McMahon began asking questions. But neither Byrne nor the consultant that completed the school's financial reports gave him satisfactory answers. "There was a kind of power in not giving people all the information they needed," McMahon says.
Rebecca Bahr, an ESL teacher at English Language Academy who joined the board a year after McMahon, was also frustrated by the lack of information. Byrne seemed to push aside board questions deliberately. Bahr once asked Byrne for a list of all the school's staff members and their job descriptions. She never got the list. Later, when the board instituted a hiring freeze, Byrne filled some positions without consulting the board.
David Kern
A hazardous profession: Vin McMahon, an ESL teacher at a Minneapolis charter school, was chair of the school board. He wanted to make the school financially stable. Instead, he was laid off.
courtesy of Amber Hougo
Charter schools at their best: Amber Hougo's charter school, Minnesota New Country, has helped her excel. Teachers run the school and there is no administrator.
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The tension between Byrne and McMahon erupted at a board meeting last February. Byrne had disbanded some board committees, and McMahon raised questions.
"I'm your boss!" Byrne shouted, shaking his fist at McMahon, according to two separate accounts of the meeting.
"With all due respect, sir," McMahon said, "when I'm on the board I'm your boss."
McMahon and Bahr started indirectly hearing that Byrne wasn't happy with them. "There were a lot of people talking about Kevin Byrne being obsessed about us asking questions," Bahr says. "People were saying, 'Kevin's very upset about this, he thinks you're trying to undermine his authority.'"
McMahon called a special board meeting on August 20 to review board responsibilities. But 20 minutes before the meeting, Byrne laid off McMahon.
Five minutes later, he called Bahr into his office. Flanked by two security guards, Byrne told Bahr her job was eliminated and she was no longer on the board.
Bahr was instantly suspicious. She asked Byrne if her termination had anything to do with her role as a board member; Byrne said no. She walked outside the school and told her co-workers that she'd lost her job. That was the last straw for the former principal of the school, Jeff Dufresne, who resigned. "It was all retaliation," Dufresne says.
Byrne declined to comment on the lay-offs. He did say that enrollment at English Language Academy is down 100 students from its high of about 300 two years earlier.
"Cuts are painful, and included board members, since being on the board is no job-security guarantee," Byrne wrote in an email.
Despite their layoffs, McMahon and Bahr thought they had a right to retain their board seats. The pair discovered that Minnesota Internship Center's bylaws made no mention that teachers who lost their jobs were automatically off the board.
So McMahon continued to call board meetings. When Byrne sent an email banning McMahon from school property, the board convened at coffee shops and McMahon's St. Paul condominium. In late September, seven of the board's nine members voted to remove Byrne as executive director.
But Byrne refused to step down. Instead, he declared that the board meetings were illegal. Byrne appointed another board chair, Janet White, who called her own board meeting. "Janet White has done an incredible job fighting the people who have illegally hijacked our board," Byrne wrote in an email to school staff. "Please attend the meeting and take the school back!"
Byrne called emergency meetings with the staff to make clear he was the boss. "Kevin Byrne literally said, 'If any of you don't think that I'm the executive director, I won't sign your checks,'" says Linda Duncanson, a former administrator who attended the meeting and was later laid off.
The evening before the October 12 school board meeting, Bahr's email in-box flooded with messages from angry teachers. One threatened to sue Bahr and McMahon if she lost a penny of her pay because of the conflict. McMahon spoke to Pillsbury United Communities, the school's sponsor, and was told the nonprofit would pull out if the conflict wasn't resolved.
McMahon didn't want that to happen, so he stepped down. Bahr asked to be voted off the board. Three other board members also left the board that day. Five volunteers replaced them.
A member of the impromptu new board quickly called for a vote to reinstate Byrne as executive director of Minnesota Internship Center. Three board members voted no, including Hassan Hilowle and John Breyfogle.
Hilowle and Breyfogle's jobs ended shortly after.
"He called me and said, 'Hassan, did you sign the paper to fire me?'" Hilowle says. "I told him, 'Yes.' 'Why?' he said. I started to tell him. But he hung up."
Hilowle's termination letter said he was eliminated because he did not hold a teaching license. Two security guards escorted him out of the classroom, in the middle of the school day, in front of students.
Educational assistant Bahar Hassan was next on the chopping block. He was a vocal critic of Byrne's. Breyfogle and Hilowle went with Hassan to his termination meeting with Byrne. When Breyfogle told Byrne that only the board could fire people, Byrne fired Breyfogle.
"If you're a teacher and on the board, clearly, as this situation demonstrates, your job is at risk," says Dufresne. "It's a recipe for having a board that just keeps its mouth shut."
