AMHERST — Amherst’s superintendent wants out — and will leave her position if the Amherst-Pelham Regional and Union 26 school committees approve a financial agreement in executive session Tuesday.
A confidential memo regarding Superintendent Maria Geryk, sent Thursday by School Committee Chairwoman Laura Kent to committee members, states “that the superintendent has accepted our financial offer that was voted unanimously in executive session on July 13, 2016, in response to her request for separation from the district.”
A copy of the memo was obtained by the Hampshire Daily Gazette.
The separation package calls for Geryk, who has been superintendent since 2012 and has a contract that runs through June 30, 2018, to be paid one and a half years of salary and benefits.
“We will entertain no amendments to the agreement until there is an up or down vote of the presented document in executive session because we have spent over 11 hours of deliberation on this topic,” Kent wrote in her memo, a copy of which was also sent to Thomas Colomb, an attorney for the school committees.
Kent on Thursday confirmed the contents of the confidential email, but declined to provide additional details about the agreement until it is voted on. She said the committees plan to be in executive session no longer than 30 minutes and will then share a statement with the community.
Kent said she hopes minutes from the executive sessions can be released soon after that, so that members of the public will know what was discussed.
“When we release the statement on Tuesday there will be information we will share with the community that will answer a lot of these issues (about) what’s been going on behind closed doors for 11 hours,” Kent said.
Efforts to reach Geryk by phone and email Thursday were unsuccessful.
The committees meet Tuesday at 5 p.m. in the Amherst Regional High School library.
Kent said conversations in the closed-door meetings centered around the terms of the separation. The committees acted after receiving word from Geryk, through her attorney, that she wanted to reach a financial settlement that would result in her leaving her job.
Kent said the issue of why Geryk wanted to leave was not “cut and dry.” Kent wouldn’t elaborate, but said very little had to do with the superintendent’s relationship with the committee.
Geryk, who had also served as interim superintendent for ufour months in 2009, was chosen for the permanent post Feb. 6, 2012, over two other finalists, by two divided school committees, the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee, which represents Amherst, Pelham, Shutesbury and Leverett, and the Union 26 Committee that oversees Pelham and Amherst elementary schools.
Geryk, who lives in Amherst, joined the Amherst school system in 2002 as a special education administrator and previously worked for the Frontier and Gill-Montague regional districts and in Westfield.