The Southern Lehigh School Board is scheduled to vote on a separation agreement for Superintendent Michael Mahon, who has been on leave for five months, at a special board meeting Tuesday night.
The agreement is the only action item listed on the agenda for the meeting, which is scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. at the high school. The agenda does not include details on what the agreement includes.
If approved, the agreement would go into effect immediately.
The board has confronted several sets of concerns related to Mahon’s performance, including an employee’s complaints of discrimination, hostile work environment and retaliation, and the glitch-filled rollout of a student information system.
Documents outlining the employee’s complaints were provided to The Morning Call on condition of anonymity. In the documents, Ethan Ake-Little, the district’s director of human resources who is Indian American and married to a same-sex partner, alleges discrimination on the grounds of race/ethnicity and sexual orientation and claims Mahon unfairly targeted him with increasingly aggressive disciplinary action.
An investigation by attorney Ellis Katz concluded that the discrimination and hostile work environment claims had not been substantiated, but that letters of reprimand and an unsatisfactory rating with no pay increase given to Ake-Little were not justified.
At the Sept. 23 meeting, the board voted to remove the reprimands, award Ake-Little — who was not named in the meeting documents — a raise and allow him to report directly to the board president regarding future evaluations or disciplinary actions.
Shortly after the publication of The Morning Call article that detailed the employee’s complaints, Ake-Little was himself suspended with pay pending an investigation into his job performance. He had previously filed a retaliation complaint against Mahon and the school board with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, and the district’s response to that complaint was due June 23.
Ake-Little declined to comment for this story. Mahon did not respond to a request for comment.
Former board President Emily Gehman also found herself under attack after her public criticism of Mahon sparked a backlash among board members who voted to remove her as president during their June 23 meeting. Complaints against Gehman at that meeting revealed the existence of another investigation, this one alleging fraudulent activity by Mahon that Gehman had investigated.
Board members Christopher Wayock, Stephen Maund, Melissa Torba, Mary Joy Reinartz and Nicole King voted in favor of Gehman’s removal, while Gehman, Eric Boyer, Timothy Kearney and Candi Kruse voted against it.
Wayock is among the board members who has most vocally defended Mahon, consistently arguing that due process was not followed in investigations into Mahon’s leadership.
Maund, the current board president, declined to comment on the separation agreement.
Mahon came to Southern Lehigh from Lackawanna County in 2021. He was appointed through June 30, 2026, and given an initial salary of $180,000. By 2024-25, that salary had reached nearly $195,000, according to Pennsylvania Department of Education documents. The terms of his initial contract with Southern Lehigh School District can be found here.
The Pennsylvania Public School Code limits the terms of negotiated severance agreements for district superintendents. Agreements that take place less than two years before the end of a contract term cannot exceed half the total compensation and benefits due under the remainder of the contract term.
Karen Trinkle, the district’s assistant superintendent, has been serving as interim superintendent.