Richland 2 school board criticized for dysfunction in scathing SC investigation report
The South Carolina inspector general’s office has released a critical report into dysfunction on the Richland 2 school board, just days before voters decide who will oversee instruction for the district’s 112,847 students in the coming years.
The report flags infighting among school board members as being detrimental to the district’s operations. Over the last four years, the report found that only 14% of the board’s agenda items related to academic concerns.
“More important, the Board addressed only five academic items over the last two school years when Board member acrimony and disruptive communications directed toward the superintendent, District staff and the public were the greatest,” the report says.
The report, published Thursday, comes at the behest of S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, who requested the inspector general investigate the district earlier this spring, using a recently passed law expanding the office’s ability to investigate school districts. McMaster said he did so after receiving several complaints from parents.
The report says investigators “observed dysfunctional or non-existent communication and a lack of trust among Board members. Each Board member contributed to its dysfunction and ineffectiveness through petty disagreements and personal attacks of other Board members.”
That includes “acrimonious comments between fellow Board members and toward public speakers at Board meetings, disruptive behavior,” including a walkout of board members last year that shut down a board meeting due to a lack of a quorum, and “executive sessions that devolved into vulgar name-calling where executive sessions were terminated without accomplishing its work.”
In addition to highlighting the board’s dysfunction, the report also examines district policies and procedures, financial practices and student academic achievement. Among other findings, the report noted the district’s lack of a procurement card policy, its diversion of district funds to its nonprofit foundation and its lack of an internal auditor.
The inspector general also found that, as a result of the commingling of district and foundation dollars, the foundation may have misrepresented its finances when applying for federal COVID aid.
The district responded to the report in a statement Friday, noting “the Report’s findings do not assert intentional wrongdoing by the District.”
“A District the size of Richland Two requires constant process evaluations and improvements, and the District intends to use the IG Report as part of our process to make such improvements,” the district’s statement reads.
The district also notes the fact “the IG Report highlights the District’s continued performance in delivering on our core mission: to provide quality public education to more than 112,837 students over the four-year review period. This fact is supported by the District’s student achievement metrics included in the Report, which compare favorably with South Carolina and national data.”
In a separate statement attributed to the school board collectively, board members committed to learning from the report’s findings and improving their working relationship with each other.
“The Board’s capability to lead is only as strong as our capacity to work through disagreements and find constructive solutions to the challenges facing education,” the statement reads. “This Board has not always hit that high standard. We commit to excellence moving forward.”
Financial red flags
Amid the interpersonal dysfunction of the school board, the inspector general’s report raised red flags about financial activity in the district, including by the nonprofit Richland Two Education Foundation, which the report alleges might have inappropriately applied for federal pandemic relief funds.
The foundation, which raises money for the district and promotes its educational programs, reported in its application for South Carolina CARES Act dollars that it had lost $168,776 in gross receipts, the report found.
Included in that amount was more than $81,000 worth of federal grants that had been awarded to the district, not the foundation, according to the inspector general.
Consequently, the foundation received the state’s maximum reward of $50,000 in CARES Act aid.
The inspector general plans to refer the foundation’s receipt of federal dollars to the attorney general’s office, which has jurisdiction over investigations into nonprofit corporations, according to the report.
The report also found that the district did not have a procurement code in line with state standards, nor did it have a detailed policy on procurement cards, a credit card-like feature that allows select employees and officials to charge purchases to school district funds. The district has neither purchasing limits on the cards nor a centralized review process for purchases, the report said.
The report reviewed some reported P-card purchases, and said some lacked enough information to justify charging the purchase to a P-card. Those included $116 for unspecified “merchandise” from the home goods store Williams Sonoma, $130 for admission to Patriots Park, $72 for tickets to a Baltimore Orioles game and $873 for clothing from Lululemon.
The inspector general recommended Richland 2 adopt the state standard for procurement card usage, and conduct an audit of the items identified in the report by the end of March.
Board chairman responds to dysfunction
School board chairman James Manning said in an interview with The State that he wasn’t surprised the inspector general had found the board to be dysfunctional and was pleased the investigation had not turned up any criminal wrongdoing.
The board’s descent into dysfunction happened gradually, he said, and was exacerbated by the pandemic.
“There’s always going to be tension when you have seven elected officials who may have different goals or desires or directions,” he said. “However, particularly with COVID, I saw a shift in the relationships that became more dysfunctional.”
Manning, who did not seek reelection and will depart the board at year’s end, said he appreciated the inspector general’s recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in the district and hopes the new board will implement them going forward. He said he hoped the new board would be able to get past any lingering interpersonal issues and return its focus to students and academics.
Vice Chair Amelia McKie, who also opted not to run again and will wrap up her term at the end of the year, released her own statement chiding members of the board whose “spirit of violence, threats and intimidation” she said had disrupted the board’s cohesion.
“I pray that, going forward, mindsets will change and hearts will soften as it comes to the care and keeping of people,” she wrote. “We must keep the main thing the main thing — educating children — at all times.”
Board member Lashonda McFadden, whose conduct comes in for criticism several times in the report, said in a statement that she would take the report as a learning experience.
“I now have a bona fide instrument to measure my productivity on the board with,” she said. “The OIG’s office highlighted areas of concern in my role that needs to be addressed. It spelled out policy violations and areas of improvement that I need to focus on.”
As a housewife and a homeschooling mother when she was first elected in 2020, McFadden said joining the Richland 2 board was “a huge learning curve for me and I tried my best to learn as much as I could.”
Another board member, Lindsay Agostini, told The State, “I look forward to working collaboratively with the newly elected board members and district administration to implement the IG’s recommendation.”
None of the other three school board members contacted by The State responded before publication.
Threats, shouting and questionable conduct
Richland 2 in northeastern Richland County has had contentious board meetings in the recent past. Previous school board meetings have erupted into shouting matches among board members.
An outside consultant brought in to improve relations among board members described “noticeable factions and conflict entrepreneurs who fanned the flames and used parliamentary procedures, legal threats, and disrespectful language to humiliate other Board members,” the report notes.
Under the previous chairmanship of Teresa Holmes, board members in the minority expressed frustration with not having their views heard and trouble getting items placed on meeting agendas.
The inspector general’s report says breakdowns in communication between the board and superintendent decreased both morale and productivity among Richland 2 staff.
In May, Holmes filed a police report against board member McFadden after McFadden was caught on audio threatening to “beat her m-----f------ ass” during a closed door executive session, which led to McFadden being charged with threatening a public official.
The report calls that threat a violation of board policy but also chastises Holmes for referring to McFadden as “little girl,” “honey” and “boo” on the recording and criticizes Manning for surreptitiously recording the closed-door session in violation of district rules. Since that meeting, McFadden and board member Monica Scott have participated in executive sessions over the phone from another room, the report notes.
Manning said Friday that he secretly recorded the April 28, 2022 executive session due to concerns about the frequent outbursts and erratic behavior of other board members he feared were escalating.
He said he hit record after McFadden entered the room and “gave some indicators she may have another outburst.”
“As far as should that have been done or not, I’m going to let what was caught on the recording – the cursing, the threatening of another board member, the uncontrollable outburst – speak for itself,” he said.
Ten days after making the recording, Manning texted Holmes and Vice Chair Amelia McKie that he’d shared the audio with the media, according to the inspector general’s report.
“It is time,” he told them, according to texts reproduced in the report. “(Name redacted) and them are mounting a campaign against us.”
Manning denied under oath that he’d shared the recording with the media, according to the report, but did admit to investigators that he’d released it to third parties.
He declined on Friday to say why he shared the recording. Manning also declined to comment on an allegation in the inspector general’s report that he disclosed privileged settlement information discussed during a September 2022 executive session.
“I will let the inspector general’s report and what’s written there be the record for that,” he said, adding that his decision not to seek reelection was entirely personal and unrelated to the allegations in the report.
Meanwhile, in just the last few weeks, McFadden has paid back $425 to the school district after she upgraded her hotel stay at a school board conference and was charged a pet fee out of school district funds, and current board chair Manning sent a scathing email saying that McFadden only paid back the money after he threatened to report her to the S.C. Ethics Commission.
The report also makes mention of McFadden’s charges, adding that the board member asked for and was denied district funds to attend a T.D. Jakes “Woman Thou Art Loosed” event while in Atlanta.
Further, the report also says McFadden carried close to $2,000 in school meal debt for her children and then advocated for the full board to forgive all school meal debts, potentially putting McFadden in violation of state ethics law by using her position for personal gain.
The report notes that three other board members — Holmes, Manning and Scott — had overspent their designated travel accounts by a total of $3,800 last fiscal year. Holmes received also received nine travel advances for district-funded travel, Scott 19 and McFadden three. The report notes no district employee has received a travel advance in the past four years. The payment of advances has since been discontinued, the report says.
The inspector general’s report says the board’s reputation has deterred job candidates from working in the district and caused teachers to leave Richland 2. Also, “District staff reported that students were aware of Board behavior during Board meetings and questioned student discipline for the same conduct as that exhibited by the Board,” the report says.
A spokesman for McMaster said Friday morning the governor’s office was still reviewing the inspector general’s report and had no comment on it at this time.
This story was originally published November 4, 2022 at 9:44 AM.
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