Coast superintendent rents a house from the school board chairman. Is that a conflict?
As chairman of the Jackson County school board, Troy Frisbie voted to hire Superintendent Dr. John Strycker and is responsible for overseeing his work.
For the past eight months, Strycker has also been renting a property Frisbie owns in Ocean Springs.
While Strycker has been living there, the board has heard complaints from multiple district employees about his behavior at work. Former East Central assistant superintendent Mary Tanner is now suing Strycker and the board for gender discrimination and deprivation of due process.
Attorneys and school leadership experts interviewed by the Sun Herald said that if Strycker is paying fair market rent, it doesn’t appear that there’s a legal conflict of interest. But Frisbie told the Sun Herald that the amount of rent Strycker pays is “confidential.”
And the optics are another matter, attorneys said.
“Is this a good idea? No,” said Tim Holleman, a Gulfport lawyer who serves as board attorney for the Harrison County supervisors. “Does it look good? No. But does it mean that there’s something wrong with it? No.”
Frisbie said it isn’t a conflict of interest for him to rent to the superintendent because there are four other board members.
“If it was just one-on-one and there would be a situation, say, that would come up, then you could say, well you have an argument with that,” Frisbie said in an interview.
School board deals with personnel issues
Strycker’s wife, Debra, filed for divorce in January 2021.
Strycker said his legal address is not Frisbie’s house and declined to answer questions about the arrangement.
“It’s about my personal life,” he said.
The house Strycker is renting sits on a quiet street not far from Singing River Hospital in Ocean Springs. Frisbie lives in a different house in Vancleave.
While Strycker has been living on Frisbie’s property, the board has dealt with situations where Strycker and other district employees were at odds.
Tanner’s lawsuit claims that in February, Strycker informed her he was investigating anonymous allegations against her. But Strycker refused to meet with her, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says she asked Frisbie for a hearing with the board, but he told her “she first had to talk to Strycker.”
Frisbie declined to comment on Tanner’s lawsuit, which was filed in July.
In June 2021, the board received an anguished five-page resignation letter from Strycker’s secretary, Melissa Rayborn, who wrote that he was “downright cruel” and that she feared being involved “in every lawsuit that will be on the horizon because of what he says/does.”
Frisbie witnessed Strycker using crude language, including a derogatory word for women, at a work meeting, Rayborn wrote.
Frisbie declined to comment on Rayborn’s letter.
The Educator Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct adopted by the school board states that unethical conduct includes “Inappropriate language on school grounds or any school-related activity.”
It’s not clear whether the board took any action as a result of Rayborn’s letter.
What do experts say?
Experts interviewed by the Sun Herald agreed that Frisbie’s renting property to Strycker doesn’t appear to violate any laws.
The district’s nepotism policy applies only to family relationships between employees and supervisors.
The amount of rent Strycker pays is relevant, said Alwyn Luckey, who serves as board attorney for the Ocean Springs School District, because if he is receiving a steep discount, he could be indebted to Frisbie and that could affect their working relationship.
Because Frisbie and Strycker won’t say what the superintendent pays, it’s not clear how it compares to typical rents for the area.
John P. Pelissero, senior scholar in government at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said that lack of transparency “just raises unnecessary questions.”
“’Why won’t they tell us what he’s paying rent?’” he said. “... It would appear that they may be trying to hide something.”
And when it comes to a potential conflict of interest, appearances matter.
“That’s the basic reason why conflicts of interest can be so corrosive, is that there may be something going on, there may not be,” said Pelissero, who also serves on a Chicago-area school board. ”But there’s the perception something’s going on.”
Clarence G. Oliver, Jr. served as a superintendent in Oklahoma for 30 years and has written books about ethics for school leaders.
He said that while he hadn’t come across a situation where a superintendent was renting from a school board member, it wouldn’t surprise him that it happens.
Superintendents often move to a community for their job, as Strycker did when he was hired from Butler County, Alabama, and may rely on new colleagues to find housing.
“The superintendent and his or her family lives in a glass house in a community,” Oliver said. “There’s always someone ready to throw rocks.”
‘Stayed away from that situation’
Frisbie did not run for reelection this year. In January, he will be replaced by Amy Arender Peterson, who worked in Vancleave schools for 25 years as a teacher and administrator.
Peterson opposed the bond initiative that Strycker championed, which Jackson County voters rejected. That experience led her to run for school board.
She thinks there should be “a separation” between the board and the superintendent.
“If you are constantly engaging on a casual level, or a business level, outside of the school, does that change how you might view things if the superintendent brings something to the board?” she said.
Former board member Kenneth Fountain, who voted to hire Strycker in 2019 but left the board before he started the job, said that while working with three different superintendents over 24 years, he never socialized with them outside of school functions, conferences and board meetings.
He wanted to make it clear that his relationship with the district leadership was strictly professional.
“I might have, kind of, stayed away from that situation,” he said of Frisbie renting to Strycker.
