member of the board: Pay him up to $100,000 to resign or terminate him.
The board’s deductible for liability insurance is $100,000, Harrison said, so the discussions centered on going up to the deductible “for economic reasons.”
But after several local media outlets reported on a memo that recommended what board members’ options were for parting ways with Robinson, the costs became “significantly more,” Board President Carla Jackson said at the April 28 school board meeting.
“It changed the trajectory of this negotiation,” Jackson said at the meeting, where Robinson’s resignation was accepted.
Three days later, Jackson said in an interview that Robinson’s attorney contacted district representatives after the memo was made public and said, “Now, the price is going up.” Robinson asked for a year’s salary — $240,000 — and benefits.
“As our lawyers explained it to us, it laid out our own gameplan,” Jackson said of the memo. “It laid out that it’s not in our best interest to go to trial. … Without the memo, his lawyer had to do his job.”
But with the memo, the district’s options were clear.
Still, board member Barbara Sykes said, Robinson’s attorney is just as capable of doing research as the board’s attorneys are. She said it’s not true that negotiations were affected “because it’s easy to figure out what the options would be.”
“I don’t see how that made any significant difference,” Sykes said.
Did the school board memo’s publication affect negotiations for Robinson’s exit?
Multiple attorneys who are not involved in the investigation or the decision to part ways with Robinson said the memo, prepared by the law firm Bricker Graydon, was not at all unusual. Bill Chris, an attorney with Roderick Linton Belfance LLP, called it a “straightforward, correct analysis of the pros and cons of separation,” while Rachel Reight, the managing partner at Baasten McKinley & Co., said the memo “is what I would have advised.”
Chris also said he would give a client “the exact same advice.”
The options in the memo included termination, resignation with no separation agreement or a separation agreement with a payout. Each option is broken down, with the pros and cons of each explained.
While there was broad agreement on the fact that the information in the memo was straightforward, legal experts differed on what the impact of its release might have been.
“I don’t think having that memo out there changed their leverage at all in the negotiations,” said Daniel Jaffe, a professor of law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. “Everything in the memo would have been well known to the superintendent’s counsel.”
But Subodh Chandra, the managing partner of the Chandra Law Firm, said the memo’s release “unquestionably” affected the school board’s negotiations because it indicated that a settlement was a viable option for them to consider.
“I think they undermined the negotiating position of the district,” he said. “It emboldened anyone negotiating on behalf of the superintendent to say, ‘Hey, they’ve been given three choices. Let’s push on this one.’”
Why were some people opposed to paying Robinson to resign?
Three members of the school board voted against the resignation agreement, saying they didn’t want to pay out that amount of money. Sykes said she was worried about the district’s finances — Akron Public Schools is already planning more than $10 million in cuts — and she didn’t think Robinson deserved to be paid out for longer than the end of this school year.
“We should not reward a person for bad behavior,” she said.
Harrison, who also voted against the agreement, said he thought the board should have instead voted to terminate Robinson because of the litany of actionable offenses in the Brennan Manna Diamond report. Not to do so, Harrison said, did taxpayers and the board a disservice — one that he’s having a hard time reconciling, he said.
The former president of the school board, who helped hire Robinson, said he doesn’t think Robinson should have walked away with anything.
“In light of reading the report, it’s unconscionable that they gave him a single dollar,” said State Rep. Derrick Hall, D-Akron.
Chandra, who was previously the Cleveland law director, said the $200,000 figure “strikes me as a high amount to pay.” He said he understands Sykes’ point of view; during the school board meeting, she called the payout “almost ridiculous and egregious.”
The payout number is what was advised by the school board’s legal counsel, said Bruce Alexander, vice president of the board. He said it was a negotiated figure and “probably the best thing to do.”
“I like to listen to legal,” Alexander said.
Why did most school board members think the $200,000 payout was worth the cost?
Jackson, the school board president, said even with a scathing report in which attorneys concluded that Robinson violated district policies, there was risk in taking another course of action.
“It can go on for a year,” she said of the state-mandated termination process, which requires a public hearing if the employee demands it. “We need to get on from this as quickly as possible.”
Not only did she want to mitigate that risk, she said — she wanted Robinson, and any issues related to him, to go away.
Besides, Jackson said, if Robinson had appealed a termination and won, the costs to the school board could have been a lot higher, along with the potential for the “emotional headache of trial” for the district to contend with.
“You have to think of the whole picture,” Jackson added. “We have to move the district forward.”
The district had a strong case, Jackson said, but the outcome of a legal process can never be guaranteed.
Jackson was right to worry, Chris said. As a former law director for the City of Green, he said he had seen more than one instance in which a fired employee won their job back, even though there was plenty of evidence to terminate them and they had been warned that termination was the next step.
“People are not aware how hard it is to get rid of a public employee,” he said. “We would lose often.”
Chris said he “wouldn’t lose any sleep” over the amount of the settlement. He called the payout a business decision, and a good one.
Reight, who represents classified employees at the district such as secretaries, those who work in data processing and others in nonsupervisory, nonteaching roles, said even when a case is good, there’s the potential that it doesn’t end in the district’s favor. Even if it does, she said, Robinson would have the option to appeal — a process that could tie the school board to its former superintendent for years.
“Litigation is often messy,” she said. “I can understand why they landed where they landed.”
Were there any clues that Robinson might need to go?
Jaffe, at Case Western, said a lot of positives come from a settlement like this. The matter is now behind the district and there are no concerns about making people testify against Robinson, an experience that he said could be traumatic. There’s “real value” in making the situation just go away, he said.
Still, Harrison said, he thought the board should have moved to terminate Robinson. Chandra said he, too, would have advocated that the board fire Robinson for cause.
“Were I in that situation, fully confident of the investigative findings, I would say, ‘Let’s fight it,’” Chandra said. “It sounded like there were widespread complaints of conduct. It would be a legitimate basis for terminating the employee.”
A 517-word review of Robinson completed in July 2024 didn’t mention any of the issues that came to light, though it said he should ensure his communications are “professional, clear, direct, respectful and constructive.” Both his and Treasurer Steve Thompson’s reviews said they needed to improve their working relationship.
In a July letter to fellow board members following the review, Rene Molenaur accused the superintendent of bullying her, saying that he had shouted at her and called her a “headache.” Jackson, on Thursday, said there were “no major official complaints” against the superintendent until after his review and Robinson had denied many of the issues that Molenaur brought up.
In the investigative report, a witness described hearing Robinson say, “I could just wring her neck” when referring to Molenaur, while another witness said he heard the superintendent say, “She better watch out, she has kids.”
Robinson admitted saying that if Molenaur “doesn’t live long enough” that her “children, and her children’s children” will reap what she sows, the report said.
Could school board members have detected issues earlier?
The real question, Chris said, is what happened in Robinson’s initial interviews “that someone didn’t glean this out” before the board got to this point.
Two current board members who were part of the interview process, Molenaur and Diana Autry, did not return a phone call seeking comment. Neither did Job Perry or Valerie McKitrick, former board members who were involved in Robinson’s hiring.
Jackson voted against Robinson’s appointment. Hall, the former board president at the time Robinson was brought on, wouldn’t comment on the superintendent’s hiring.
Alexander said he never got a chance to do a full interview with Robinson, but “trusted my fellow board members,” who recommended him for the position.
“I feel like maybe I could’ve been a little more demanding” about participating in the interview, Alexander said. “There were some good candidates, but fellow board members said this would be the best candidate. You go with the majority.
“Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not.”