In my previous post about Ian Roberts being hired by the Millcreek School District for the position of superintendent, I had a series of questions, but they barely scratched the surface of what others are now finding.
There is an amazing thread on X.com by attorney Laura Powell, digging into the Ian Roberts story:
Ian Roberts, the Des Moines school superintendent arrested by ICE, has so many inconsistencies in his public biographies that it’s amazing that no one questioned his identity before.
I’ll keep adding receipts to this thread as I find information.
— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) September 27, 2025
If you are not on X, I’ll summarize some of what she’s found, but I highly recommend you check it out yourself.
Missing documents and fabricated facts
The Millcreek school board voted 9-0 on June 29, 2020, to approve the appointment of Ian Roberts as Superintendent of the Millcreek School District. There were, however, many things missing from his required documents.
On July 21, 2020, the board discussed this:
Roberts didn’t even have the documentation of receiving his doctorate, something he should have been able to easily produce. He seems to have an EdD from an online university.
In the photo at the top of this article, you can see there was no I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification stating he was legally able to be employed in the United States, which would have been a clear stop to the entire process.
He was not finger printed by the FBI which would have revealed who he was and likely revealed his previous weapons charges.
The Millcreek schools decided to give him his position on a provisional basis for 90 days during which time he needed to supply all of the missing documents. I found no record in any board meeting minutes to confirm this was done.
Roberts even cited different birth dates, 1970, 1973 and 1978 on various documents and stated he was born in Guyana, but later said he was born in Brooklyn, New York.
He says he was awarded “Principal of the Year” in 2013 from George Washington University, though there seems to be no record of this.
The story gets even more troublesome when he heads over to Des Moines, Iowa, but that’s a story for another day.
School boards and the public need to pay attention
These glaring missteps led to the appointment of a person who had no business working in a school district or anywhere else. Due diligence means you look closely and don’t take someone’s word for it. Did he even have a Social Security number? How closely does our district here in North East look at documentation? Did Attorney Sennett, who was and is Millcreek’s solicitor and who was and is the NE solicitor, follow up on the 90 day limit to confirm Roberts had turned in the necessary legal documents?
During this time period, COVID was in full swing. Did the attention to that lead to everyone dropping the ball on Roberts? Was this a case of DEI policies causing people to look the other way? It’s hard to say, but everything that could go wrong did and it was all preventable. How much did it cost taxpayers for the search firm to come up with a candidate that should not have made the cut. If ICE had not arrested Roberts, would the parents and taxpayers of Millcreek or anywhere else in Erie County ever have known any of this?
If there was ever a wake up call for parents and taxpayers to pay attention to what is going on in our schools, this is it. Will that happen? We’ll see.
Millcreek minutes 6-29-20 Vote to confirm Roberts section 10.01
Millcreek minutes 7-21-20 Discussion of problems with his missing documents section 3.02
Nicole Keller says
I was in public education for 3 decades; because of my husband’s job, we moved around on a regular basis. There are dozens of pieces of documentation that you need to provide in order to be employed as a public school teacher. I am HORRIFIED at the negligence demonstrated by the Millcreek School Board and administration. The parents who were removed from the school board meeting are finally vindicated, but that does nothing to make amends to the very qualified candidates who were passed over in the hiring process. A class action lawsuit against the Board and Administration by the parents of Millcreek is in order.