Geary USD 475 Board of Education members have voted to suspend Junction City High School Principal Melissa Sharp with pay pending further action by the Board. Superintendent of Schools Dr. Reginald Eggleston confirmed that based on the decision of the Board the suspension will be for the duration of the school year.
Eggleston said the Board did a thorough review of the information that was received and have taken their action. He will proceed to work on hiring an acting or interim principal. "That should be soon but we're going to work on that. That's going to be my homework now as the superintendent to start taking care of that."
The BOE decision followed a series of executive sessions spanning over three meetings including 40 minutes behind closed doors Monday evening at the Devin Center. The executive sessions at two previous meetings covered a total of five hours. Board member Jim Schmidt made the motion to suspend Sharp with pay pending further action by the Board and it was approved unanimously on a 7-0 vote.
Sharp has not yet been reached for comment. She is a longtime JCHS principal and before that served as a teacher and coach and as an assistant principal for many years.
The decision to suspend the principal follows a recent incident at Junction City High School where a student was told to remove her Islamic head scarf, known as a hijab. That prompted other students to stage a peaceful demonstration.
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A spokeswoman for the Geary County School District said officials are still determining details of the incident, but a student reported an employee at Junction City High School told her to remove the hijab on Tuesday.
That prompted students to demonstrate outside the school Wednesday before classes started to protest religious discrimination. The demonstration ended without incident, and the students returned to class.
The high school principal met with the students to discuss their concerns and school officials have called a emergency meeting for Friday, which will be closed to the public because they intend to discuss personnel matters, spokeswoman Sacha Dent said.
“We are proud that our students choose to stand up for what they believe is an injustice within their community,” Dent said in a statement. “These young people are our future, and (Wednesday) they showed that they were able to demonstrate peacefully for a cause that they believed in.”
Dent said the Geary County School District does not tolerate bias or discrimination against students and requires “robust diversity training, active community engagement, and more education of different cultures and beliefs.”
The Kansas Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement Thursday that it welcomed the investigation by the school district.
“We will closely monitor the investigation, but strongly believe and demand that the Junction City High School and its school district must examine policies to determine if changes must be made to prevent such incidents in the future,” said CAIR-Kansas Board Chairman Moussa Elbayoumy. “All district personnel, especially school administrators, should be offered diversity training on the right to religious accommodations for students and staff and the proper way to enforce the district’s policies.”