Just before Christmas, the principal of the St. Paul district’s largest school emailed her staff with a heartfelt reflection on leading the school through a pandemic.
“The job has always been challenging, but nothing prepared me for the stresses this year would bring,” Stacie Bonnick wrote on Dec. 22, going on to describe feelings of isolation, anxiety and stress but also “moments of unanticipated joy and success.”
To at least one staff member at Washington Technology Magnet School, the principal’s weekly message sounded a little too good.
“Upon reading this it did not seem like her usual writing which is typically of poor academic quality. With a quick google search I was able to determine this in fact was not her work and the entire thing was plagiarized from another principal in another state,” the staffer wrote Dec. 23 in an anonymous email to Superintendent Joe Gothard and school board members, which the staffer later forwarded to the Pioneer Press.
Bonnick liked the message enough that she copied from it again, without attribution, in a January newsletter to Washington families.
“Schools are so much more than academics. Schools are places where people come to be loved, to feel safe, and to be nurtured. Educators provide more than teaching and learning. We are sources of stability and calm during the storms,” the letter read, in part.
Weeks later, Bonnick met with her supervisor and an investigator from the district’s human resources department and admitted she plagiarized another principal’s work.
“You indicated that this was a poor decision on your part,” assistant superintendent Andrew Collins wrote in a discipline letter the school district released this week, four months after the Pioneer Press asked for information about the incidents.
Bonnick was given a one-day suspension without pay on Feb. 5.
That was three days after another Minnesota school leader, Rochester superintendent Michael Munoz, resigned amid charges he used other people’s words in staff communications and graduation speeches.
For students in St. Paul Public Schools, plagiarism is considered a Level 3 — out of five — violation and “may result in a dismissal from school for part of a day or an entire school day.”
Except for a sentence about her own son, Bonnick’s letter to staff is nearly identical to a Dec. 17 Facebook post by Greg Wilkey, principal of East Side Elementary in Chattanooga, Tenn. His 364-word post has been shared over 1,600 times on Facebook and republished by multiple news organizations.
Wilkey, who also writes fiction, told the Pioneer Press he wasn’t aware his work had been plagiarized.
“I am conflicted as to how I feel. On the one hand, I’m honored that my words and my reflections resonated with someone enough to share them. I have always been willing to express my thoughts with the public,” Wilkey said by email Tuesday.
“I know there is always a risk of my words being used whenever I post or share on any public platform. I do regret that the principal in question did not simply give the proper credit, but at the same time, I hold no ill will toward her,” he said.
Bonnick did not return a phone message for this article.
