Vinton County school board faces public complaints against two staffers

Five speakers used the Vinton County Local Board of Education’s March 16 meeting to air complaints about two Vinton County Middle School staffers, teacher Sarah Clancy and Head Custodian Jared Wright. Four of the speakers were adults and one was middle school student Jaedyn Auxier, and the complaints were unrelated except that they both involved Middle School employees.

The meeting was held at South Elementary in Hamden, not at the District Office in McArthur, where the board normally meets. That shift placed the public discussion in a school building at 38234 State Route 93, a campus that opened in August 2007 and serves 237 students. For families in Vinton County, that made the meeting about more than two employees. It also raised the question of how the district handles complaints once they are spoken aloud in public.

The district’s staff directory lists both Clancy and Wright, and identifies Wright as head custodian at Vinton County Middle School. On the board side, Cindy Strausbaugh is listed as president and Mary Ann Hale as vice president. With names, jobs and school locations already in the public record, the central issue shifted to process: what formal steps the district uses to receive complaints, whether those concerns are investigated, and what discipline or follow-up can follow when multiple people raise issues in the same meeting.

Those questions mattered even more because the board’s late-March calendar already included another personnel matter. The district scheduled a special board meeting for March 30 at 5 p.m. at the District Office in McArthur to set a hearing on Rene Sherwood and unpaid medical leave under Ohio Revised Code Section 3319.13. Together, the March 16 complaints and the March 30 personnel hearing showed a board already dealing with employee issues in public view, and parents were left to judge whether the system was responding with clear action or just moving from one personnel problem to the next.