Longtime Turlock schools employee sues district after board member takes his job
A former Turlock Unified School District assistant superintendent is suing the district, alleging he was forced out of his job and back into teaching last year, which then allowed a former board member to take his top management position.
Mike Trainor — who has been with the school district since 1993 and now teaches physical education at Roselawn Continuation High School — filed a lawsuit July 8 in Stanislaus County Superior Court. He is represented by the Bay Area law firm of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy.
Trainor took a nearly $75,000 pay cut when he returned to teaching.
The school district reported in June 2019 that he had been making $179,143 as an assistant superintendent and would earn $105,552 as a teacher. The lawsuit seeks lost wages and back pay as well as other financial compensation, financial damages for emotional distress, pain and suffering, and attorneys fees.
The lawsuit claims Trainor, 56, was the victim of age discrimination, retaliation for his political beliefs and reporting wrongdoing and coerced into “voluntarily” resigning his management job. A Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy attorney said Trainor would not comment for this story.
The lawsuit names Superintendent Dana Trevethan and former school board member Barney Gordon as well as unnamed others as defendants. Gordon now has Trainor’s old job as assistant superintendent for business services.
The school district referred questions to its legal counsel.
“Given that this is an active legal matter, we have advised the District that they should not discuss specific details of the complaint,” attorney Milton Foster with the law firm Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost said in an email. “Nonetheless, the District disputes the claims made by Mr. Trainor, and are confident the legal proceedings will reveal that the allegations made do not accurately reflect the facts of the situation.”
Gordon had been a member of the Board of Trustees — the elected body that oversees the district of about 14,000 students — for about six years before resigning in April 2019 shortly after Trainor had stepped down as an assistant superintendent. Twelve days after resigning, Gordon applied for the assistant superintendent position.
The Board of Trustees voted 6-0 in May 2019 to hire Gordon, a decision that raised questions of whether Gordon and the district had acted ethically. District officials say they did, and that it was Trainor’s decision to step down.
The lawsuit also touches on Turlock’s contentious 2018 mayoral election, in which Mayor Gary Soiseth was defeated by then Councilwoman Amy Bublak. The lawsuit claims Trevethan and Bublak were friends from college and Trevethan supported Bublak in the election.
Trevethan was angry and retaliated against Trainor, according to the lawsuit, because he supported Soiseth during his off hours, which he was allowed to do. Trevethan also allegedly pursued what Trainor called a witch hunt against Soiseth’s father, Scott, who was the school district’s director of nutritional services and reported to Trainor.
A 2018 school district investigation determined Scott Soiseth had acted outside the scope of his duties and permission when he catered his son’s state of the city address in July of that year by providing coffee and doughnuts. Soiseth was placed on paid administrative leave. The lawsuit claims the investigation was done to embarrass Gary Soiseth and hurt his campaign.
Complaint filed against superintendent
The lawsuit states on the advice of Trainor, Soiseth filed a harassment complaint against Trevethan. Soiseth said in an interview that an attorney for the district conducted an investigation but concluded there was no wrongdoing. But Soiseth said the investigation resulted in the harassment coming to an end.
He said his department had catered city events well before his son was elected mayor in 2014 as well as other events. He said his department catered events for district staff as long as staff paid for it. For example, he said his department provided ice cream and fruit salad for the superintendent’s daughter’s high school graduation party.
Soiseth said he was placed on leave for six to eight weeks and retired in March of this year after 28 years with the school district.
He said his mistake with his son’s state of the city address was in signing an employee’s time card before checking with the employee. He said he assumed the hours were for delivering food to the state of the city address and two other events that day, but they were for making and serving coffee at the state of the city address. That required district authorization, which Soiseth said he did not have. Soiseth said he paid for the coffee and doughnuts.
While Trevethan — who has been with the school district for more than 20 years, and the last five as superintendent, according to her LinkedIn account — did not comment for this story, Bublak did.
Bublak said she and Trevethan were on the Stanislaus State University track and field team in the late 1980s and while they are friendly, they are not friends. Bublak said Trevethan did not support her in the mayor’s race.
Bublak said she knocked on Trevethan’s door at her home seeking her support during the 2018 race. “I asked her for her endorsement and to put a (campaign) sign in her front yard,” Bublak said. “She was vehement: ‘No. I hate politics, and I’m staying out of it.’ I get it, but I had to ask.”
Board member with a grudge?
The lawsuit also alleges that while he was still on the school board, Gordon and school board member Frank Lima pressured Trainor to improperly allocate more funding from $100 million in school bonds voters approved in 2016 to schools in their neighborhoods because better school facilities would improve the value of nearby homes.
The lawsuit claims the two tried to intimidate Trainor, and Trevethan pressured him.
Lima denied the allegations and provided The Bee with this statement:
“Certain allegations have been made in a complaint filed by a disgruntled employee of the district. As to those allegations pertaining to me personally and my character, I absolutely refute and deny the allegations and look forward to the facts being properly adjudicated before a judge, and if necessary, a jury.
“Because this is a pending matter before the court, I cannot offer a further response at this time, but I look forward to the actual facts of this case being made public in the proper forum.”
Gordon allegedly had resented Trainor since 2013 when Gordon unsuccessfully applied for the job of the district’s director of technology and later learned Trainor had given him a low score during his job interview, according to the lawsuit. The technology director would report to Trainor, and the lawsuit alleges the district improperly let Gordon know about the low score. The lawsuit claims Gordon, Trevethan and Lima were friends when Gordon applied for the job.
Gordon had applied for the job before he joined the school board. The board appointed him months later to fill a vacancy. During his time on the school board, Gordon as well as Lima and Trevethan “each made it known to Mr. Trainor repeatedly that Mr. Gordon was still upset for not being offered the Director of Technology position.”
Gordon declined to comment, saying in a text message: “Our legal counsel’s comment will suffice.”
The lawsuit states Trainor’s 27 years with the school district had been one of steady advancement, from physical education teacher to dean of students, assistant principal, human resources director, assistant superintendent for human resources and then assistant superintendent for business services starting in 2011.
Positive performance reviews
Trainor held that last position “without incident, and in fact, received overwhelmingly positive performance evaluations, and regular accolades from superiors, colleagues and students,” according to the lawsuit.
But the lawsuit claims Trevethan in October 2018 accused Trainor of misconduct in his supervision of Soiseth and told Trainor repeatedly about complaints that Lima and Gordon had about him.
The lawsuit says the complaints were a pretext, vague and unmerited and that Gordon was improperly using his “influence as a public official to complain about Mr. Trainor with the specific intent of pushing him out of his job as Assistant Superintendent of Business Services.”
The lawsuit claims Trevethan gave Trainor a negative midyear review. Trainor knew he could be fired based on two poor performance reviews and his annual review was due within months. The lawsuit also alleges Trevethan regularly asked Trainor when he planned to retire and made other comments related to his age.
The lawsuit claims Trainor complained about Trevethan to human resources but nothing was done. Trainor realized if he did not do something he would be fired, according to the lawsuit, so he decided to step down from his position and return to teaching.
‘Trainor did not wish to leave’
“(O)n April 4, 2019, Mr. Trainor made the extremely difficult decision to accede to the Defendants’ desires and request a ‘voluntary’ demotion ...,” according to the lawsuit. “Mr Trainor did not wish to leave his position, but regretfully knew this was the only way to maintain a job with the District.”
Gordon then resigned from the school board April 16, applied for Trainor’s old job April 28, and was hired by school board May 21, according to the lawsuit. The “defendants’ plan had worked,” the lawsuit alleges.
Gordon had been director of information systems for the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District since November 2015 in the Bay Area and had worked for Stanislaus State and Modesto City Schools before that.
Gordon acknowledged in a June 2019 Bee story that his transition from elected official to district employee was not typical, but he and the district said then it was done in a legal, transparent and ethical manner. The Turlock district has said he was the most qualified of the 15 applicants and that two independent, five-person panels rated him as their top choice.
Trainor did not respond to several requests for comment in June 2019 when The Bee first wrote about the school district hiring Gordon to fill Trainor’s old job.
This story was originally published August 7, 2020 at 4:30 AM.
