Records shed light on Ohio superintendent odyssey

JULIE CARR SMYTH

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — Stan Heffner cel­e­brated his new $180,000 pri­vate sec­tor job over $10 cock­tails, escar­got, and oys­ters at San Antonio’s swanky Tost Bistro Bar in the spring of 2011.

Heffner, who was at the time Ohio’s interim schools super­in­ten­dent, dined with John Oswald, vice pres­i­dent of Edu­ca­tional Test­ing Ser­vice, a lead­ing national test devel­oper, and Oswald’s wife, Ros­alie. The three were toast­ing Heffner’s future as senior leader for K-12 assess­ment at the com­pany and his upcom­ing move to Texas.

Heffner’s flight to Texas had been coor­di­nated by his exec­u­tive sec­re­tary at the Ohio Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion, Car­olyn Jones, while she was on state time, accord­ing to a state inves­tiga­tive files reviewed by The Asso­ci­ated Press. Jones also coor­di­nated other air travel related to his job hunt and sent paper­work using state equip­ment for his pur­chase of a Texas home, records show.

Hef­fer gave up the new job when he was named Ohio’s per­ma­nent super­in­ten­dent last July but before that — and after he accepted the job with ETS — Heffner tes­ti­fied as interim super­in­ten­dent on a bill before the Ohio Sen­ate with the poten­tial to ben­e­fit Edu­ca­tional Test­ing Ser­vice, accord­ing to a report issued by Inspec­tor Gen­eral Ran­dall Meyer.

Heffner issued a pub­lic apol­ogy and then resigned on Aug. 4 in the wake of Meyer’s find­ings. Franklin County Pros­e­cu­tor Ron O’Brien is review­ing the case for poten­tial legal vio­la­tions, and the Ohio Board of Edu­ca­tion is likely to name an interim replace­ment Monday.

Ohio law pro­hibits state employ­ees from using state time and equip­ment for per­sonal busi­ness. Heffner told Meyer’s inves­ti­ga­tors dur­ing his inter­view that Jones, his exec­u­tive sec­re­tary, “was very gra­cious and — on offer­ing to be of help.” She was not a tar­get of the probe.

“The woman is incred­i­ble,” Heffner told inves­ti­ga­tors, not­ing that he would ask Jones to “sand­wich into the sched­ule” a few days to look for a house and she would book Heffner’s flights using his per­sonal credit card information.

Asked if he had any con­cerns about using his pub­lic office in such a way, Heffner said, “I wasn’t thrilled about it, and I didn’t know how else to do it.”

Kat Arohn­son, a head hunter with an exec­u­tive search firm in Boston, had worked the deal between Heffner and ETS for months, accord­ing to inves­tiga­tive documents.

Arohn­son began com­mu­ni­cat­ing with Heffner, some­times through Jones, in the fall of 2010 often using his state email and cell­phone. Jones worked onto Heffner’s sched­ule a trip to ETS’ Prince­ton, N.J., offices in Decem­ber 2010.

Heffner accepted the ETS job in April. Mean­while, Heffner and oth­ers at Ohio’s Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment were prepar­ing tes­ti­mony for him to deliver in the state Sen­ate on May 11, 2011 — a week before his din­ner with Oswald.

He told inves­ti­ga­tors Oswald didn’t want any­thing from him in his capac­ity as interim Ohio superintendent.

“Which I was grate­ful for that ‘cause I thought I don’t know how — it’s a full-time job and a half doing what I do, let alone think­ing I’m going to some­how moon­light or any­thing for them,” Heffner told investigators.

But state inves­ti­ga­tors found that Heffner com­mu­ni­cated with ETS on sev­eral issues in which the com­pany had a busi­ness inter­est dur­ing the period.

The Ohio inspec­tor gen­eral found rea­son­able cause that “wrong­ful acts or omis­sions” occurred in the case. He gave the state school board 60 days to respond.

Heffner told inves­ti­ga­tors that he had told state school board pres­i­dent Debe Ter­har about his plans to work for ETS, and alerted her and other board mem­bers to a blog report­ing his ties to ETS before he was offered the full-time superintendent’s job.

The board did an abrupt turn­around in July 2011 when it hired Heffner to stay on per­ma­nently in his interim role.

Heffner told inves­ti­ga­tors his hir­ing came after “a 48-hour period I would never in a mil­lion years had guessed was going to hap­pen to me.”

Dur­ing that time, Heffner learned that the board’s favored super­in­ten­dent can­di­date was drop­ping out of the run­ning and that there was a prob­lem with the lone remain­ing con­tender for the job. So he put his own name in for the job.

He got the job, pulled out of the ETS job, and put the brakes on a home pur­chase in Texas that was within 24 hours of clos­ing. He said he lost thou­sands of dol­lars on the real estate deci­sion, and reim­bursed ETS for some of the expenses it had incurred.

Posted by AP News on Aug 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.