Just two months into his first school year there, the Phoenix school district that hired ex-South Bend schools Superintendent Todd Cummings on Tuesday placed him on paid leave without giving a reason.
What Cummings is accused of remains a mystery, even after the Paradise Valley Unified School District placed him on paid leave at a public meeting Tuesday night.
The district’s Governing Board took the action after meeting for an hour behind closed doors. They quickly appointed an assistant superintendent as acting superintendent and ended the meeting. They had also met in executive session on Monday.
Board president Anne Greenberg and teachers union president Heather Schmidt declined WVPE’s interview requests after the meeting.
Cummings had led the South Bend Community School Corporation from 2019 until June, when he quit under pressure from a newly elected board of trustees. The new South Bend board hired private investigators Tim Corbett and Joe Speybroek to review Cummings’ tenure. Their investigation found evidence that hundreds of students’ grades may have been artificially inflated and credits given for work that was never done. Those allegations have yet to be proven.
Those investigations were happening very publicly in April and May as Paradise Valley was hiring Cummings and negotiating his $280,000 annual contract.
