Social divide, Facebook toxicity hampering progress in Richland 1, former member says

Lila Anna Sauls was in the unique position of sending her kids to one of Richland 1’s highest performing schools, but also being in touch with the district’s neediest students.

Sauls, who sent her five children to the A.C. Flora High School cluster, is also the president and CEO of the Columbia nonprofit Homeless No More. And until Tuesday, she was a member of the Richland 1 school board.

“I had always been this person in the community who was just able to sit at any table,” Sauls told The State.

She wants to keep helping children in the district, but had no interest in running for a second term in 2020.

There are personal reasons Sauls didn’t run again — she’s about to finish up her doctorate from Northeastern University in Boston. But one of the main reasons she stepped away from the school board is because the Richland 1 community is so divided that the toxicity — driven in large part by social media — has distracted the board from its most important missions and kneecapped meaningful progress, she said.

As a result, after four years in office she felt ineffective, she said.

“I don’t necessarily blame myself for that. I blame where the community is and where the nation is,” Sauls said.

The same social media phenomena dividing and radicalizing those in the United States is poisoning local politics and pitting people against each other, Sauls said.

“This culture of only finding the negative with the district, with the schools, with the people that they’ve never met, it’s being fed by the ability to type a paragraph and hit send,” Sauls said. “There are no face-to-face conversations.”

Though there is always a droning buzz of controversy somewhere on local politics, the turning point for Sauls came when a group of parents in a Facebook group began questioning the legitimacy of Homeless No More, the non-profit organization she leads.

Social media posts questioned the salary she received from Homeless No More, which topped $120,000 in 2018. They questioned the travel costs and whether the Homeless No More — which runs multiple homeless shelters and provides affordable housing to needy families — actually does anything in the area.

“What it showed me was this group was not interested in what really matters, which is the issue of education and helping fix any issues. What they were interested in was diversion, shock and awe, burning it down from the inside-out and making it personal when this respected non-profit had nothing to do with anything they had an issue with,” Sauls said.

“It broke my spirit,” Sauls said.

Nonprofits have to publish an IRS form called a 990 that discloses nonprofits’ costs, expenses, etc. Guidestar.org, which monitors non-profits and posts these 990 forms, has given Homeless No More its platinum seal of transparency, according to the website. That’s Guidestar’s highest level of recognition.

“I learned quickly with social media even if you try to reply and say ‘this isn’t true,’ it doesn’t matter,” Sauls said. “That’s not just local. That’s social media in general.”

Sauls has been urging people to get off social media and talk face-to-face. She had been trying to do that on her own Facebook account by posting her personal cell phone number to her campaign page, offering to meet district parents in person, but almost nobody took her up on that, she said.

“I begged people to talk to me. If you have issues with my vote… I will help you understand what the problem is or I will help you find the answer,” Sauls said. “I would never hear from people.”

The issues for which Richland 1’s board caught heat on social media — such as spending district money on personalized jackets — missed the big-picture work being done such as boosting graduation rates and feeding students in a district where three in four students are in poverty, Sauls said.

For many low-income parents, some of whom may be single parents or have multiple jobs, “They don’t have time to send emails. They don’t have time to show up at board meetings,” Sauls said. “The mother whose child isn’t eating isn’t going to call me on a Friday night.”

Going forward, Sauls said she will continue to help out at the school district and believe she can do more through Homeless No More than on the school board, she said.

“I’m the same person they elected four years ago,” Sauls said. “I didn’t run for a title.”

This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 12:00 AM.