A resignation and a firing: Charlotte schools' leadership upheaval | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the peak calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. If I sound a little weird, it's because we are live from the surveillance van at the Jiffy Lube. It's the WBT van, but it does kind of feel like a surveillance van. That's what Craig called it. It does look like it does feel like that. I feel like we're monitoring conversations, except I'm the one talking. But why am I in the van? Glad you asked. We are at the Jiffy Lube on Monroe Road, 9710 Monroe Road in Charlotte, almost into Matthews here. for the seventh annual WBT Little Heroes Blood Drive. We got the One Blood Big Red Bus here, and so they are taking your blood to help fight pediatric cancer. This is Pediatric Cancer Awareness Month, and so we do this every year, every Wednesday in September, and we're broadcasting until 6 p.m. this evening. So come on by, say hello. Don't interrupt me while I'm on the air. We are in a surveillance van, so we're keeping a low profile despite the despite the logos written all over the side. Although maybe we're undercover as a radio van. That's the deal. And so, by the way, if you come in and give a donation of blood, they will give you, Jiffy Lube will give you a 50% discount on an oil change just for supporting the Little Heroes Blood Drive. So come on by and see us. If you need details, go to WBT.com for the locations and all of the other details there. All right. So I got to tell you, it was a very late night for me last night. I tuned in to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board meeting. And it was supposed to start at 6. And then it wasn't starting. And they were playing that elevator, you know, waiting room music. Whatever. And they're playing all that music. And it's going on for like half hour, like 40 minutes or so. And then they finally start the meeting, the open meeting. And, of course, we're all watching to get the report on the investigation into the superintendent, Crystal Hill. They promised they would release this report to the public, and this was the night they were going to do it. So everybody was there for this report. It was odd. I noticed this right away when they come out of the closed session that apparently began, I don't know, like an hour and a half earlier or so. They... They come in, and the vice chairman of the board, Dee Rankin, he's leading the meeting, not the chair, Stephanie Sneed. But she is at the dais. She's sitting there right next to Rankin in her normal spot. But she's not running the meeting. He's running the meeting. And his fellow board members are calling him Mr. Chairman. And so I use my context clues to ascertain there has been a leadership change. Something happened in that closed-door meeting. Stephanie Sneed is no longer the chair of the Charlotte Mecklenburg School Board. Now, I had to wait, like, I don't know, 45 minutes or so for official confirmation that this change had occurred. Don't know what the vote was, because apparently they did it in closed session. Don't know If this was like a vote to remove her, she said she resigned. So I guess not. But we don't know because it was done in closed session, which I'm not an expert on open meetings law anymore. But when I was a reporter, that's the kind of thing that we would have raised came over. You don't do that in a closed session. That is an open session vote that should have occurred. But apparently, what do I know? Maybe the rules have changed. This is the way that they are proceeding forward with the bold new leadership by putting in place the vice chair. That makes total sense. OK, so he's leading the meeting and they start making all these changes to the agenda. They start swapping out different items, adding things in, taking other things out. And one of the things caught my ear that they had inserted, which was the termination of the superintendent. And again, using my highly developed context clue ascertainment skills, I determined, huh, I guess they fired the superintendent too. It took a little while for confirmation of that, but indeed I was correct. So my tuner is still in tune. Good to know. So yes, Stephanie Sneed, the chair, is out as chair. Still on the board, though, because they do need their five-vote block majority. So she's still on the board. And the superintendent is out as part of the bold leadership change to reset and chart a new course for the children, of course. Because remember, everything that everybody does In CMS, or C-M-S, everything everybody does is for the children. And if you oppose them, if you object to something they're doing, well, then you are not for the children. You're against the children, apparently. And the whole time I'm watching this poop show play out last night, I was reminded of the famous quote from Mark Twain. In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards. Some things don't ever change. Okay, I covered CMS 25 years ago. Did it for about eight years. Different characters, right? Different people on the stage. Same dysfunctional poop show. This is why when people talk about K-12 education with me and I tell them, I say the model is the problem. There isn't anything that you're going to be able to do to fix, quote-unquote, CMS, because the problem is the model. We talked about a little bit of it yesterday with Andrew Dunn, when he was going over, like, what are they teaching kindergartners? And some of the things that they're directing in their 52-page quick reference guide, 52 pages is not a quick reference guide, by the way, but in their quick reference guide, they've got things like talking about interpretive dance, like these things are so big and copyright, copyright and fair use laws and, and how it relates to content creators, ability to make art. Like this, these are four and five years olds. Like, what are we doing here? People that the problem is you have people, you have adults that are in the system that are protecting a paycheck, protecting their position. And so whenever they, check the box on whatever it is they were hired to do. They have to now go find something else to do. And it just, you know, mission creep. It just creeps out. It just goes broader and broader, and they're constantly doing more and more work because if they're not doing any work, how do you justify your position and your budget? Also, I regret to inform you that the now former chair of the school board, Stephanie Sneed, is very disappointed in you. Very disappointed in you, the public, all of the adults, and especially the media. It's the media. I'm reminded of a soliloquy that was offered up by the philosopher Chris Rock about the media being to blame for all of these problems. No, Ms. Sneed, this is not the media's fault. All the attention on CMS right now is because The people that are leading CMS have been participating in a fantastic poop show. That's what we're seeing. All right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about create a video. Great local company in Mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos. VHS tapes, film reels, and slides into lasting keepsakes. 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Then, after the trip or gathering, they'll professionally turn your shared moments into a beautiful storytelling video that your whole group can stream and download and treasure for years. Check out GroupTravelVideos.com. That's GroupTravelVideos.com. or call 704-846-7870 extension 206. And when you do that, ask for Katie, but Pete, can I just email? Well, yes, you can. You can email Katie, Katie at group travel videos.com group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. I mentioned Andrew Dunn, uh, in the last segment there, uh, he tweeted out this morning, the biggest obstacle to securing more money for public education is a lack of trust in how it will be used. Last night's Charlotte Mecklenburg school board debacle is just the latest example. And yeah, I would agree with that. Absolutely. Paul says, it's interesting. It seems to me like they fired the superintendent for what would otherwise be viewed as almost like a whistleblower type thing because she sent out a Uh, she sent out publicly a memo describing financial abuses affected by the board. Yeah. Um, I saw somebody make a comment about, I saw somebody make a comment about this. Uh, they're doing yard work right outside the van. Okay. That's awesome. Um, the, um, somebody, uh, I think it was, uh, I think it may have been a commenter or something on the Charlotte observer website. Maybe I don't recall, but they, uh, They were like, oh, yeah, well, you can't talk smack like that. Oh, it was also a school board member. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they were talking about how you wouldn't allow this to occur if this was your employee, like if it was a principal, and the principal went public after being suspended. It's like, well, it depends on what they're going public with, right? If they're going public with evidence... and allegations of corruption, then that would be a whistleblower type of situation. And the thing that apparently got Superintendent Hill suspended was regarding the contracts and her personnel decisions. And we don't even really know at this point what all the specific accusations against her were, but we got the report last night about the investigation that was conducted into her by this outside law firm, and they didn't find anything worth firing her over. It does not appear to have turned up anything. So did they launch an investigation? And if so, what was that vote, by the way? Did they launch an investigation into Superintendent Crystal Hill in order to get her to quit, sign a nondisclosure agreement, and get her to leave? Or did they threaten that she wouldn't do it, and so then they launch an investigation? Because what it appears, based on the memo that she put out, with all of these email correspondence, all of the contracts and such, there seems to be a lot of evidence that the cronyism, the corruption, the contracts that were being handed out to allies was not being done by Hill, but it was being done by the chair. or former chair, Stephanie Sneed, who also, by the by, happens to have been a labor and employment lawyer with the Department of Defense. Yeah, I was a little interested to find out some of her credentials. During the campaign, she talked about how she was an attorney for CPS. And when I saw that, I said, CPS? We don't call guns. at Child Protective Services here in North Carolina. We call it DSS, right? So CPS looks like that was up in Maryland. And so I went looking, I pulled up her, you know, found some stuff on her bio, and apparently she was an employee at the DOD. And she did labor law there. So she would know something about how to review contracts for vendors and such through a government agency. bringing in an outside law firm to then route the money that was set aside. By the way, you know where the money came from? Charlotte Ledger did a big write-up on this this morning. This was from the city of Charlotte for affordable housing. They were going to build, you know, teacher workforce housing over at Garinger. And so there was this pot of money, and then CMS hires a law firm to help with that project. And she then gets Racky McGregor hired by the law firm for consulting work after his contract had not been renewed by Superintendent Crystal Hill. And the money that he was getting paid replaced the contract that he had just lost. And this might be why the... Mecklenburg County District Attorney has referred all of this poop show up to the State Bureau of Investigation. So for those counting at home, yesterday we had our former Charlotte City Councilwoman Tijuana Brown, the formerly incarcerated person and now futurely incarcerated person, sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for COVID relief fund fraud, right? You got her. You've got our Mecklenburg County Sheriff, Gary Not-My-Fault McFadden, he's under SBI probe on allegations that he tried to basically extort and threaten a state lawmaker over her vote on making him cooperate with Immigration Customs Enforcement. And now you've got the entire school district and maybe some elected leadership and maybe some hired leadership. They may be under SBI investigation as well. We just need now somebody from County Commission. All I need is somebody else from County Commission. And then we will have the trifecta, right? It's just, guys, it's unreal. Although, as a local radio host, I do recognize I am in high cotton here. This is a target-rich environment. This is from Danny. Danny. Yes, the school superintendent got her severance pay, but she will get retirement the rest of her life, like $ 150K a year. Superintendent Hill rats out Sneed, and Hill gets voted out. Yeah, so the price tag on this poop show, in case you were wondering what the admission fee is, the severance that they paid her, because they didn't fire her for cause. They fired her for convenience. That's literally what they said. We're firing her for convenience, okay? So she's entitled to one year of severance. That's like $ 341, 000, which is the going rate for a local government buyout to make some elected or appointed person go away. You know, a city or county or like a police chief or something to make them go away. This is apparently the going rate. You know, it's like give them 300 grand, say goodbye. So $ 341, 000 for her severance. And then they talked about the price of the investigation. The price they paid to the law firm to investigate Superintendent Hill, that came in at $ 379, 000. So it cost more for a two-month investigation than it is for an entire year. They could have just let her go before the investigation. They could have just done that, but they did not. So instead, they paid $ 379, 000 to turn around and give her $ 341, 000. So that brings our total up to $ 720, 000 taxpayers have to pay now because of the dysfunctional school board. And maybe corrupt school board. Maybe. Oh, and then they also hired a crisis management firm. No price tag given on that last night, but they talked about how that was part of their response. So they literally had to bring in somebody to manage the crisis. But don't worry, everybody. Be confident. We're hitting the reset, and now it's really for the children. Price tag, three-quarters of a million dollars. All right, let me jump over to the phone lines and see how we fare here with Stacey. Welcome to the program. Hello, Stacey. Hey, how are you? Long-time listener. My husband and I were laughing when the show started. We love your closing tagline, don't break anything while I'm gone. That's right. Nobody ever listens to me. Nobody ever follows my advice. We try. I'll just tell you we tried. I have a quick question. Do you think any of these people will do any jail time? The cool boy. it's too early to say. Well, it's too early to say, I think, because we don't know what all of the evidence will prove or could prove, right? If the SBI comes in and they discover that there was some sort of illegal activity going on with the contracts... Then I don't know. Like, first off, you'd have to you'd have to see the evidence. Then you'd have to determine whether or not it's enough for a conviction. And then, you know, do you see a plea agreement? It's not like, you know, Stephanie Sneed, if this is who we're talking about. It's not like she's a formerly incarcerated person like Tijuana Brown was and so or is. And so, you know, there's no previous record there yet. So she may get probation like Tijuana Brown's two daughters did. Please. Anyway, I just wondered because, I mean, this is so frustrating. I mean, this is insane. Oh, yeah. Everyone is screaming nothing is affordable because of Trump and the gas. And then money that is earmarked for teachers to have affordable homes disappears. And I would imagine you have to sign something or there's an employee handbook that says you can't go get money. It's an offense. I'm just so frustrated by the entire thing. I can't believe it. I just cannot believe. Well, yeah, and we'll see if the contracts that were done... And the superintendent claims that were done without her knowledge. Is that a crime? And I don't know. I don't know what the specific contract law would be. You know who would know? A former labor and employment lawyer for the Department of Defense, Stephanie Sneed. She would probably know that. Well, once again, you know, but she's not, she didn't do that job here. So she's probably going to say, I didn't know the laws in North Carolina. Maybe so. Yeah, maybe so. We'll see. Stacey, I appreciate the call. Thanks so much to you and your husband for listening, too. We appreciate it. All right. Thank you. All right. Take care. Yeah. So, yeah. So just a reminder, I am remote on location. And so there is a delay on the phone lines. I should have given Stacey the heads up on that. But that there's a delay because we're traveling through time and space. with the radio signals and the interweb. All right, let me jump back over. Now, look, you people, and you keep texting here, and if you keep texting, then I'm not going to be able to get to all of the audio sound bites, okay? So if I don't get to all the audio sound bites, I mean, I don't want to say it's your fault, but it is kind of your fault. Also, I am running on about four hours of sleep because at the end of the CMS board meeting as I was watching it, I lost power because of the storms last night. So I lost power. So then I had to wait for the power to come back on, had to reboot everything, had to then go through and salvage all of the audio and do new audio recordings and everything else. And so it was a very, very, very late night for me. So if I sound a little punchy, that's why. Brenda says it sounds like Crystal Hill was fired for being a whistleblower. I thought whistleblowers were protected. Yeah, again, that's something that we're going to have to figure out. 803 number says CMS is too big. It needs to be broken down into several smaller districts. No one person can run a district this large. I remember this argument 20 years ago. There was a guy named John Rhodes. He was a state lawmaker. And along with guys like Jim Puckett, and I think Larry Gavreau may have been part of this effort, there were, especially up in the northern part of Mecklenburg County, they wanted to secede from CMS. They wanted the state to break up CMS because CMS was not building schools in the northern part of the county because there were too many white people up there. They didn't want them to have schools. Why? That's crazy, Pete. Why would you say that? Ah, because we had been operating under race-based desegregation orders. because CMS was a racist district back in the 50s and 60s, or prior to. And so they got put under a race-based desegregation order. That's how we had busing. And so then CMS would bus all of the black kids from there to here and white kids from here to there and meet halfway in the middle, and they would racially balance all of the schools. And then they finally got sued And the courts ruled, OK, you have removed the last vestiges of racism. You guys are OK now. This occurred in like 99, 2000, I want to say. It's one of the first stories I ended up covering as a reporter at WBT. And that time frame, like probably 2002 or something like that. And they were released from the court order. But CMS had gone into court and basically argued, we can't be trusted. We have to stay under the busing order. We're still racist, kind of. And the judge was like, no, you're not. You've got a black school board chairman, a black vice chair. You've got three other members. Like, this is just a, this is silly. And so, but there was this big push to secede because the school board would not build schools in the north because they wanted to keep busing the kids from North Meck down. And so if you don't build schools... The schools get overcrowded. Now you have to send them to the schools that have seats. And so it was an intentional thing. And the state was petitioned to break up CMS. Here's the problem. I come from Long Island. I grew up on Long Island. We had the same problems. When I was the editor of the school newspaper, our high school teachers were going on strike. For the same reasons they wanted, because every budget has to be approved by voters and stuff up there. And same problems. And up there, every single town has its own district. So you have like 150 superintendents and 150 districts and all of that. And they got the same problems. It's the model. It's the K-12 factory model implemented 100 years ago that we ripped off from the Germans. Like, It's not a good model. Again, from the text line, Shannon says, preach it, Pete. CMS has been a monster for years. It was crazy when my now 28 and 29-year-olds were there. The North Mecklenburg area was completely ignored for years. Yes. And I remember during the break, the effort was called the deconsolidation effort. They wanted to deconsolidate. At the time, the legislature was controlled by, well, the House was the speaker, Jim Black, a Democrat. And so this was during Democrat control. And so they did not want to deconsolidate CMS. Now, maybe there's a new appetite to explore this idea. Oh, by the way, Jim Black also went to prison for corruption. Yeah. And then we also had the former mayor. the city of Charlotte, Patrick Cannon, he went to prison. I mean, we really are becoming a world-class city, you know? It really is amazing. Yeah, deconsolidation was that effort. All right, let's see here. 704 number says this whole thing between CMS school board and Crystal Hill is because they found out she's a conservative. What? Is she? I was not aware of that. I have no idea what her politics are. Kevin, the fake Republican... says this price for Hill is going to continue to climb after being fired without cause. She'll sue the city for $ 5 million. They'll settle for $ 3 because they don't want details to come out in court, and she'll have a happy retirement at 49 years old. Now, she could, I guess. She could try to sue for additional monies. I don't know if she'll have a case. Again, we don't have all the evidence to know whether or not there's a strong case or not. But she can be fired. She was fired, quote unquote, for convenience. So not for cause, but for convenience. And the city manager, county manager, and superintendent, they all work at the pleasure of the board. Now, if she was fired because she had uncovered illegal activity, and this was retaliation of some kind, if she can prove that, then yeah, there may be more taxpayer money going out the door uh for that but we'll see um this is uh 704 number says uh ultimately this is 100 the fault of the voters of charlotte mecklenburg yeah no i i agree that's why i keep saying these are choices we don't have to live like this We don't. You know, people keep making these same choices. They keep pretending that this grand governing experiment that is America will somehow just run without people paying attention. Like that's how you end up with this kind of graft is that people don't care, not enough people care, not enough people pay attention, and they just take it all for granted that somebody else will pay attention, somebody else will do it, and they owe no obligation to participating in, dare I call it, our democracy, right? In order to self-govern, you have to be, we have to be responsible and informed citizens. And that is literally why I got into this field of work. The texter goes on to say they must love having their ever-increasing tax dollars stolen right in front of their faces because they keep putting the same people into these positions to rip them off. Yeah, this is where I start looking at the business leaders and even the church leaders. Like, where are you guys on this? Now, I know the Charlotte way. I understand that. You're not going to do these things in public. But these things need to still be done. You may not want to come out and drop a 200-page memo like Superintendent Hill did, but you guys have to exert your influence, as is the Charlotte way. You have to exert your influence because this stuff then starts damaging economic development and the local economy. And all of a sudden, businesses do not want to come here if they think that the city is riddled with corruption they're not going to want to play ball and the only ones that do want to play ball are going to be bad actors um alan says regarding cms school board elect clowns get clown results yep play silly games win silly prizes basically and tracy says uh is there no end to the corruption and collusion with these morons public tax money being wasted just lunacy Yeah, and as far as I can tell, the price tag is now somewhere around three-quarters of a million dollars. Best estimate right now, based on the severance that we pay out. And then also, we're going to pay another superintendent. So add in another salary into that. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to ThePeteCalenderShow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.