Superintendent-elect embellished resume

BOISE – Tom Luna, the incoming head of the state’s public school system, misrepresented his position with the U.S. Department of Education on his resume during his successful campaign this fall.

In a biography on his Web site and a resume provided to Idaho Public Television for its campaign debate series, Luna wrote that he was “Appointed Senior Adviser to Secretary of Education Rod Paige by President George W. Bush.”

However, Luna was not appointed by President Bush, said Bill Hansen, the former deputy secretary of education and Luna’s immediate supervisor at the department.

Paige tapped Luna as a “special assistant” in the undersecretary of education’s office, according to a detailed 2004 directory of executive branch appointments published by the joint congressional Committee on Government Reform.

The Office of Presidential Personnel “signed off” on the appointment, Hansen told the Associated Press. Soon after, in April 2003, Paige named Luna director of a newly formed Rural Education Task Force, he said.

Elaine Quesinberry, a Department of Education spokeswoman who now sits on the Rural Education Task Force, described a similar hiring process.

“Tom Luna was the director of the Task Force, appointed by Secretary Rod Paige and approved through a White House vetting process,” she said.

Luna is not listed in an archive of presidential nominations.

Brian McNicoll, a spokesman for the Committee on Government Reform, said appointments such as Luna’s are not defined as presidential appointments.

Luna said the Office of Presidential Personnel called him in November of 2002 and asked him to file an application as a “senior education adviser.”

He said the White House hired him in March of 2003 to lead an Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities, and a month later he was asked to direct the Rural Education Task Force.

“That’s how they refer to it. It’s a political appointment where you apply through the White House,” Luna said Wednesday. “I could tell you a couple of days after the election, I got a call from White House personnel saying, ‘Would you like to work for the president?’ “

While at the Department of Education, Luna maintained an office but also continued living in Nampa.

Luna said he attended several meetings with President Bush, mostly in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He said Paige or Hansen were also at the meetings.

“One or the other, seldom both,” Luna said.

Hansen said he does not remember any meetings with President Bush that Luna also attended.

Hansen, who was appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve as Paige’s principal adviser, is a Pocatello native. He stepped down in 2003 and now works at an education consulting firm in Washington, D.C., with Paige.

He was one of several top-level officials who helped Luna secure his post in the Department of Education months after Luna lost to Democrat Marilyn Howard in the 2002 race for Idaho superintendent of public instruction.

Last month, Luna, a Republican, defeated Democrat Jana Jones in his second run for the superintendent’s seat. He takes over as head of the Idaho Department of Education and the state’s 620 public schools in January.

Throughout the campaign, Luna offered his stint at the Department of Education as a rebuttal to criticism that he never taught in a classroom or worked in school administration.

Hansen said Luna’s duty on the Rural Education Task Force was to serve as a policy adviser in the Department of Education, an ambassador for the agency at rural education conferences and a liaison between the department and school administrators.

Hansen said Luna was instrumental in reworking parts of the federal No Child Left Behind Act to provide more flexibility for rural school districts when hiring teachers.

Luna also revamped funding formulas and helped restore grant programs for rural schools that President Bush cut from the federal budget. Hansen said Luna excelled in his job.

But some rural educators have groused that Luna left behind a scant work product and his task force produced no meaningful reform.