On Jan. 31, 2023, Mahomet-Seymour Board President Max McComb wrote an opinion piece for the News-Gazette in rebuttal to what board member Meghan Hennesy said at the Jan. 17, 2023, regularly scheduled board of education meeting. The following are just excerpts from those pieces. Hennesy’s speech (Jan. 17) can be found here. McComb’s opinion piece (Jan. 31) can be found here.
This project is not an attempt to look at every issue that was brought up in its entirety. This publication has reported on some of these issues before. In those cases, links are provided so that each reader can learn more about the issue. The articles that follow are an attempt to look at the claims each board member brought up. In some cases, one board member named others. In those cases, this publication looked at what happened surrounding those claims. All of the articles can be found on this page. Each article also includes documents and videos referenced.
We understand that this piece comes two months after these events took place. We have taken time to watch discussions of every topic over the last three years, to look at board agendas and minutes from the same time period, to read emails, to send FOIA requests and to undertake a major project in analyzing TIF data. This work took time, and that is why it took so long to complete.
Quotes from Max McComb
“Dr. Colleen Schultz, her partner [Hennesy] on both the school board and the Sangamon Valley Public Water District Board, called off from the meeting so that Mrs. Hennesy’s walkout would take the board down to three members present. What she did not realize was that because the board was temporarily at five members, we had received guidance that our quorum to do business was temporarily at three.”
Max McComb
Looking Back
It is not unusual for board members to be absent from the Mahomet-Seymour School Board meetings. on Jan. 17, 2023, Schultz had a family issue come up and was not able to attend the meeting.
The difference between Schultz’s absence and absences prior to this meeting, was that McComb, with the guidance of district legal counsel, shrank the size of the seven-member board to a five-member board as they had removed Jeremy Henrichs and Ken Keefe on Dec. 19, 2022.
Henrichs moved from his out-of-township home in May of 2022 while Keefe allegedly moved from his out-of-township home in Nov. 2022. At the Dec. 19 meeting, Keefe maintained that the out-of-township home was still his residence, while McComb held that his residence was in-township when he put his home on the market. Former board member Cheryl Melchi was able to remain on the board of education with her home on the market until she closed on her home in 2017.
The law states that the board should consist of seven members, three outside the township and four inside the township. To learn more about this issue, click here.
Under the same circumstances at the Dec. 19 meeting, the board of education could not meet without a quorum of four present. That day, Keefe and Henrichs were removed from the board in consultation with the board’s legal counsel. At that time, the board was recognized as a seven-member board.
It was not until the Jan. 17 meeting that constituents learned the district had received guidance from its own legal counsel that the board could function as a five-member board in the vacancy of Keefe and Henrichs, meaning the meeting could go on with a three-member quorum.
There is only one other time that the board has not been able to establish a quorum. As board members showed up at Mahomet-Seymour High School in the summer of 2017 for a discussion on the enclosed Middletown Prairie Elementary playground, they realized only three members were present. Not knowing where the other board members were, calls were made until they were able to establish a fourth member to phone in. No one was blamed for trying to stop a meeting from happening.
It seems that Schultz’s absence would have only been an issue if the district hadn’t established a five-member board. Seeing as they had done so, did the board president have an obligation to inform all other board members? Or did he leave them in the dark, hoping that they might not come to the meeting in order to blame them for trying to halt a regularly scheduled meeting?
Perhaps we’ll never know the intentions behind why people make the choices that they do.
Hennesy did come to, and leave the Jan. 17 meeting. She stated,
“And so tonight, I’m going to actually take a stand because I can. And I’m not interested anymore in this performance art that’s being done. I don’t want to participate in it anymore. I refuse to participate in it anymore. And so tonight, I appreciate you listening.
“I came here tonight so that my voice and my reasons can be heard and people couldn’t make up stories about what it is that I’m doing and why I’m doing it. And I thought it was important because that has happened time and time again. And a person having their own voice and being able to have their own message is vitally important. It’s something we should be teaching our kids. And so I came here tonight to use mine, and I thank you for listening. Now I’m going to go.
Meghan Hennesy
Schultz and Hennesy are both currently on the Sangamon Valley Public Water District Board. Their term is up in May of 2023.
