Charles City School District superintendent placed on administrative leave

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Charles City School District superintendent was placed on administrative leave on Friday, April 19, a little more than 10 weeks before her planned retirement, for what the president of the School Board said were allegations that raise questions about her “fitness for duty.”

School Board President Dr. David Schrodt sent a message to school district teachers and staff saying that as of 12:30 p.m. Friday, Dr. Anne Lundquist “is on paid administrative leave pending investigation.”

“The Charles City Community School District has begun an investigation into allegations we received regarding alleged behavior that raises questions about Dr. Lundquist’s fitness for duty and ability to serve as an employee of the Charles City Community School District,” Schrodt said in his message to the employees.

Schrodt told the Press on Saturday that the allegations were not criminal in nature. He declined to give details on what the allegations were, but said, “Not criminal, no, no. I’m not even sure the best way to describe it. I  guess I probably don’t want to say. It’s definitely not criminal. It might be just school district type things.”

Schrodt said he had talked to the school’s attorneys, from Ahlers & Cooney law office in Des Moines, on Friday, and had a meeting planned with them Monday morning where they “will go over in detail what happened and what are the investigative steps, and then what to do from there.”

Schrodt said the allegations had been made by a current employee or employees in the district, and he had just been made aware of them Friday morning.

Schrodt said when he was made aware of the allegations he conferred individually with other Board of Education members, then made the decision himself to place Lundquist on paid administrative leave.

“I felt that it should not be ignored,” he said.

Lundquist, contacted over the weekend, said she was surprised by Schrodt’s action, but she has been advised by her attorney to not comment at this point.

In his message to teachers and staff, Schrodt said that the Area Education Agency had been contacted and will be able to supply a temporary superintendent if needed.

Schrodt said the school’s attorneys told him that if Lundquist’s leave was temporary then a temporary superintendent would not be needed.

“If it’s permanent, then we would need that, and the AEA and I will discuss that on Monday,” he said.

Lundquist had announced in February her retirement from the position, effective on June 30 at the end of the current school year.

Asked if Lundquist’s leave could last until the end of the school year, Schrodt said, “She could decide that if she wants to. I don’t want to decide that for her.”

Asked if the allegations had anything to do with the allegations made against the previous superintendent, Mike Fisher, regarding enrollment figures and how they were handled, Schrodt said, “None. No. Totally separate.”

In January, Fisher, who is now the superintendent in the Oskaloosa School District, entered into a settlement agreement with the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners to resolve a code of ethics complaint that he had violated enrollment reporting policies while superintendent in Charles City.

Fisher said the Charles City School District’s own investigation had cleared him of any wrongdoing while he was still employed here, but a complaint was filed with the Board of Educational Examiners.

Asked if a complaint had been filed with the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners regarding Lundquist, Schrodt said, “It has not.”

Schrodt said he thinks this development is unlikely to affect the school district’s process of finding a new superintendent to start July 1, which has been ongoing since shortly after Lundquist announced her retirement.

“We have six candidates that we are going to be discussing on Monday and we will narrow that down to the final three candidates at that meeting,” he said.

“May 6th is the day that they’ll have an opportunity to meet with the different stakeholder groups,” he said, including school staff, school teachers, administrators and directors, and then the School Board will do formal reviews.

“With the input from the different stakeholder groups, we’ll make a decision from the final three. So I don’t see any concern with that,” Schrodt said.

Lundquist had retired in 2020 after a career in education including serving as the superintendent of the Red Lake School District in Minnesota and holding other administrative roles at the district and state level in Minnesota and Iowa, and she and her husband had moved to north Iowa to be nearer to family and build a home on property they own in Charles City that they had purchased several years earlier.

Lundquist had been teaching second grade at Immaculate Conception Elementary School to fill a vacancy there, and agreed in the spring of 2022 to take the position of interim superintendent with the Charles City School District for the 2022-23 school year after efforts to find a replacement for Fisher had stalled.

She was given the position fully in November 2022. Her latest contract extended her position through the 2024-25 school year, but Lundquist asked the school board during a special meeting on Feb. 1 this year to release her from that latest contract and begin a search for a new superintendent for the next school year.

She said she had intended to retire after the 2024-25 school year, but with recent changes in the Area Education Agencies because of reforms advocated by the governor and passed by the Legislature, there would be a lot of qualified administrators available to fill superintendent positions now.