Pleasant Valley OKs $14,500 agreement with official facing charges

In the wake a scathing grand jury report about illegal activities, retaliation and cronyism in the Pleasant Valley School District, the school board voted to approve a retirement buyout for one of its employees at the center of the issues.

Board solicitor Mark Fitzgerald made a surprise addendum to the agenda, which was followed by a board motion for a retirement buyout to Joshua Krebs in the amount of $14,500.

First, the board eliminated the position of director of support services in favor of a new position titled director of operations.

Krebs, 38, the current director of support services, was believed to be on paid leave for a year while dealing with two sets of charges related to violations of Pennsylvania’s wiretap laws.

Thursday night, Fitzgerald said Krebs has been off the district payroll “for a few months,” but would not give any other specifics related to Krebs’ employment.

The details of the settlement were not revealed Thursday night.

Fitzgerald said there were other options for the district to remove Krebs, but that they could be more expensive in the long run and would not come with the same protections from future litigation.

The directors voted 5 to 4 in favor of the buyout agreement.

“This is one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made a board member,” said newly elected board President Sue Kresge. “Knowing that we will be protecting the board and the district down the road made the difference.”

Directors Len Peeters, Donna Yozwiak, Laura Jecker and Delbert Zacharias voted against the agreement.

Krebs is currently awaiting trial on the wiretap cases on charges he illegally placed a wireless video camera in a break room at Pleasant Valley Elementary School in 2016. He is also facing perjury charges stemming from the incident as well as an incident in a Towamensing Township bar 10 years ago.

The camera captured video and audio of employees in what they thought was a private space where they could make calls regarding family and medical issues.

According to court documents during grand jury testimony on April 24, Krebs made false statements about using the wireless camera before he allegedly placed it in the break room at PVE in April 2016.

He testified that he used the camera in the boiler room in another school for two consecutive nights, because he believed employees were smoking cigarettes, violating district policies. One night the camera worked and the other, the battery died, he said.

Detectives investigating the case said that was untrue, after analyzing a hard drive that captured audio and video from the video camera. They said they found footage of the boiler room from four separate nights between February and March 2016.

The detectives also accused Krebs of lying about the time it took him to review a night of footage. He testified that while fast-forwarding it took him 10 to 15 minutes, which they said would not be long enough to review the footage.

He also denied that he told a custodian supervisor that one of her employees was planning to quit, but detectives said in notes that Krebs took while watching the footage, he had written, circled and marked the name of the employee who planned to quit.

A Monroe County grand jury recently handed down a presentment which recommended additional charges be brought against Krebs, former Assistant to the Superintendent Christopher Fisher and former district Superintendent Carole Geary.

Two weeks ago, the exhaustive 106-page grand jury report was released, with testimony from 64 witnesses and more than 20,000 pages of documents.

In the report, district employee Elaine Adams testified to being on a date and having seen Krebs and middle school Principal Rocco Seiler at a bar where the two were in the company of a young woman who was “clearly intoxicated.” She testified that the two were touching the woman inappropriately and that she appeared to be “scared.”

Adams’ date confronted the two men and got the young woman away from the men. Adams arranged to get the woman a ride home.

Adams recalled being called down to her principal’s office and being asked about the incident at the bar.

The principal at the time was Penny Derr, who told the grand jury she was in a relationship with Krebs.