GRAND FORKS – Years before his principals and chief of staff filed personnel complaints against him, Grand Forks Public Schools Superintendent Terry Brenner faced allegations of unprofessional behavior from a subordinate he sought to remove.

In 2015, Cathy Williams, then an instructional coach for the district, initiated a grievance procedure after Brenner, her supervisor, placed her on an “improvement plan” and tried to reassign her from the district office.

The school district’s highest-ranking employee’s professional conduct has been under scrutiny since members of the Grand Forks Principals Association filed a complaint against Brenner in April for his conduct while planning budget cuts for the 2024-25 school year.

Grand Forks school board members are currently evaluating Brenner as part of a regular biannual review of the superintendent.

Board members voted in May to subject the superintendent to a “360 evaluation” that sought input from his subordinates.

However, a council committee last month

returned plans to include admin input

in the fall evaluation process, instead assigning a “leadership coach” — to be paid by the district — to solicit administrator input on Brenner’s performance.

Asked for comment, board chairman Dave Berger wrote “it would not be appropriate to comment on a personnel matter” in a Thursday email to the Herald. He cited two School Board policies regarding staff complaints and board-staff relations.

“All school board members are working diligently to complete their evaluations of the superintendent related to his job description and the priorities and goals outlined in the District Strategic Plan,” Berger wrote.

Williams initiated a grievance proceeding against Brenner around July 2015, when Brenner was director of Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment and Professional Development and Williams was an instructional coach in that department.

Brenner had sought in June to reassign Williams from her position in the district office to a high school teaching position.

A little over a year earlier, in April 2014, he had placed Williams on an improvement plan, even though Brenner had given Williams overwhelmingly positive ratings over the past five years they had worked together, according to her performance reviews.

Jane Rupprecht, who worked on the grievance procedure for the North Dakota United state teachers union, said she remembered Williams as very competent. Rupprecht could not understand why Williams had been placed on an improvement plan.

“If an administrator is writing an improvement plan for somebody, I need to see the documentation, I need to see concrete evidence that improvement is needed,” she said Wednesday.

A letter signed by then-Grand Forks Education Association President Tom Young claimed the improvement plan came without reason and interfered with Williams’ ability to perform her duties by excluding her from several workgroups .

He also wrote that there was “virtually no substantive professional communication” between Williams and Brenner in nearly two years as a result of the plan, and Brenner instead sought to track Williams’ progress through anonymous surveys filled out by teachers, which Young he wrote to them. were intended to produce negative feedback on Williams.

“The overall result is that this ‘plan’ hindered, rather than helped, Ms. Williams’ ability to improve her work,” Young wrote at the time.

Brenner’s response to Young’s letter did not address Young’s claims or defend the improvement plan. He rejected a recommendation from the GFEA and North Dakota United to scrap the improvement plan and keep Williams where it was.

Williams and the teachers’ unions appear to have won the day: A canceled transfer form in Williams’ personnel file shows her reassignment to Grand Forks Central High School was canceled, and other than the GFEA letter and Brenner’s response, no record remains of the “improvement plan” or teacher surveys.

Speaking to The Herald in 2024, Williams said she believed Brenner’s actions were prompted by an incident in April 2014. She claims Brenner yelled as part of what she calls “a torrent of anger” at her during a discussions in his office.

(This conflict is not documented in Brenner’s or Williams’ personnel files. Asked about the incident by the Herald, Williams said she should have filed a complaint against Brenner, but did not think to do so at the time. )

The improvement plan, she said, emerged soon after.

“For some reason, he’ll see that he needs to get rid of someone, and then he’ll make up a reason to do that,” she said in August.

Brenner declined the Herald’s request to speak about the grievance procedure.

“The district does not comment on personnel matters,” he wrote in a Thursday email.

Williams continued to work as an instructional coach under Brenner until he retired in 2017.

She told the Herald that her relationship with Brenner did not improve after the complaint and Brenner transferred her responsibilities to other people.

“How can I convey what it’s like to live like this? It’s like he made me a ghost,” she said. “You sit in that chair and you’re allowed to come to department meetings, but you don’t have — I don’t mean power, I didn’t have any power — but you have no role.”

Williams’ claims bear some resemblance to

staff complaint filed in May by Deputy Superintendent Catherine Gillach.

Both women worked for Brenner for long periods and received positive reviews before an apparent falling out with Brenner — though Gillach’s actions prompted Brenner to file a letter of reprimand against her in June 2023, nearly a year before her staff complaint.

Both also claimed that Brenner engaged in underhand tactics to remove them from their positions. In Gillach’s case, Brenner prepared and then put “on hold” a second letter of reprimand calling for her to be fired in April 2024 after Gillach refused a request to resign.

Gillach, according to interview notes from the investigation into her complaint, believed she was being “scapegoated” for the public backlash against proposed budget cuts last year.

Brenner said he acted within his rights as superintendent and sought to remove Gillach because of perceived insubordination and poor decision-making during the budget process.

Williams came forward for the first time after Gillach’s staff complaint was made public, saying he did so to support a fellow professional. She listed Gillach as a professional reference while applying to substitute teach at the district in 2018, but said she hadn’t spoken to Gillach in years before the latter’s staff complaint.

Gillach told the Herald on Thursday that she and Gillach had been “friendly” colleagues but were not friends.

The school board declined to discipline Brenner based on the findings of an investigation by former board president Amber Flynn; Gillach remains employed by the district.

The board also declined to discipline Brenner when the principals’ association filed a personnel complaint against him in April for “lack of cooperation and respect.”

However, the board

voted for new checks on Brenner,

including the leadership coach and 360 evaluation, as well as requiring bi-weekly meetings between GFPA and Brenner until next May and requiring the superintendent to visit each school in the district at least twice a year.