The Jim Thorpe Area school board is considering a new policy against nepotism in hiring.

One board member strongly opposes it.

On Wednesday, board members approved the first reading of a proposed policy aimed at discouraging the hiring of job candidates based on their family relations alone.

“When I was running for school board director, the biggest thing people said to me was there’s too much nepotism in Jim Thorpe and they wanted to see that stopped,” board member Cindy Lesisko Henning said.

Nepotism is already addressed in the board’s existing procedures and state law, but the new rule would make it harder to hire someone related to a board member. It would only affect new hires.

Under state law, school board members must already abstain from a vote to hire anyone in their immediate family as well as grandchildren, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, first cousins, sisters-in-law or brothers-in-law.

But the new policy would add an additional requirement, approval from six members, a two-thirds majority.

“We want to make sure that more than the majority approves of this,” Henning said.

The stated goal of the policy is to commit to hiring the most qualified candidates without influence from family relations. Scott Pompa, who along with Henning came up with the policy, said nepotism has been a problem in the district in the past.

Pompa said the board has been doing a good job hiring the most qualified candidates since he joined in 2019, but a policy will make it easier for board members to resist pressure to hire relatives.

“I don’t know if you really have to worry about that anymore. It will be an easy answer: no, I’m going to be looking for the best qualified person,” he said.

Pompa said that before the 2019 election, all but two of the board members had a “direct relation” employed by the school district. He said he also heard many concerns about board members hiring their relatives.

The policy got the support of a majority of board members. Another majority vote at the board’s March meeting would make it official.

One board member made it clear that he opposed any policy restricting nepotism. Strubinger said there have been many valuable employees at Jim Thorpe who were related to board members, and that they could have been denied their jobs if such a policy was in place.

“Our town is a small town. A lot of people, we’re all intermarried too. Don’t forget that,” he said.

Strubinger drew upon examples from outside the school district. He said that when he was an employer and he had a good employee, there was a good chance that their sibling would be a good employee too.

“I worked with Bethlehem Steel Corporation, with people down there whose father, or grandfather was the boss,” he said. “It worked as smooth as smooth can be. I never saw any favoritism.”