Evading Accountability
How a small town in Michigan lost their Director of Business Operations
Last week, I read an article written by a local journalist: TECUMSEH SCHOOL BOARD DISCUSSES $750,000 BUDGET BLUNDER IN CLOSED SESSION. It seems that a budget variance was discovered in a routine audit for the Tecumseh Public School district. The variance was large enough to warrant a closed door meeting with attorneys, and the resignation of our Director of Business Operations, Kelli Glenn. Everyone knows everyone in small, midwestern towns, and I knew Kelli.
A year ago, I ran for school board as a last-minute, write-in candidate opposing an incumbent who somehow managed to slide into a partial term seat unopposed. I reached out to Kelli at the time to gain an understanding of district finance. I’m a strategic planner in my day job, so I know my way around the nerd talk enough to have had an intelligent conversation with her.
At first, Kelli was very helpful. She expected me to be clueless on school finance, and in many ways I was. What alarmed me was her reaction on topics that I did know a thing or two about, like risk analysis. She could explain the daily ins and outs with ease, but when pressed on more in-depth topics, she either froze up, changed the subject, or said she didn’t understand the question.
Months later, a board member pressed her on why we don’t have monthly statements for our financial outlook. In my line of work, we call this our “business rhythm”. Mrs. Glenn gave an awkward explanation that monthly statements are impossible given the nature of state and federal payments. Since Kelli was kind enough to help me before, I offered to return the favor by writing an article explaining the nuances of district finance, specifically the difficulty in calculating monthly statements.
No response.
Evading Accountability
As I attended subsequent meetings, I noticed that more and more excuses were being used. Her school board updates couldn’t be published, and couldn’t be distributed ahead of time. They were often late. She became easily flustered when asked simple questions. She was curiously absent when auditors were present. She was especially evasive in response to a question I asked: how much are we paying lawyers to settle lawsuits against the district?
Normally, this behavior would send up multiple red flags. Not in this small town. I chose to write about this specific incident because it mirrors other situations I’ve seen in places I’ve worked, organizations I’ve volunteered in, and especially in churches I’ve attended. I’ve found that there are a few themes these situations have in common.
Small Town
The small town mentality was definitely to blame here. Board members would commonly say, “we trust the experts” when other board members would challenge data in a financial presentation. The word “expert” here is an assumption of expertise that is unverified. In small towns, the “expert” is a cousin, a friend of a friend, or the high school quarterback in ‘94 who hired his wide receiver from that same year.
A few years ago, this same district removed its high school principal, Dennis Niles, from his position for “non-sexual touching” with students. When pressed on the matter, then-superintendent Rick Hilderley confessed in a recorded telephone conversation that he did not do a background check on Niles because he “knew him”. (Read Here). The phone conversation was never published, but I’ve heard it myself.
In my former town of Crestview, FL, a similar issue occurred. Our mayor, the prior high school band director, hired a chief of police from Central Florida with a record of sexually harassing employees. When a barbie doll was served to a female officer at a Christmas party with its mouth taped shut, it became a scandal (Read Here). The mayor explained that he never ran a background check. Same story, different city.
This mentality affects churches as much as school boards. I once discussed the issue with former Okaloosa County C.O.P. Larry Ward, a fellow Rotarian. He mentioned the difficulty prosecuting those who steal from churches, as church boards can be reluctant to prosecute. Before I joined the military, my own church at Calvary Chapel Merritt Island had $1.2m stolen by their long-time treasurer over the course of years. (Read Here).
To be clear, Mrs. Glenn did not steal anything, nor is anything nefarious suspected. My point is the reluctance of governing boards, or the community, to audit one of their own. This mentality comes with suspicion of outsiders, even when they are more qualified than a “hometown boy”, or girl. For Tecumseh, it bit us in the ass this time. I believe this is why oversight is tough in small towns. It’s not easy to criticize the church pianist, or your student’s father, or especially your 4th grade teacher now that you’re an adult.
Lack of Oversight
I want to take aim at the “trust the experts” mantra I often heard from our school board. I generally agree with this statement in areas with which I’m not informed. I have a masters in business psychology, so I would be inclined to trust my doctor about side effects of mediation over my own judgement. It’s not my lane, and that’s ok. The issue I take in this instance is that the school board serves as an oversight commission. You don’t need an MBA to ask questions.
I often find that lack of oversight is not trust, but laziness. Last year, this same board urged us to “trust the experts” in passing a new sexual education curriculum. When a local parent found a link in the new curriculum for a website advocating for abortion services without parental consent, the socially conservative board president was shocked. In “trusting the experts”, he was sanctioning a curriculum that went against his own beliefs, and board bi-laws. It wasn’t trust, it was laziness.
Midwestern Culture
I was born and raised in Florida, growing up on the Space Coast and stationed on the Emerald Coast. My “culture” is mostly Southern, with some Latin-American and coastal vibes. I noticed something distinct after moving to Michigan. In the South, we’ll get in your face and tell you what we think, then laugh together over a glass of sweet tea. You can hate me, but you better shake my hand and look me in the eye. That’s not the case in the midwest.
Up here, at least in rural areas, disagreement tends to be seen as malicious. It’s offensive. Saying, “I see it differently” in a conversation will shut the conversation down quickly. This plays out in our elections and board meetings frequently. I once attended a town meet-and-greet as a school board candidate at our local VFW. When I approached Trustee Brooks (a board member I openly disagreed with) to shake her hand, she looked at me with a look of disgust not even my mother could conjure. It was unthinkable that I would expect a handshake.
Single Points of Failure
I find the most difficult problem in organizations is a single point of failure. This could be failure in a process, but it could also be a person. If one person holds all the knowledge, then one person holds all the power. If one person has everyone convinced that they hold the knowledge, they still hold all the power. When one person holds all the power, success or failure becomes dependent on that individual.
In his book Citizenville, California Governor Gavin Newsom recounts the 2008 crisis involving San Francisco network engineer Terry Childs, who single-handedly built and controlled the city’s critical FiberWAN system, amassing total administrative access due to bureaucratic silos and lack of oversight. When Childs locked out all colleagues by changing passwords, paralyzing government operations, he was arrested on felony tampering charges and jailed with a $5 million bail; for eight days, he refused to divulge the credentials, claiming he was protecting the network from incompetence.
Newsom visited Childs in jail to plead with him to release the info. The mayor of one of the largest cities in America was brought to his knees, literally, by a single point of failure. In Tecumseh’s case, Mrs. Glenn had that power. Board president Greg Lewis even admitted that with the sudden departure of Glenn and another employee, the district was left with little to no expertise in the midst of a crisis.
Open Sourcing the Community
I’ll admit this last point is a little personal for me. Two years ago, a phenomenal band teacher was facing termination due to budget cuts. I pushed my way through a crowded high school library full of angry community members to volunteer my services. I knew a little bit about finance, I have Fridays off, I offered to take a look at their books and see if I could find any unnecessary spending. Another woman, Heather McGee (a stranger to me at the time), also offered her free services and financial expertise.
No response.
Heather and I ended up running for school board the following year. Heather won, and Heather has been asking questions ever since. I did not win, though I never expected to as a write-in, but I’ve been asking questions through the community blog I created. In the book Citizenville, Governor Newsom suggests that the problem with government is that it does not involve the community. We’ve fostered a generation expecting government to solve problems for us.
He goes on to point out that government should create avenues for the community to solve problems themselves, with the government facilitating. I’ve found that most of the pitchforks on social media have no intention of lifting a finger to solve a problem. Among the 100 railing against unsolved problems, however, there are always one or two willing to solve them. I was one of those two. Through my new blog, I’ve met many more. Unfortunately, no avenues exist here.
Conclusion
The Tecumseh Public Schools budget variance, ultimately a $770,000 underestimation of special education costs, not fraud or lost revenue, exposes a deeper civic fragility that small towns across the Midwest quietly nurture: a lethal cocktail of blind trust in “local experts,” cultural aversion to confrontation, and zero tolerance for outside help. Kelli Glenn’s resignation, the closed-door panic, and the board’s stunned admission of having no one left to run the numbers are not anomalies. They are the predictable collapse of a system that prizes familiarity over competence, silence over scrutiny, and hierarchy over shared ownership. Until communities like ours reject the myth that “we’ve always done it this way” and instead build open, redundant, and welcoming pathways for volunteer expertise, we can expect more “blunders”. In the absence of real oversight, the next single point of failure is already in the room.