When the news broke that Centennial School District’s top candidate for superintendent was Dr. Abram Lucabaugh, I was shocked that anyone would consider him a good choice. His tenure as superintendent for Central Bucks was fraught with unjustified suspensions and expensive unnecessary lawsuits, as well as book and pride flag bans that harmed education district wide – not to mention the damage to teacher, student, and parent morale. Now Lucabaugh has his sights set on Centennial and the district’s majority right-wing school board is laying out the welcome mat.
First came suspending Andrew Burgess, a long-time teacher at Lenape Middle School. Burgess filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights at the request of one of his transgender students and their family after the school administration did nothing to address repeated accounts of bullying. In retaliation, the district suspended him and then switched his position from Lenape to a different middle school, different course load, and different grade with just days’ notice before the start of the school year.
Then came the lawsuits filed by the ACLU of PA on behalf of both Burgess for wrongful suspension and the LGBTQ+ student population for systemic discrimination against them due to district policies. Burgess won his lawsuit and the district, under Lucabaugh’s leadership, was forced to pay $100,000 in damages, plus his attorney fees.
“This settlement is a win for Andrew Burgess and for teachers everywhere who fearlessly defend their students’ right to be their full, authentic selves,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, in a press statement.
The fact that a teacher like Burgess who was a tireless advocate for his students had to be defended from his Superintendent and right-wing majority school board at the time is deplorable.
Finally came the book banning and Policy 321, both of which Lucabaugh enthusiastically embraced.
The Moms for Liberty-backed school board president at the time, Dana Hunter, secretly colluded with the Independence Law Center (the legal arm of the right-wing Christian PA Family Institute) to rewrite district policy in order to make it easier to ban books, which Reuters reported on extensively. School board members along with local Moms for Liberty parents cherry-picked short passages out of context of these books to justify banning them, not considering that every book in a school library has been carefully and thoughtfully vetted by certified school librarians.
READ: The Bucks County Courier Times Fails Readers With Its Book (Banning) Policy Editorial
Then there was Policy 321: Partisan, Political, or Social Policy Advocacy Activities sounded great on paper. In practice, however, Policy 321 allowed Lucabaugh and the school board to demand teachers remove any pride flags displayed in their classrooms, and to censor anything a teacher said or did that they, the superintendent and school board, didn’t want to hear or see.
When the Central Bucks community soundly voted out every Republican candidate for school board in November 2023, Lucabaugh cut and ran with a $700,000 severance package that the board pushed through, along with a new contract and staggering 40 percent raise, just weeks before the election when they saw the writing on the wall. That severance package, along with over $1 million used to contest the ACLU lawsuits and the $500,000+ awarded to Mr. Burgess to cover his legal fees and damages, was all paid from school district bank accounts. That means the taxpayers of Central Bucks paid over $2 million total to cover legal fees for wrongful discrimination of its students, wrongful suspension of a teacher, and paying out the superintendent behind all these horrible decisions who cut his 5 year contract short by 4.5 years. That doesn’t even include the quarter of a million dollars the district wasted on a PR firm to spin all the aforementioned shenanigans carried out by that school board and Lucabaugh.
READ: Meet Three of the Neighbors Who United to Defend Public Education in Central Bucks School District
If Lucabaugh does become the superintendent of Centennial, it would not at all surprise me if the same thing happens in our school district. Our conservative majority board, along with their like-minded superintendent, will turn our district into a testing ground for right-wing culture wars. The residents of Centennial will fight back and vote them out in November 2025 or 2027 (after hopefully not too much damage is done to our students), and we, the taxpayers, will again have to foot the bill to get rid of Lucabaugh’s toxicity with a severance payout.
Centennial doesn’t have the deep pockets that Central Bucks does, and our student population is much more diverse racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically. Centennial cannot afford Lucabaugh’s price tag (his contract, his lawsuits, and his potential payout), and our students cannot afford his potential support of discriminatory policies.
