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DOWNTOWN AKRON — On the evening of Jan. 5, the Akron Public Schools (APS) Board of Education announced they would hold a special meeting Jan. 6 to “conference with an attorney for the public body concerning disputes involving the public body that are the subject of pending or imminent court action” and to “consider the employment, dismissal and discipline of a public employee and/or official and to take potential action, in open session, related to the employment, dismissal and discipline of a public employee and/or official.”
Around noon Jan. 6, the district announced the cancellation of that evening’s special board meeting.
On Dec. 19, the APS board announced it is hiring an independent firm to conduct a “thorough and impartial” review of allegations involving Superintendent Michael Robinson and other administrators.
“It is the board’s responsibility to take any allegations seriously,” the statement read. “The independent firm will commence this review promptly and the board will make its findings public upon completion.”
The West Side Leader reached out to district spokesperson Stacey Hodoh and board President Diana Autry to find out which independent firm is doing the study, and Hodoh stated Dec. 31, “the selection of the firm has not been publicly announced as of yet.”
Robinson has been under scrutiny for several months, after the Akron Education Association (AEA) announced that the teachers’ union was moving forward with a new lawsuit against Robinson and the board. The suit alleges that Robinson tampered with public email records, “sending emails that disappear under his control in an attempt to manage ‘sensitive’ topics,” and that his actions were “a clear violation of Ohio public records laws.”
Last year, the AEA filed nearly 20 grievances, four unfair labor practice charges and a previous lawsuit against the superintendent for his alleged repeated violations of the board’s collective bargaining agreement with the AEA.
Less than two months after Mark Williamson resigned as spokesperson for APS, he sent a letter to the district’s legal department in December 2024, reporting how Robinson treated him and others, including two female reporters. Robinson responded, stating that information is “not accurate and quite disturbing.”
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In anticipation of the APS board’s first regular meeting of 2025, the West Side Leader researched Robinson’s only experience in a superintendent role, based on information listed on his resume.
According to an article in the June 27, 2018 edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Robinson became superintendent of the Pine Bluff School District (PBSD) on June 6, 2016 at an annual salary of $155,000. He served two years and then, in February 2018, asked to have his contract — which was to expire June 30, 2019 — bought out. The Pine Bluff district — which, at that time, had 3,648 students — approved the buyout for $50,000 plus health and dental insurance benefits until December 2018.
Herman Horace, president of the Pine Bluff School Board, was quoted in the June 28, 2018 edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as saying, “Dr. Robinson is well educated. He felt it was time to go. I don’t know if he got burned out or what.”
According to the article, the buyout plan came at the end of a year in which Pine Bluff’s schools had “lost 678 students since the 2013-14 school year, received three Ds and four Fs as the result of the state’s revised letter grading system for schools that takes into account achievement and academic improvement over time on the annual ACT Aspire exams.”
A few months after Robinson left Pine Bluff, a Sept. 14, 2018 article in Deltaplex News reported that the PBSD was declared as “fiscally distressed” and the Arkansas State Board of Education assumed control of the district, firing the interim superintendent who was hired after Robinson’s departure and dissolving the district’s school board.
Mike Hernandez, deputy commissioner for the Arkansas Department of Higher Education, said in the Deltaplex article that “he had worked with previous PBSD superintendent Michael Robinson, but he ‘went in the opposite direction.’”
After his time in Arkansas, Robinson’s resume states he then worked in Houston, Texas, before serving as chief academic officer at East Baton Rouge Parish School System in Louisiana, starting Feb. 1, 2021.
During a special meeting on April 26, 2023, following the March 4 mid-contract resignation of then-APS Superintendent Christine Fowler-Mack, the Akron Public Schools Board of Education hired Ray and Associates Inc. to conduct a search for a new superintendent. On July 10, 2023, the board named Robinson superintendent of the 20,000-student district and gave him a five-year, $240,000 annual contract. He worked with district leaders on a short-term, temporary basis prior to starting his role Aug. 1, 2023.
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The APS board’s next meeting will be Jan. 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Administration Building, 10 N. Main St. It will also be available to watch on the APS YouTube channel. For ongoing reports about APS, visit akron.com.
