Park City School board votes to renew superintendent's contract amid controversy

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PARK CITY — The Park City School District board of education voted 3-2 to renew Superintendent Jill Gildea's contract despite some community members and two board members thinking the decision should be left to the incoming board.

"I'm confident ... that this is the right decision, right now, for this district," school board Vice President Wendy Crossland said Tuesday.

Board members Nick Hill and Meredith Reed, the two newest members of the board — and the only members whose terms aren't ending after this year — cast their votes against renewing the contract now.

"I would prefer that was a decision made by the incoming board," Hill said.

"I would second that," Reed echoed.

Park City School Board President Andrew Caplan, Crossland and Anne Peters — all of whom terms are ending after this year — voted to approve the renewal.

In early August, Hill told KSL.com there had been no discussion among the board regarding Gildea's contract.

"Saying that before we discuss it was unfortunate in that we have a crisis of trust with many in the community — as the petition lays bare — and I don't think we can address it without a robust and transparent goal-setting and evaluation process," Hill said.

The topic became the subject of public controversy in June after Caplan told KPCW that the decision to renew Gildea's contract wouldn't be left to the new board.

This led to Park City residents Josh Mann and Karl Persson launching a petition asking the board to leave the decision of renewing Gildea's contract in the hands of the incoming school board.

"The majority of the board is going to turn over," Mann, who ran for a seat on the Park City School District board in 2022, told KSL.com. "You then have the current school board president who says, 'Yeah, we're going to vote to renew a contract for a controversial superintendent before the next board is seated,' and that just doesn't seem right."

The petition had gained over 500 signatures at the time of the Tuesday's vote.

Mann emphasized that the petition wasn't explicitly calling for Gildea's contract not to be renewed, instead asking to let the incoming board decide the matter.

Still, he doesn't think he and Persson would have gone as far as starting the petition "if the current superintendent had done an amazing job."

Indeed, her tenure has been rife with controversy, including the district being charged with failing to report three cases of suspected child sex abuse to police and the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights finding over 180 reported incidents of student-to-student harassment from 2021 to 2023, among a litany of other issues.

Despite protest from the community and two of the board members, Gildea's contract was renewed with Caplan, Crossland and Peters seeing the renewal as the best way forward for the district.

"What I would ask the community ... is to have some civility and some class, and for someone to get on the radio and say things that are only partially accurate or partially true and have people demand that's the right thing to do without sitting here in this seat, without volunteering thousands of hours, without taking into account other stakeholders ... it's a bit foolhardy," Caplan said.

"We all came here for the people and for the community and let's not change that. Let's not have that be the narrative because it gets clicks on KPCW or The Park Record," Caplan said. "Let's not allow the press to influence how we act towards each other because we're better than that."