School owes explanation for this good-bye gift

While the text of the Iowa Constitution lacks the prominence of that adopted by our nation’s Founding Fathers, people from Ackley to Zwingle and points in between should track down a copy and give it a read. 

Buried away in the document adopted by Iowa voters in 1857, they will find Article III, Section 31, or what has come to be known as the public purpose requirement. That section says, in essence, that state and local governments are barred from spending public money unless there is a public purpose for those expenditures.

My public-school education tells me that section prohibits the use of taxpayer money to continue to pay someone for work after their performance ends unless the government entity provides justification of the public purpose served by those payments.

Where I come from, going-away gifts do not serve a public purpose. And this brings me to the Des Moines Public Schools and last week’s news headlines.

On November 18, the school board convened a closed session. The purpose, its agenda stated, was “to evaluate the professional competency of an individual whose appointment, hiring, performance or discharge is being considered when necessary to prevent needless and irreparable injury to that person’s reputation.”

At the conclusion of that private discussion, the board voted to accept the already-tendered resignation of Robert Lundin, the district’s chief academic officer, effective June 30, 2026.

Lundin was a “strategic consultant” before joining the Des Moines schools in May 2024. For reasons it never been made public, the district placed him on paid administrative leave last October 6. He has not worked since then.

As part of a “separation agreement” that was made public the day after the board “evaluated” Lundin and accepted his resignation last week, the public learned his paid administrative leave will continue until the school year ends next June 30.

For those keeping track of dollars and cents, Lundin pocketed six weeks’ salary while on administrative leave and now will continue to collect a salary at an annual rate of $195,658 for seven more months.

So, between now and June 30, the district will give Lundin approximately $114,200 to do work that ended October 6. That is roughly equivalent to what two Des Moines teachers are paid for working the entire school year. 

The school board has given no explanation why it will pay this money to an administrator who will have only worked about three months of his 12-month contract — or how he has earned that compensation for days he will not work or provide services to the Des Moines Public Schools.

The board offered no explanation of its rationale — or of the supposed public purpose for that expenditure.

Phil Roeder, the director of communications and public affairs for the DMPS, said in an email to me, “This separation was a mutual decision and not based on any discipline or misconduct by Dr. Lundin.”

OK. But if a $50,000-a-year teacher asks to be released from a contract in the middle of the school year, the district will not pay the teacher through the end of the school year the way Lundin will get paid. Instead, the district’s master contract and policy manual warn teachers the district will assess those who resign early a $1,500 fee for breaking their contracts.

This is not the first time the school board has embarrassed itself with a lack of transparency and candor with taxpayers. In 2022, when Tom Ahart resigned as Des Moines superintendent with one year left on his contract, the board entered into a similar separation agreement. In that instance, the Ahart agreement cost the taxpayers nearly $400,000 in compensation for the year he did not work.

Beyond the public-purpose requirement of the Iowa Constitution, a few other factors in Lundin’s departure should concern Iowans.

State law requires government employers to make public what are called “the documented reasons and rationale” for the demotion of a government employee, for the person’s termination or for the employee’s resignation in lieu of termination.

If Lundin’s resignation truly was voluntary, as DMPS leaders claim, then why give him a lucrative good-bye present? 

Why did the school board need to meet in closed session to discuss his job performance, since his resignation was dated four days prior to the board meeting? No reasonable employer evaluates the performance of an employee who has quit.

Was the board going to refuse to accept his resignation — even though the separation agreement had already been written and signed by Lundin?

And if his departure was not his decision alone, then where are the “documented reasons and rationale” that lawmakers said must be made public when a “resign or else” directive is given?

Without facts and openness, only the school board members and Robert Lundin know what led to his administrative leave and then his resignation. Only the board knows whether it was as cavalier as it looks to fork over a $114,000 gift from taxpayers as he departed.

Almost 50 years ago, W. Ward Reynoldson, Osceola’s folksy Supreme Court justice, wrote about a “plain judicial intent to permit the concept of ‘public purpose’ to have that flexibility and expansive scope required to meet the challenges of increasingly complex social, economic, and technological conditions.”

But in tough economic times and tight budgets for public schools, it hardly seems possible that complex conditions support stretching the term “public purpose” to encompass parting gifts paid to highly compensated public employees, especially when they are allowed to ride quietly into the sunset without completing the work they were hired to do.