LR5 board rebukes member in response to Spearman on banned books, avoids censure
Lexington-Richland 5 responded to a letter from the state superintendent with a rebuke of one of its board members, but did not pass a formal censure against the member.
The school board voted Monday to send a formal response to state Superintendent Molly Spearman defending the district’s book policy and criticizing board member Rebecca Blackburn Hines for writing to the head of the state Education Department about book complaints in the first place.
The board voted 4-3 to send the letter to Spearman. Nikki Gardner, Jan Hammond, Catherine Huddle and Ken Loveless voted in favor of the letter. Hines, Matt Hogan and Tiffani Moore voted against.
But the board ultimately rejected a motion censuring Hines for sending the letter to Spearman, also by a 4-3 vote. Hammond joined with the three board members rejecting the letter to vote down the censure motion.
A censure is a non-binding resolution expressing a public body’s disapproval of an official’s actions. The motion at Monday night’s meeting, introduced by Huddle, would have also barred Hines from serving as a board officer in the future.
The letter approved by the board accuses Hines of violating board policy by acting on her own without board approval.
Hines wrote to Spearman asking how best to handle parental complaints about potentially obscene books in school libraries, after some parents had read sexually explicit passages they objected to at the Jan. 24 board meeting. Spearman responded that the department had warned districts to review its libraries for some of those books earlier in the school year.
“District Five’s Board and administration failed to do its job by properly vetting the obscene materials in question, even after the state very publicly encouraged them to do so,” Spearman wrote in her Feb. 8 response.
The board’s response, read by Gardner on Monday, pushed back against that assessment.
“(Hines’) letter was never discussed with or agreed to by the board,” Gardner said, and other board members were not aware of it before Spearman responded.
Use of board letterhead
In moving to censure Hines, Huddle went further, accusing her of acting unethically in sending the letter.
Accusing Hines of “privately using board letterhead to contact the state superintendent and throw our superintendent under the bus,” Huddle said, “she undermined the integrity of our board with the state department and our community.”
By using the letterhead, she “falsely created the impression that the board endorsed the contents of the letter,” Huddle said.
Loveless said Hines’ letter misrepresented the school district’s policy on books, which he said is similar to the state department’s recommended policy.
“Is this legal? I don’t know,” Loveless said of Hines’ letter. “Is it appropriate? I think not.”
District policy says a formal complaint about any content in a school will be reviewed by both a school and a district committee appointed to examine its appropriateness and educational value. The committee can decide to remove the book.
Superintendent Akil Ross said legal precedent wouldn’t allow him to unilaterally remove a book, and the board’s attorney advised board members against voting by themselves to remove specific books.
The district previously told The State that no books have been removed from school libraries, because the district has not received any formal complaints that would initiate the review process.
Hines pushed back against her critics’ characterization, saying she wrote as an individual board member and as a district parent, not on behalf of the entire board.
“I was sent (district) letterhead for use as needed by the superintendent’s secretary, when I was acting as a trustee,” Hines said.
She said she had previously sent other public letters to officials using the same letterhead, and other board members had “liked” those letters when she shared them on social media, without raising concerns about them.
Hines said the censure motion was meant to send the message that “if you disagree with the status quo, you will be attacked and shut down.
“If you act in good faith, you will be bullied and publicly reprimanded,” Hines said. “If I’m censured, I’ll look my girls in the eye and say I did what I thought was right.”
Second censure motion
Monday’s motion was the second formal censure motion taken up by the school board in the past year. In June, the board voted 4-2 to censure member Ed White for violating the confidentiality of the board’s closed door executive session. White had publicly resigned at the previous meeting and accused Loveless, Gardner and Huddle of bullying then-Superintendent Christina Melton out of her job.
The board also initiated a lawsuit against a former superintendent for criticizing the board’s hiring of an interim superintendent. Stephen Hefner was one of several former officials who wrote to the district’s accrediting agency questioning the contract with then-Interim Superintendent Akil Ross, which was structured as an agreement with Ross’s education consulting firm, HeartEd LLC. Ross has since been hired as the permanent full-time superintendent.
Although the accrediting agency, Cognia, ultimately took no action on the complaint, the board voted to sue Hefner for attempting to interfere with the contract and for bringing the district into disrepute, demanding he apologize for sending the letter.
The board reaffirmed the lawsuit with a 4-3 vote in December. Hefner has counter-sued, saying the board is attempting to violate his First Amendment free speech rights.
Hines previously voted against both the censure of White and the lawsuit against Hefner.
Other board members Monday were critical of the decision to move a censure motion.
“Is the issue the letterhead, or the fact that she sent a letter?” Moore asked. “District 5 has been in the news a lot. Trustee Hines is not the first member to be in the newspaper... I think this is a witch hunt and people have their feelings hurt, and come out swinging at the wrong people.”
Hogan said he didn’t know what the censure motion was in reference to when it appeared on the agenda.
“When I looked at the letter, I was curious why she wrote it,” he said. “But did any of us come to her and ask why it was written? Or are we upset with the response that the recipient of the letter got?”
In voting down the censure motion, Hammond said she was still upset the letter was sent without the chance for other board members to weigh in.
“You should go through the board and the superintendent, and then it would have greater effect,” Hammond said.
This story was originally published February 28, 2022 at 10:30 PM.
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