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The complaint, filed last Friday, alleges that city and district officials not only ignored Correia’s insistent warnings about the budget crisis, but subjected him to public ridicule by “insinuating he had done something wrong.” The lawsuit names the City of Brockton, Thomas, Sullivan, and James Cobb — a district operations leader who served last as acting superintendent in Thomas’s absence last school year — as defendants.
Correia is seeking a trial by jury on the counts that the defendants violated state civil rights and whistle-blower protection laws; slandered and defamed him; interfered with his relationship with his employee; and intentionally caused him emotional distress.
“There was such an outcry by the public when this became announced in late August of last year that the city and the school district was trying to essentially scapegoat my client when, in fact, he was the canary in the coal mine,” his attorney, Timothy Burke, told the Globe.
Correia previously notified officials last September of his intent to file a whistle-blower claim. At the time, Burke publicly released several of Correia’s emails, showing his client sounding the alarm as early as July 2022 about a potential budget shortfall. Throughout the summer and fall of 2022, his emails show, Correia urged Petronio “to implement conservative spending policies in order to avoid major cuts and layoffs” and reel in new contracts, staffing, and transportation expenses. Correia held an emergency meeting with Thomas and Petronio in March 2023 to discuss recommendations for mitigating the shortfall, according to the complaint.
To reign in the budget, Thomas agreed to a hiring freeze, halting overtime pay, and terminating discretionary spending, but those cost-saving measures “were taken to the late,” Correia wrote in an April 2023 email to Petronio. In the email, Correia said he projected a deficit of $13 million.
“After 22 years of experience in Municipal Finance with the City of Brockton, it’s unfathomable to me that all the warnings that I raised for the past year in regards to a potential budget shortfall were ignored,” Correia wrote in the email to Petronio.
In late April 2023, the lawsuit alleges, Correia met with Sullivan, who also serves as chair of the Brockton School Committee, and the city’s chief financial officer, Troy Clarkson, to discuss the shortfall and ideas for offsetting it. But the rest of the School Committee was not informed until months later, just days before the start of the 2023 school year. Instead, according to the complaint, Sullivan publicly denied knowing anything about the budget deficit and shifted the blame to Correia, who was promptly placed on paid leave.
“They put him on administrative leave and suggested that he had participated in wrongdoing instead of actually rewarding him for his diligence,” Burke said.
Spokespeople for Sullivan and Brockton Public Schools declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
Correia’s lawsuit further accuses Thomas of allowing his friends, acquaintances, and business associates to circumvent the district’s standard hiring practice of requiring a completed criminal background check. The complaint alleges that people with criminal backgrounds were permitted to work inside the city’s schools and they were paid for work Correia believed they hadn’t done.
Speaking with Globe, Thomas said he wasn’t surprised Correia had targeted his contracts, which he had signed as part of a community mentorship program in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“These were people of color that we’ve had in the school system for a long time as mentors,” Thomas said. “Did they have criminal backgrounds in their past? Yes. Were they effective with our most troubled students, who were court-involved, who had charges against them for various things, who had real serious behavior issues, who were gang-involved? These mentors — what they did for these kids — saved their lives, kept them out of gangs.”
Thomas said he stood by his mentorship program “100 percent,” adding that one of the program’s mentors stopped a student stabbing at a therapeutic school in March 2023. He declined to comment on the other allegations listed in the complaint.
Brockton Public Schools is among the largest and most diverse in Massachusetts, serving nearly 15,000 students, more than 80 percent of whom are Black or Latino. Its flagship high school made headlines last year due to shocking reports of student violence that left faculty injured and fearing for their safety, a staffing crisis that left students stranded without teachers for hours in the cafeteria, and calls from some School Committee members to bring in the National Guard to restore order.
An independent review commissioned by the state of the district’s shortfall blamed its financial problems on budget mismanagement and inadequate oversight. The report, made public in March, faulted the school system for failing to properly track and approve expenditures.
The city is currently awaiting the results of two separate investigations into last year’s budget fiasco. The School Committee expects to publicly review the findings of one of those probes in the coming weeks.
Deanna Pan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @DDpan.