"The Charlottesville school division on Monday decided not to hire a former Indiana educator as Greenbrier Elementary’s new head, five days after publicly announcing the selection of Debra Duncan as the school’s principal.

According to her husband, the reversal stemmed from a 17-year-old unsolved murder near San Antonio, Texas, in which he was a suspect but was later cleared of all charges.

In a Tuesday e-mail, school officials cited “unforeseen circumstances” as the reason for rejecting Debra Duncan’s contract, and city schools’ spokeswoman Cass Cannon would not comment on the situation surrounding the division’s abrupt change in mindset.

During a telephone interview, Duncan’s husband, Eric, said his wife was never investigated in the unsolved murder and the issue had not come up before in any of her other education positions. Debra Duncan had been an elementary principal and assistant principal in Indiana for the past seven years.

“I was the focus of the investigation, she wasn’t,” Eric Duncan said. “The bottom line was, she was absolved and so was I.”

According to Eric Duncan, a member of the Charlottesville community must have researched his wife’s name, found information about the murder investigation and alerted School Board members about it.

Board members contacted Tuesday either would not comment on the situation or failed to return phone calls. The School Board ultimately votes to approve the appointment of any new principals in the division.

In 1990, 11-year-old Heidi Seeman disappeared and, after a 21-day search, her body was found partly decomposed about an hour northeast of San Antonio, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Six years later, Heidi’s father, a former Air Force officer, filed charges against Eric Duncan, also a former Air Force officer, through the Uniform Code of Military Justice. A military grand jury found no evidence to support the charge and it was dismissed, the Express-News reported.

The Duncans may pursue a lawsuit against the school division, said Eric Duncan, who said his wife was not commenting as she continued to interview for jobs.

“I believe it’s fraudulent inducement and a breach of an oral agreement,” he said of the school division’s action.

Cannon said the division’s background check asks candidates to provide three references and one is contacted directly. A background check is not normally conducted on the candidate’s family, she said.

Debra Duncan was scheduled to meet with school officials Monday morning to finalize her contract, according to her husband, when a city school official called her at about 9 a.m.

“She said that she heard about the investigation and said, ‘We are not going to approve the contract,’” he said. “They didn’t want to hear any explanation or rationale.”

The couple had arrived in Charlottesville on Saturday to look for a house and he was pursuing a professor position at the University of Virginia, according to Eric Duncan.

He had left a professor job at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Cannon would not comment on what was said to Duncan on Monday morning and Superintendent Rosa S. Atkins and Faye Giglio, the division’s human resource director, were both at a governor’s conference in Richmond and were unavailable for comment.

School officials will soon name an interim principal at Greenbrier, Cannon said." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, July 11, 2007)