Richland 2 school board takes steps to oust chair over $52K in unpaid ethics fees

Richland 2 school board has taken steps toward ousting the board chair after continued controversy over her unpaid ethics fees.

On Tuesday, board members proposed a rule that would allow the board to strip a board member of his or her position as chair, vice chair or secretary. The target of that rule is Amelia McKie, who has been facing increasing public scrutiny over her nearly $52,000 in unpaid ethics fees stemming from her failure to submit campaign disclosure forms dating to her 2014 election. Those forms, mandatory for all candidates for public office, show who donated to a political campaign, how much they gave, and how the campaign spent its money.

“I believe what prompted this was the ethics violations and our board chair not filing her ethics reports,” said school board member Lindsay Agostini. “I will support the policy and I think at a minimum, she needs to step down as chair.”

Tuesday was the first time the proposal was introduced so board members did not vote. But that didn’t stop members of the public from calling for McKie’s resignation.

“In view of the $52,000 amount of her fines from the ethics commission, I request she hereby voluntarily step down from the board,” Gus Philpot said during the public comment portion of the meeting.

At the end of Tuesday’s meeting, McKie owned up to the ethics fines and read an apology from a prepared statement.

“I’d like to take a moment... to publicly apologize to the citizens of the district, of our community, our educators, district staff, my colleagues on the board and our students for the personal shortcomings that were recently spotlighted in various media outlets,” McKie said during the meeting. “I made a number of mistakes... I am human. I am not infallible. I am responsible and I am not running from those problems.”

McKie said she and her attorneys are working with the S.C. Ethics Commission to comply with her filing requirements.

Even if the board votes to remove McKie as chair, she would stay on as a board member, said school board member James Manning.

“We cannot remove a member of the board from the board. We don’t have that authority. Only the governor can do that,” Manning said.

Manning said he sees McKie’s ethical concerns as personal problems, and not ones the board necessarily needs to address through official action.

Some have suggested the push to oust McKie was because she is black in a school district that has historically skewed white. In the 1998-1999 school year, the district was 45 percent white. This school year, the district is 21 percent white.

The Richland 2 Black Parents Association wrote in a Facebook post that the issue was about ethics, not race.

“A lot of people are talking about the race component,” Steve Gilchrist, a member of the Richland2 Black Parents Association, said in an interview. “We’re very emphatic that her ethics issues are not race issues.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of the story had the following quote:

“We have had a lot of things said and done in the last couple of weeks in the paper and on the media,” board member Teresa Holmes said during the meeting. “Some of it was racially motivated. I do believe that.”

Holmes called The State after publication to clarify that she did not believe the investigation into McKie or the press coverage of McKie was racially motivated, but that some of the prior press coverage of her and the district was racially motivated.

This story was originally published January 25, 2019 at 4:12 PM.