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Emails reveal Zila scolded board members following Nov. 8 meeting

Deb Zila Email Shawnee Mission School District Board of Education
Click here to read the full text of the email.

Emails obtained under a Freedom of Information Act/Kansas Open Records Act request show that president Deb Zila chastised her fellow Shawnee Mission School District board of education members following their failure to act on some of superintendent Gene Johnson’s proposals at their Nov. 8 meeting.

In a message sent Nov. 10 with the subject line “Disappointment,” Zila tells her fellow board members that her confidence in them has been “immeasurably shaken.” She references the critique Kansas City Star columnist Mike Hendricks published after the Nov. 8 board meeting (in which he said the board had “melted like a cheap candle”) and says she is “ashamed to say I thought we could all ‘walk the walk’ and make those hard decisions when it counted.”

She concludes the message, “I would ask you to ponder your priorities and commitment to the district and its students.”

About the author

Jay Senter
Jay Senter

Jay Senter is the founder and publisher of the Johnson County Post.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in business at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he worked as a reporter and editor at The Badger Herald.

He went on to receive a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Kansas. While he was in graduate school, he also worked as a reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World.

His reporting has appeared in the Kansas City Star, The Pitch and The New York Times, among other publications.

Senter was the recipient of the Johnson County Community College Headliner Award in 2023.

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