| THE DAILY REFLECTOR
Glenda Jakubowski's Acceptance
Speech for the First Annual
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The first week in February The Daily Reflector took a chance on a full-time English major in desperate need of a job. Executive Editor Al Clark gave me the education beat. Two weeks later, Superintendent of Schools Howard Sosne resigned a year early -- with a $78,000 bonus. An anonymous phone caller told me that the resignation was due to contract problems. Sosne and the school board wouldn't tell me anything. One school board member vowed the board would never talk to me about the resignation -- that they had come to that agreement. Sosne told county office personnel that anyone talking to The Daily Reflector would be fired. When we pressed the school system to explain the retirement, the official word was that Sosne planned to retire anyway, and that the $78,000 bonus was "compensation" for the year he wouldn't work. So we were stonewalled. Weeks passed, and then months, with no news to report, but in our coverage of the new superintendent search we continued to remind readers of how the county came to be looking in the first place. Meanwhile, Mary Schulken's editorials kept the issue alive for the public and kept the pressure on the school board. Sometimes the public turned on her for that |
stance. "Enough," letters would say. "Let's get on with things; let the school board do their job." The school board's job, Mary said, in one editorial after another, is to execute its fair and honest responsibility to the public--not to make secret deals behind closed doors. For months, I collected documents -- archived news stories from Sosne's former school district and from his salad days in our county, and copies of his 1993 and 1997 contracts. In May I got a call from the state Treasury folks -- Superintendent Sosne was filing for his pension and they wanted copies of the stories I had written in February. Based on information from our articles, Sosne's pension was reduced by $30,000 annually, and the Pitt County school system was refunded $15,000 for its retirement contribution toward the superintendent's over-reported salary. The Treasurey Department would later consider whether to file fraud charges against Sosne. Mary was still writing editorials. And I was still collecting documents. I obtained school board meeting minutes for the months prior to Sosne's signing his first contract in 1993 and his second contract in 1997. And that's where I finally found the contract discrepancy the board had denied for five months and covered up for three years. |
After Sosne's 1997 contract had been approved by the board, but before it had been signed, Sosne had changed one phrase in the multi-page contract by three words. Those three words resulted in tens of thousands of dollars more for the superintendent each year. Most, or all, of the board members -- depending on who's telling the story -- signed off on the contract without noticing those three words, leaving Pitt County with the third highest paid superintendent in the state. In February of this year, when the full board became aware of the unauthorized contract changes, they demanded the superintendent's resignation. Threatened by Sosne with, of all things, a lawsuit for breach of contract, the board agreed to the $78,000 buy-out ... and silence. Armed with these new findings, I began calling school board members for comment. Some still refused to talk, but eventually five sitting members and one former member, and then the superintendent himself, confirmed the story. Mary Schulken summed it up as we stood over the water cooler yesterday: There was nothing glamorous about what we did. I dug and dug, and Mary pounded and pounded, until finally we got it. We had the story. |
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