The state’s two key lawmakers on education said Thursday that they want the education commissioner to resign, calling him a bully and a poor leader.
Rep. Michael Merrifield and Sen. Sue Windels, both Democrats, said they are fed up after receiving dozens of complaints about Commissioner William Moloney in the past few years.
“He’s more of a figurehead commissioner than a real active, dynamic” leader, Windels said.
Moloney refused to jump into the fight.
“It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on this,” he said.
Moloney declined to say Thursday whether he would resign. But he said last month after school superintendents wrote a paper criticizing leadership at the state education department that he had no plans to quit.
The lawmakers’ call for resignation came in a news release from ProgressNowAction, a progressive organization that includes one of the State Board of Education’s Democrats, Jared Polis, as a board member.
Polis said calling for Moloney’s resignation has “everything to do with the performance of the department and nothing to do with politics.”
But Republicans on the board dismissed it as a political stunt.
“The circumstances under which these politicians have chosen to disclose their intentions makes it obvious that they are not very serious about it,” Bob Schaffer said.
Board chairwoman Pam Suckla, another Republican, said Moloney “has done an excellent job” as the agent of a board politically split 4-4.
“It’s just purely political,” she said. “They are going to make as much noise as they can.”
But Merrifield and Windels, who lead the House and Senate education committees, said they have heard widespread discontent about Moloney’s leadership from superintendents and board members.
Merrifield, a former teacher, said Moloney bullies superintendents and has created a “negative relationship verging on fear” between school districts and his department.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
