Local and state officials are at odds over who is responsible for conducting background investigations as they seek a replacement for former Baltimore school board chairman Brian D. Morris.
Most involved suggest it is someone else's job to search for the kind of troubling history of bad debts and court judgments that led Morris to resign last week from a $175,000-a-year system job, which he received after serving for six years on the city school board.
Gov. Martin O'Malley's office says the state school board is responsible. A member of the state school board said the governor and mayor of Baltimore are expected to vet the candidates. A spokesman for the mayor said responsibility rests with the governor and state education officials.
The confusion is underscored by information obtained this week by The Baltimore Sun that Morris was never awarded a degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, which is listed on his official resume. That detail, which resulted from two incomplete classes in his final semester and which Morris says he had been unaware of and now disputes, was apparently not discovered by city and state officials on multiple levels. Morris' biography on the school board Web site has long said he was a UM graduate.
The process of appointing new members typically begins with the Maryland state school board, which advertises for vacancies, considers applications and forwards its recommendations. The final appointment is made jointly by the mayor and the governor.
A spokesman for Gov. Martin O'Malley, Rick Abbruzzese, said candidates "are appointed under the assumption that the vetting has already taken place at the state Board of Education level."
But Scott Peterson, spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon, said: "The governor and [the Maryland State Department of Education] are responsible for that. You assume when they're coming to you, the screening has already been done."
State school board member Dunbar Brooks said the board gives applicants a sheet with 10 questions, including why they think they are qualified, what issues they believe are important and if they have any conflict of interest.
"We were just screening people to see if they were meeting the minimum qualifications. Then we would send it to the governor and the mayor," Brooks said. "If they wanted to dig deeper it was their prerogative to do so.
"We never had a deep vetting process, because my understanding was that that was not our role."
