Iowa’s stunning, embarrassing immigration mess
By Byron York
September 30, 2025 2:00 pm
IOWA’S STUNNING, EMBARRASSING IMMIGRATION MESS. On May 16, 2023, the Des Moines, Iowa, school board hired Ian Roberts to be its new superintendent. Roberts, the first African American ever chosen to run the city’s schools, formally began the job on July 1, 2023.
By the end of July, the board got some surprising news about their new superintendent. He had been named in a $250,000 settlement with an ex-employee at his previous job as head of the Millcreek Township School District in Pennsylvania. Melody Ellington, the Pennsylvania district’s human resources director under Roberts, claimed she had been subjected to “unlawful treatment.” The nature of that treatment was not revealed. Roberts said he could not comment on a confidential personnel issue, but he insisted the problem “had absolutely nothing to do with me leaving Millcreek and coming to Des Moines.”
Meanwhile, officials at the Des Moines board said Roberts’s problem was news to them. “Given the confidential nature of the settlement, there is nothing that Des Moines public schools would have known about prior to the hiring of Dr. Roberts,” the board chair, Teree Caldwell-Johnson, told the Des Moines Register. “For the same reason, this would not have been picked up by the search firm doing the background check.”
more
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3830765/iowa-stunning-embarrassing-immigration-mess-ian-roberts/
