AUGUSTA, Maine - Maine Gov. Paul LePage continues to defend his threat to withhold funding for Good Will-Hinckley unless the organization parted ways with its new executive director, Maine House Speaker Mark Eves.
In his most recent radio address, LePage claims Eves' opposition to charter schools in the Legislature and his professional background made him unqualified for the top job at Good Will-Hinckley. But is that really the case?
Gov. Paul LePage began his radio address last week by returning to a now-familiar argument: Mark Eves' past votes on charter school legislation made him unfit to lead Good Will-Hinckley.
"When I heard Good Will-Hinckley had hired Mark Eves to run their charter school for at-risk kids, I thought it was a joke," LePage said. "If Speaker Eves had his way, no charter schools would have ever opened in Maine."
Eves was actually hired to run the Good Will-Hinckley organization, not the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, which comes under its umbrella. Hinckley also runs a college step-up program, in partnership with Kennebec Valley Community College, the Glen Stratton Learning Center for kids with emotional and behavioral challenges, a nutrition program and the LC Bates Museum.
"The kind of conflict the governor is talking about doesn't make any sense to me," says Carl Pendleton. Pendleton worked with Eves, on and off over the past decade, at Sweetser. Pendelton is the behavioral health organization's former president and CEO. "To single out Mark and say that because he didn't support charter schools as a legislator - I don't know, I think that's a bit of a reach."
Former Good Will-Hinckley President Glen Cummings - like Eves a Democrat and former Maine House speaker - opposed charter schools during his time in Augusta. But LePage never objected - publicly at least - when Cummings ended up overseeing the launch of the state's first charter school on the Hinckley campus. In last week's radio address, the governor also took aim at Eves' resume.
"Unlike prior presidents of Good Will-Hinckley, who hold advanced degrees in education administration and have long careers as educators, Speaker Eves' only qualification was being a politician in Augusta," LePage said.
Unlike Glen Cummings, who served as an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, Eves hasn't been an administrator at an education-focused organization. But does that mean that he wasn't qualified to lead Good Will-Hinckley? Not necessarily, says Marc Pitman.
"There's been a shift in school hiring," says Pitman, who runs the Non-Profit Academy, based in Waterville, which advises organizations on everything from executive recruiting and fundraising to board governance.
"Increasingly, over the last few decades, schools have been seeing a need for business leadership and skills sets in understanding human resources, strategic visioning for the future of a school and also fundraising," Pitman says. "The shift that we've been seeing would mean that having the educational background isn't necessarily as important in leading a school."
The actual job description for the Good Will-Hinckley presidency calls for the following qualifications: successful management of financial systems, budgeting, facilities development, and fundraising; administrative experience in strategic planning, evaluation of staff, institutional changes, and technology implementation; and experience working with legislators, state policy makers, and governmental agencies.
At Sweetser, Carl Pendleton says Eves had responsibilities in all of these areas during three years as a business development manager.
"We decided that what we were going to do is we were going to follow a kind of national theme: collaboration and partnership with integrated care. We couldn't think of a better person to help us with it than Mark," Pendleton says. "His role was to make contacts with private physician groups, hospitals, insurance companies - trying to match companies with a similar philosophical attitude."
Pendleton says Eves helped grow Sweetser's business. Eves has a bachelor's degree in psychology and a masters in marriage and family therapy. Prior to his business development role at Sweetser, he spent years working with the kinds of at-risk youth that Good Will-Hinckley's programs aim to help, and supervising other therapists in their clinical work.
As speaker, notes Pendleton, Eves has overseen the operating budget and management of the Maine House of Representatives and five non-partisan offices, including the Office of Policy and Legal Analysis and the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability. When Eves decided to pursue the Good Will-Hinckley position, he asked Pendleton for a reference.
"I mean, when he worked for me, the budget that he was in charge of was much smaller," he says. "The number of people that he was in charge of was much fewer. You know, he'd have to grow into that job. Did, in my mind, he have the capability to do it? He certainly did. I gave them my wholehearted support and wrote a nice recommendation for him."
In early June, Good Will-Hinckley announced Eves' appointment, after a nine-month national search. Maine Gov. Paul LePage sent an initial letter to the Hinckley board, prior to the hiring, objecting to Eves' selection. At the time, Jack Moore, the board chairman, responded to the governor's concerns with the following statement:
"Mark Eves' professional credentials and career in psychology and family therapy, as well as his statewide policy and leadership experience as speaker of the Maine House of Representatives make him the best candidate to lead our school’s work creating opportunity for at-risk and nontraditional students from across Maine."