In the second of two meetings hosted the week before winter break, the school's board of directors moved to administratively reassign executive director Eli Cohen to remote work after a discussion that took place in public session.

Board treasurer Ron Borkan spoke against the reassignment, noting recent resignations and saying he had concerns about “the unintended consequences,” but other board members disagreed.

“We have lost 30 out of 40 faculty in the last three years, 26 of them in the last two years,” said board member Debra Edgerton. “What became alarming was to have more, the largest number of faculty that left in the past year.”

She continued: “What was happening after this past year is what started, at least for me, thinking what is going on and to talk about students when we had the report of how many students were leaving and not connecting it to the reason faculty were leaving. That is the question we have in front of us. Yes, we will probably lose more faculty, but you can’t blame the entire incident on us when most of this has happened in the prior three years.”

The motion passed 3-2, with Borkan and James Yih, the board president,  voting against.

During discussion of appointing an interim executive director later in the meeting, Borkan resigned, citing his disapproval with the way the board was handling the situation.

He later said this “was not some rash decision,” noting dissenting votes he’d made throughout the fall.

“When you’re on the board, sometimes you lose a vote, but you’re expected to then support the majority decision," he said. "For the most part, I could, but as we got into reassigning Eli to work from home or reassigning Christina [Wolfe] to work from home, those decisions I thought were very ill-advised, very short-sighted and downright wrong. I figured I can’t support these decisions [and] I can’t be on the board if they’re going to be making decisions I can’t support, so I resigned.”

The latter of those two reassignments had happened at the board’s meeting on Nov. 28.

Borkan was absent, but the rest of the board voted unanimously, due to a reduction in force, not to renew Extended School Services (ESS) director Wolfe’s contract after it is set to end on June 30. It also appointed board Vice President Kyle Winfree to lead a committee — including staff, parents, FALA leaders and outside experts — to explore how to restructure the department.

“We’ve been deliberating with thoughtfulness and care,” board secretary Andy Bessler is summarized as saying in the minutes. “We can move forward in positivity and growth. This has been tough for everyone, and it involves confidential information we cannot disclose. Please trust that we are working in the benefit of the school, legally and for the care of the students.”

Although Borkan believed Wolfe had performance issues that needed to be addressed, he moved during the meeting to rescind the decision to eliminate the position until the new structure had been finalized.

He had been on the finance committee for about a year at time and said neither reduction in force nor changes to the ESS director position had ever been discussed.

“If the issues were how Christina was performing at her job, that she wasn't what the school needed in a SPED director, the process the board was going through was wrong,” he said. “You do a performance evaluation, you collect your data, you talk to the employees and you work on a performance improvement plan. You’re not just having performance issues and eliminating the position; that's not how it's done.”

Other members noted that without this motion the position would still exist at FALA, with Wolfe in the role, until the end of her contract at the close of the academic year.

“I am feeling extraordinarily challenged and concerned that this is not objectively being considered,” Wolfe said when recognized at the meeting.

In response, Bessler said he was “considering all the stuff objectively as best as I can,” but that he was not comfortable discussing certain items in public “to protect people.”

“I’ll say that finances were not the only thing that we considered,” Yih said. “We had a long discussion of this.”

The motion did not continue.

According to Winfree, the reduction in force was the first step in addressing a need to restructure the ESS department. While he said he thinks everyone in the department has a "big heart" and is “in it for the right reasons,” his belief is that the structure is not serving them well.

“As it was earlier this year, we have one person at the top with certification and then multiple others who have these conditional certifications that are dependent on a mentor in the school to retain their certification and complete their education,” he said. “I think it’s great to have a mentor supporting your education, but if it is your direct supervisor and there is no other [supervisor], how are you going to speak up if there’s an issue? This person controls your job [and] they control your education."

Having multiple people at the top of the hierarchy does not necessarily require hiring new staff, he said. Instead, he offered, “it should be interpreted as an opportunity for advancement.”

Wolfe, however, was skeptical that the department could function without any sort of director, saying one is needed for tasks such as reporting to the state, providing oversight and SPED-specific crisis management.

“I just don’t see how a full-time teacher has the level of flexibility that's needed sometimes to support the department running as smoothly as it needs to,” she said. “I would never recommend that a SPED department completely eliminate the director or the leader of that entirely because there are too many moving pieces at all times for that to all be distributed out. But my hope was to actually move to more distribution and building more autonomy within all of the professionals.”

Cohen and Borkan had similar concerns about removing the position, both saying it was a necessary role for the school to have filled.

“[This position is] the one that keeps you from getting sued,” Cohen explained. “Which is frankly what schools get into trouble for -- they get SPED lawsuits or a lawsuit from the office of civil rights or the ADA or IDEA. That's when you get into trouble.”

During the Dec. 12 meeting, the board discussed interim solutions for determining the structure of the ESS department going forward with the director position eliminated.

Winfree said he met with four Flagstaff SPED experts to discuss ways FALA could better support its ESS students (only naming one, to the disapproval of meeting attendees).

The committee, which will eventually provide a recommendation to the board, has not yet met and is expected to take “several months” to come to a decision -- Winfree estimated next fall.

In the meantime, the board has hired two experts to help guide the ESS department -- interim director Michele Lucci and consultant Russ Randall, both of whom have decades of experience in special education.

In an email to the Daily Sun, Yih specifically noted their knowledge of IEPs, 504 plans and transition plans, saying they along with school improvement specialist Kara Kelty "have been instrumental in bringing the highest quality of services to our students."

“I want people to understand that the story the board is trying to tell is a lie,” Wolfe said about a month after these meetings. “I, for sure, understand and appreciate that reality is based on perception and that perception is subjective. But this whole 'we’re going to fix the school after we broke it, but we're not going to say that we broke it.' ... It's wrong, it’s gaslighting.”

Like almost everyone cited in these articles, Wolfe described her initial experience at FALA as one of the best work environments she’d experienced in education, and, similar to former dean Jed Hayes, she believed some of the issues came from a lack of support as she entered an administrative position for the first time.

While the 21-22 school year was especially difficult, she said she’d started this year with new staff and a plan to “pivot and grow.” She had hired three educators who were in the process of completing a master’s degree and was building extra support for them. Eventually, she said, the hope was to grow a strong team in-house and move to a more distributed leadership model that matched FALA overall.

Wolfe expressed several concerns with the board’s decision. Among them were Borkan’s absence, that her position was the only one affected by the reduction in force, that the next school year’s budget had not yet been reviewed (she was also a member of the finance committee) and that a continuance clause in her contract meant that reduction in force was one of the only nonperformance (specifically a PIP) reasons the board could decide not to renew it.

Her primary reason for resigning, she said, was the Dec. 13 meeting and the board’s treatment of staff during the open forum that night.

She had also found the situation personally stressful.

“I have plenty of documentation about how the board’s been pretty crappy to me, but it was painful on a different level last night, watching everyone be treated that way,” she said the day after the Jan. 12 meeting.

The school began its winter break on Dec. 16, with students and staff set to return Jan. 2 (snow later delayed the return from break to Jan. 3).

Issues again surfaced after the break, with a total of 10 staff now having resigned, including the student services director. By the end of January, the board had hired three education professionals to help provide guidance for the school -- two specifically for its ESS department.

Two group letters were sent to the board -- one from 14 staff members, one from 47 students -- expressing disapproval with the board’s handling of the situation and asking for changes, as were several individual emails on the same themes.

The staff email, sent Dec. 14, included seven demands they asked to be recognized by 2 p.m. Dec. 16 (the last day of school before winter break), after which they would “have no choice but to coordinate escalating actions until our demands are met.”

The student letter, sent Jan. 11, expressed concerns with Cohen and Wolfe’s removal and the lack of explanation for those actions in particular.

“In the immediate aftermath of your actions, we are left without administrators on our campus and without answers to our questions,” they wrote. “Rather than promote our well-being, you have chosen to take actions that place stress on students and staff, disrupting our education and damaging our school.”

Both emails asked that three board members -- Yih, Winfree and Edgerton -- resign and that some form of staff and student voice replace them, and on the board more generally. This had also been expressed in meeting comments throughout the process.

The board has so far had two community discussion sessions on different syllabus related to the situation in its meetings and, in a letter to the community published Feb. 12, said FALA would hold a public town hall "in the near future."

The Jan. 23 meeting included reports from student representatives and staff advocates -- which Yih said would be the first of many.

In this meeting, he addressed the request to resign, saying it was "a fair request," and that he was past his three-year term, but that it was difficult to find suitable candidates. Winfree gave a similar answer, with both noting that the board cannot legally function with fewer than five members, so to fulfill the request would have risked FALA's charter school status.

Board members also acknowledged the impact the situation was having on students and staff in their comments.

"We will get through this, and I think part of this healing process does start with us being called out and us owning up to the situation that we are in," Yih said. "I'm hopeful, based on your participation today, that we can go down this road together to Excellerate our communications with you, to meet you, to learn from you and to hear your voice."

Borkan said this situation has also caused at least a “handful” of students to leave FALA -- on Jan. 5, Cohen mentioned about 10 leaving over the previous two weeks. Other educators described the effects they’d seen in their students.

“Students on campus are afraid, some of them to the point of tears daily, that the school’s going to shut down and that this is the only place they’ve felt safe at school,” said Chad Fields, FALA’s mental health counselor. “At every other school, they felt ostracized, marginalized and unseen. [They] felt safe here and they’re afraid that’s going to go away.”

One student shared an email they wrote to a board member as part of an exchange in response to the group letter. At the end, they explained why they decided to join the other students in signing.

“Personally, my hope for the letter from students wasn't that it would immediately prompt everything it calls for, because I'd seen nothing that made me expect any quick action," they wrote. "Rather, I hoped that it could demonstrate the cost of the direction the Board is moving in, as well as the stress and frustration it creates for students when we're not given a way to affect that direction."

It went on to read: “At worst, I expected it to be taken as a demonstration of conviction and capability from FALA's students. I did hope and do still hope that it will encourage the Board to supply students the seat at the table we're entitled to, and that the Board will supply us more reasons to believe that our voices actually have an impact on their decisions.”

Fields’ job means he works closely with the school’s ESS team -- Wolfe was his direct supervisor for the roughly 80% of his work that had to do with special education, he said.

Fields has attended every meeting since October and said the board’s actions in that time have seemed “at best, illogical.”

“It feels like a hostage situation, where our care for the children and the services we provide for them are leveraged against our moral sense of integrity to not want to be a part of this system anymore,” he said. “But we know what will happen if we all choose to be a part of this immoral disaster. ... So many staff feel like we have to sacrifice our sense of integrity to be what is just because of our commitment to holding this community together for the students that we love.”

The reassignments and resignations have impacted Fields’ work “massively,” he said in early January. The ESS department went from having a director, counselor, three teachers and an administrative assistant to just himself and one teacher.

Fields said he has been helping out in other areas to try to fill those gaps, and while he’s continued to be able to meet the required number of counseling minutes, ”it’s becoming harder and harder.”

“It’s huge,” he said. “There are compliance issues -- IEPs are tied to legal documents and our funding is tied to the ability to satisfy the stipulations in those contracts with students and their families. We’re getting close to not being able to do that legally and, I would say, definitely ethically.”

Such concerns are echoed by many current staff’s communication with the board and some of the resignation letters.

One current employee, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation, said they would like to resign from the school as well, but needed to stay to support their family’s livelihood. They’d seen other staff making similar decisions.

In an email to a board member in late December, another employee (who asked for anonymity for the same reason) gave the example of the student services team needing to cover multiple positions due to the absences created by the reassignments and resignations.

“I just want to do my job. I want to come to work and be amazing,” they wrote. “I miss where the hardest problem I had was telling kids to get out of the bathroom. I understand we all have the same mission, ‘to do what is best for kids.’ That is hard to do when we ended up in a place of distrust and endless discomfort towards the people around us.”

That email was part of a thread about the third FALA-related police report filed in December.

The first two, filed by Winfree and another staff member, both focused on the same incident, which had happened in May of 2021.

One report summarizes Winfree as saying he’d heard from a school employee that Wolfe had taken a student with disabilities to music class, which was auditorily overstimulating for them and caused significant distress. Wolfe, however, said the student had asked to be taken to the class, the reporting educator had misread the situation and that the student's parents agreed this was not a concern.

Both reports ended with the case being closed unfounded, with the stated reasons that there was no criminal conduct and the allegations don’t rise to the level of child abuse.

The timing and reason behind these reports has been in contention, however.

Cohen and Wolfe both say the board knew about and dismissed this employee’s claim; an email from Yih on Sept. 18 asks the board not to respond to the same source cited in the report, as “at this point, I do not believe [their] claims need to rise to the attention of the board.”

Winfree, however, said he was taking the first step in reporting allegations to the state by calling law enforcement. Hearing that Wolfe had threatened to sue a different staff member if they spoke up about the situation was what “solidified” his understanding that it needed to be reported.

The third report is about a different incident: an alleged kidnapping attempt on Winfree’s child.

On Dec. 15, someone called the school claiming to be Winfree’s wife, according to what Winfree and Cohen said was the understanding at the time. The caller said to send Winfree’s child to meet them outside, and that they were not to interact with any school staff.

Winfree said he was concerned enough after putting the pieces together to call the police about this on Dec. 22. The police report closed the case on Dec. 28, noting that this was likely a misunderstanding, as the parent of another child at the school who had the same first name had called their child out of school at the same time as the phone call in question.

The board brought charges against Cohen at a meeting Jan. 12, delivering them with an intent to terminate on Jan. 26.

Board members went into more detail of their concerns at the meeting as they brainstormed what to include in the charges. (Cohen has admitted to some of these, including breaking reassignment and having a relationship with a subordinate. He said the first was necessary out of a need for safety and that there were no policies against the second at the time.)

Yih summarized the charges in a Jan. 23 meeting as falling into groups of allegations around “inappropriate disclosure of confidential information, violation of administrative reassignments, failure to conduct duties, mishandling of contracts…poor relationship with the board of directors and some unprofessionalism.”

As seen in the comments around the original discussion, particularly an apology Yih made at the beginning, current employees disagreed with the choice to outline these in detail in a public session. To Wolfe and other employees, this discussion wasn’t an act of transparency, because it was both false and unnecessary.

Stating that Cohen broke the terms of his reassignment would have been enough, Wolfe said.

“He has areas to work on in his profile as a leader; we all do, frankly. We don’t all have to suffer through 45 minutes of public criticism,” she said. “Those weren’t discussions. It’s such a gross display of dehumanizing.”

“To learn in the board meeting that James apologized for not taking action in 2020 over things, feels very wrong to take it now. It's 2023. It's punishing us,” another employee wrote to the Daily Sun. “Clearly there have been improvements as all of Eli's staff working near him have stuck our necks out, spoken up, sent emails and said how wrong this is from the beginning. Ron's resignation and letter summed it up that it is wrong and they need to listen to us.”

Board members noted here and in later meetings, however, that Cohen had requested the discussion be done in public, so that is what they did.

When the board turned the floor to Cohen after discussing the potential charges at the meeting, he said he didn’t need to speak, out of concern for legal jeopardy.

“I am not going to deal with lies and whatever. I have legal counsel, we’re done,” he said. “You can continue as you wish.”

The motion passed with four members voting for it, and the two new members abstaining.

This was followed by an explanation of the hearing process from the board's legal counsel, which can be seen about 45 minutes into the recording. 

On Jan. 26, the board took the next step, moving to approve and deliver the charges against Cohen as well as an intent to terminate his employment. It also amended the terms of his reassignment, instructing him not to report to work or act on FALA's behalf until further notice.

He is currently still employed at the school. 

"I hope we can in due time supply more information when we feel it is legally appropriate, good timing, that sort of thing," Yih said in discussion of the motion. "We're trying to be careful here -- in large part, legally. We have heard your concerns about transparency and we're working through that."

Bessler added: "We need to have that due process run through and I just ask for everyone's patience while we let that happen."

A hearing, which will not be open to the public, is set for today. Afterwards, the hearing officer will have 10 days to deliver a report with recommendations to the board, which it will then review in a public meeting.

Minutes of all the meetings, including summaries of public and board comments on the matter, are available on FALA’s website at flagarts.com/governance. Recorded versions and transcripts are available for meetings beginning Dec. 12.