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Novato school board president scrutinized over racial slur

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Novato school board president scrutinized over racial slur

The president of the Novato school board has prompted an internal investigation after allegedly uttering a racial slur during a discussion with two district administrators.

Ross Millerick said the slur on April 27 in a teleconference with Kris Cosca, the district superintendent, and Jonathan Ferrer, an assistant superintendent, according to a preliminary report. The subject was the hiring of athletic directors.

Millerick was recounting an incident during a 1998 San Marin High School basketball game where some students shouted the racial epithet at the team, the report said. Millerick restated the epithet while describing what happened.

The word upset the administrators, and an investigation was ordered by the Marin County Office of Education ad hoc committee overseeing the district’s operations. Robert Henry, legal counsel to the county office, supervised a private investigator who was retained for the probe.

The ad hoc committee released the preliminary report late Tuesday.

“Instead of referring to the epithet as ‘the n word,’ he used the entire word to describe what was said at the 1998 event,” the report says. “Mr. Millerick thought more supervision at sporting events could help crucial similar situations in the future.”

The report says: “Mr. Millerick did not use the ‘n word’ as a pejorative directed at assistant superintendent Ferrer or superintendent Cosca.”

“The anecdotal story by Mr. Millerick was intended to be supportive of minorities and was designed to inform superintendent Cosca and assistant superintendent Ferrer of what happens where there is a lack of adult supervision at high school events,” the report adds. “There was no evidence Mr. Millerick endorsed the use of the word toward African Americans or other people of color.”

Henry said Wednesday that the probe’s findings were serious enough to release in preliminary form.

“This is an elected official,” Henry said. “Unlike an employee, for whom at least initially, great care would be taken to deal with the confidentiality in an allegation of this kind, when an elected official, in a setting such as that, says something, I don’t think that is entitled to the same level of confidentiality.”

Millerick, contacted Tuesday evening, declining to comment. He also declined to say if he would step down.

According to Henry and Mary Jane Burke, the Marin County superintendent of schools, Millerick said on May 6 that he would not resign from the board. He has been a trustee since 1991.

None of the six other Novato board of trustees was available for comment. Three trustees — Derek Knell, Diane Gasson and Julie Jacobson — were appointed last week to serve on the new ad hoc committee.

No formal complaints have been filed in the incident, Henry said.

The investigation will enter a second phase next week with interviews of about 15 people who were involved in the aftermath of the incident, Henry said. Releasing the preliminary findings this week was intended to prevent misinformation from circulating, he said.

“Once the telling, and the retelling, and the retelling of what the board president said occurs, you always are concerned that everybody who is hearing this understands what the context was,” Henry said. “Once I saw what the context was, it was my strong recommendation that we needed to get this out to the school community.”

According to the report, both Ferrer and Cosca stayed on the teleconference after Millerick left the meeting to discuss “how Mr. Millerick’s comment was inappropriate and upset assistant superintendent Ferrer.”

Cosca “immediately contacted Mr. Millerick by telephone and told him the use of the entire ‘n word’ was inappropriate,” the report says. “Mr. Millerick apologized and explained his intent was not to offend anyone but to share a very disturbing historical event in the district with the hope that future actions could prevent those types of incidents.”

On Wednesday, Cosca said he agreed with the findings of the probe.

“I am committed to using this experience to make NUSD a better place for everyone within our community,” Cosca said in an email.

“One important next step in making this happen is culture sensitivity training for the board and myself, to be held in June,” he added. “This will be followed up by ongoing training for our management team starting in June and moving into the 2021-22 school year.”

According to the report, the district is “identifying resources for additional training to support the administrative staff in the area of disrupting casual language, behavior and systems that are rooted in overt or systemic racism.”

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