New Concord Elementary School Principal Accused Of Spying On Rochester School Board Member

CONCORD, NH — The new principal of a Concord elementary school is a former superintendent who was involved in a two-year wrongful termination lawsuit, settled earlier this month, involving allegations he ordered an IT director to grant him access to the emails of school board members and union officials, essentially spying on them.

Kyle Repucci, the former Rochester superintendent hired by the SAU 8 Concord School District on May 6 to lead the Broken Ground Elementary School, was sued along with members of the Rochester school board and the Rochester School District for the wrongful firing of a whistleblower, David Yasenchock, the chief technology officer for the Rochester district for about 23 years and a U.S. Army reservist and colonel for 32 years. The firing occurred two months after Repucci ordered him to search for emails between board members and union officials, extract them from the district’s information technology system, and provide those emails to him, according to a court filing. The purpose, according to Yasenchock, was to see if school board members had worked on a file presented by union officials to the board.

Yasenchock said another Rochester school board member, the chairman, Paul Lynch, had also been involved in the request, and he was concerned that the request violated school board policies and procedures. Other IT employees echoed the concerns.

Yasenchock claimed Repucci “also requested access for himself” and Saundra MacDonald, the assistant superintendent at the time, so they could access stored emails on their own to review communications. Yasenchock wrote to both Repucci and MacDonald and asked that they put the full scope of the request in writing. Yasenchock said he was then “summoned” to Repucci’s office where both he and MacDonald confronted him. He left the meeting, he said, “after gauging the level of hostility in Repucci’s demeanor.”

When he left the meeting, he stated, “I am a very ethical person, and this is going nowhere, and I feel it is my obligation to report this to the full School Board; thank you very much.”

Yasenchock claimed Repucci confronted him as he left the building, which resulted in “a manifestation of intrusive memories and anxiety” due to Yasenchock’s post-traumatic syndrome due to his military service. He also has a doctorate, according to the filing. Yasenchock believed Repucci “failed to make reasonable accommodations” for his mental disability and “exploited (it) when he followed, harassed, and confronted” him outside the building.

Municipal Resources Incorporated was then hired to find a firing justification of Yasenchock, the lawsuit said, and “created a false narrative” to discharge him.

Repucci recommended the board fire him, which they did, in November 2020.

As CTO, Yasenchock was being paid $90,515 annually.

Months after his firing, Karen Stokes, another Rochester school board member, learned she was the target of the email search, both her school board account and personal account. She said there was a police investigation that confirmed her emails were data-mined.

“The Rochester Police Department said it was against policies but not illegal,” she wrote on Facebook in August 2021, eight months before Yasenchock’s lawsuit was filed. “Is this what you want from your elected officials? Neither individual has admitted any wrongdoing. What stops them from doing it again? To you, your spouse, your neighbor, etc.”

Stokes and other residents were also frustrated the board refused to open an independent investigation into the spying.

In the Yasenchock case, filings and motions were made during the next two years.

Part of the lawsuit was vacated, including emails and video evidence, with each side attempting to make their points, but other parts stood and were admitted as statements of facts. The district’s attorneys counterclaimed Yasenchock lied during a police interview about an interaction in a parking lot between him and Repucci. They also claimed he had doctored the timecards of some IT members, which violated school policy, although no specifics were given as to why the timecards were doctored.

Jury selection for the lawsuit was scheduled for May 6. However, the court was informed on April 8 that the case was probably going to be settled and an agreement would be filed within the month. On May 8, the court was told the matter had been officially settled.

Repucci did not respond to an email seeking comment about the lawsuit.

Yasenchock’s attorney, Philip Pettis of Boynton Waldron in Portsmouth, also did not respond to a phone call seeking comment about the settlement.

But in a statement to the Rochester Voice published Sunday, Yasenchock confirmed the out-of-court settlement and the parties had resolved their differences.

Concord Hires Repucci, Doesn’t Mention Lawsuit

Repucci was one of 30 candidates to apply for the open principal position at Broken Ground Elementary School.

Eight candidates were interviewed for the job by a search committee, which included Jessica Campbell, the recently elected Zone A school board member representing Wards 1, 2, 3, and 4, who moved to the state from New Jersey a couple of years ago.

Originally, School Superintendent Kathleen Murphy wanted to merge the Mill Brook and Broken Ground schools to save money and create a seamless transition process between the two schools. The combination of administration between the two schools would have made it the largest elementary school in the district — something that probably should have been done during the elementary school consolidation plan and would have led to savings of at least $2 million in salary and benefits savings since the Mill Brook Primary School was built. After the proposal was floated and a meeting was booked to discuss it, the Concord Education Association and others proposed a vote of no confidence for Murphy. The superintendent, in reaction to the outcry, pulled the idea.

Repucci was interviewed during the Concord School Board meeting on May 6. He said, during the past year or so, he had discussed with his wife about getting closer to students and staff, which is why he became involved in education in the first place. Repucci said he was looking forward to working at Broken Ground.

Repucci said he initially went to school to study health science, but that was not his passion. After volunteering at the Boys & Girls Club in Massachusetts, he discovered his passion was working with children. He spoke about his teaching and principal duties in two states and how he moved into administration in Rochester. Repucci said he did not know if it was the right move, but if it were not, he could always return to being a principal.

“After eight years in central office,” he said, “I find it’s the right time to get back my true passion, which is working with students and staff on a daily basis.”

Another board member asked Campbell how the process worked. She called it “fantastic” and said there was “a wide range” and “great, diverse group of candidates.” Campbell said a wide range of people from the community and district were involved in the search committee, including parents, teachers, administrators, and the board. Each member then created their own personal rankings of all the candidates, like a grading rubric.

“And I will say, for Kyle, it was unanimous,” Campbell said. “It was the only candidate where everyone just truly thought you were wonderful,” Campbell said. “It was a great interview.”

The Concord School Board meeting featuring their questions for Repucci runs from 1:08 to 11:57 in the video below.

During the meeting, neither Campbell nor any school board member mentioned anything about the lawsuit, which was still active at the time, according to court documents. The information was available online in media reports.

The school board later approved hiring Repucci.

Campbell did not respond to an email or text message seeking comment about the hiring process.

Murphy Defends Hiring

In an interview Thursday, the day the court filed paperwork indicating the case was settled, Murphy said she knew about the lawsuit but not the specific allegations against Repucci.

Murphy checked his references and was told the matter was settled even though the settlement had not been officially filed with the court during his interview process about a month before.

“There was an agreement, but they just hadn’t filed all the paperwork,” she said, adding she knew what was in the settlement paperwork.

Murphy said some of the 30 applicants were not qualified or did not have the principal certification. Those applicants were funneled down to eight. She said the committee felt they needed a principal whose experience was not with a “little foo-foo school” but “somebody who came from a district that had experience” and had dealt with severe, complex issues like poverty. Murphy said that a committee went through the entire hiring process, and Campbell knew about the lawsuit when she was involved in the interview. Campbell, she added, volunteered to be on the search committee.

“The committee had parents and teachers,” she said. “There was 100 percent unanimous support for the candidate.”

When asked if the search committee members were informed about the lawsuit, she said, “They knew about it.”

Murphy also said the role of the superintendent comes with “a lot of baggage” and cited examples in her career with decisions made by boards that she had to implement, as well as other superintendent decisions agreed to by boards. She commended him for keeping schools open during the coronavirus pandemic and said she spoke to board members and others in the district who praised him.

“I called everybody I knew over there and talked to people,” she said.

Murphy did not speak with Stokes, the board member who was spied on.

Some Right-To-Know Requests Denied

Patch made a right-to-know request for the names of the 30 candidates who applied for the job, the resumes of the eight interviewed candidates, and a list of the search committee members besides Campbell.

Murphy said Repucci was the only finalist and released his resume.

She also released the list of questions used by search committee members during two rounds of candidate interviews.

The questions in the first round were generic in nature — about social-emotional learning; diversity, inclusion, and or cultural competence training received; keeping staff engaged; and frivolous, open-ended intelligence-gathering queries like “tell us about an accomplishment for which you are particularly proud of?” and “tell us about an ‘expert in the field’ that you highly regard and influences your practices?” None of the questions included anything about the lawsuit or how to increase proficiency, student outcomes, or educational excellence in one of the most difficult elementary schools in the district.

The second round of questions involved curriculum the candidates were excited about, more diversity questions, managing budgets, collaborating with other elementary schools, teacher strategies, restorative justice practices, promoting civility in the workplace, and addressing chronic absenteeism. None of the second round of questions included anything about the lawsuit and only one question was about “student achievement” — and it was how data was used to solve a problem and monitor progress not actually achieve it.

Murphy, however, rejected the request for the names and resumes of the other candidates, citing the “internal personnel practices” and “files whose disclosure would constitute invasion of privacy” exemptions of RSA 91-A.

Hiding behind the personnel provision keeps the public and the press from knowing how many other qualified applicants there were for the job before Repucci was hired or whether they were involved in lawsuit concerns or other issues easily found by a 60-second Google search and a few minutes perusing the Rochester community Facebook site.

Repucci Gets Bought Out

Repucci’s last day working for the SAU 54 was Monday after the Rochester School Board voted to buy out his contract on May 16, wishing him well in his future endeavors.

According to Fosters.com, Repucci was paid $60,000, the remainder of his salary and accrued paid time off. The school board chairman, Shane Downs, said Repucci was not fired but declined to say why they bought him out for the rest of the contract.

Repucci announced he was resigning from his position at the end of June in early December 2023.

According to documents received by Patch, 12 of the 13 Rochester school board members were involved in a nonpublic session in late September 2023 involving RSA 91-A:3 II (a) and (c) — which deal with “dismissal, promotion, or compensation of any public employee or the disciplining of such employee, or the investigation of any charges against him or her,” and “matters which, if discussed in public, would likely affect adversely the reputation of any person.” In attendance were Repucci, Jerome Grossman, a Rochester attorney who specializes in real estate law, wills and trusts, and other services, and Olivia Bensinger of Shaheen & Gordon in Concord, a litigation attorney specializing in civil rights, employment, and general commercial litigation.

It is unknown exactly why the meeting was held.

Repucci had been the superintendent in Rochester for a little less than four years after being an assistant superintendent in the district for three years. He also spent six years as a principal in Epping, was the dean of students before that, and taught English Literature in Dover and Westwood, Massachusetts, for six years.

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