Only 17 days after her contract was approved, the superintendent for Regional School Unit 21 has resigned.
The RSU 21 board of directors said Thursday that they accepted interim Superintendent Maryann Perry’s resignation, effective Friday.
The school district will pay Perry $8,878 for her work since Sept. 10 and provide a severance of $13,000, the board of directors said.
Perry’s contract, which was to run from Sept. 10 through June 30, 2020, with a salary of $130,000, was approved unanimously by the board on Sept. 9, according to the York County Coast Star. Perry previously served as the head of schools in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
Perry’s tenure at Marblehead came to end this spring after a controversy at the School Department there over her decision to withhold 2018 special education tuition bills for several months before paying them with 2019 funds, according to the Marblehead Reporter. The school committee there accepted her resignation in late February, and she left the district on May 24, the newspaper reports.
That controversy followed her to Maine, where residents in RSU 21 demanded the school board revisit its vote to hire Perry and review the district’s hiring process as well as the findings of an independent auditor for the town of Marblehead, the York County Coast Star reports.
The school board chair, MaryBeth Luce, admitted at a Sept. 16 meeting that the board did not discuss “publicly accessible information” about Perry’s tenure at Marblehead and said that the hiring process “has not been in line with community expectations,” according to the Coast Star.
The eight-member board voted unanimously to appoint Phillip Potenziano as the interim superintendent.
Perry’s resignation comes a day after the district announced Luce resigned over her handling of Perry’s hiring.
“Last week, I apologized on behalf of the board for not meeting community expectations during the hiring process of the interim superintendent,” Luce said in a statement. “Today, I am stepping aside to allow for new leadership to move us forward.”
The school board’s vice chair, Mike Mosher, also stepped down from his post but will remain on the board. A vote for a new chair and vice chair will be held at an upcoming public meeting, which will be announced at a later date.
RSU 21 is made up of the communities of Arundel, Kennebunk and Kennebunkport