Todd Paris, Staff Writer and Salisbury Attorney
♦ Three weeks in the life of a Superintendent Lynn Moody: You just published “The Nightmare Scenario” and placed three of your board member’s re-election prospects in grave jeopardy by announcing a plan to move 4400 elementary school students from all over the county inwards towards urban areas. Your heavyhanded attempts to suppress dissent even angered the (formerly supportive) local paper and transformed a small Faith/Morgan PTA meeting into a 5000 member FB page. They may form a PAC. Two challengers, Michael Julian (a known vocal critic of RSS and who is widely respected in the east) and Andrew Poston (an up and coming political figure working towards a Masters in Education) have stepped forward months early to run. Then you have Chuck Hughes from the Salisbury District (who is really looking after Salisbury’s interests at the expense of the rest of the kids in the county), “melting down” at a public meeting on television and insulting the tax-payers. Who knows who else may file?
We learned that in figuring schools as “under capacity,” you included the seats in mobile units and that one school you claimed was built in the 1920’s was almost completely torn down and rebuilt in the 1990’s.
Then the formerly “non-controversial” West Consolidated site suddenly has a natural gas fired power plant next door explode and catch on fire. Did anyone notice that happening? Next, folks were made aware that the experts who were called in to tell tax-payers that a school district with OVER CAPICITY should spend hundreds of millions on new schools may be awarded the contracts to design them under NC’s no bid statute. Their representative got openly laughed at when he claimed the busrides to West Consolidated would be only 15 minutes longer. It was on television! Then you have the watchdog Rowan Free Press with thousands of local readers posting links to other newspapers about the same expert’s being involved in similar projects in Robeson and Moore Counties and the newspaper articles don’t look all that positive about these shenanigans.
Of course, this operation is all being conducted from your new, palatial abode with a completely out-of-place dome on top which tax-payers now refer to as “The Blunder-dome.” Suddenly, as soon as it was completed, you inform people that you can no longer maintain most rural schools and must shut them down. Not good.
Finally, today in the local paper, you have the chairman of the county commission, who previously spoke favorably about “The Nightmare Scenario” now distancing himself and the rest of the Commission as fast and hard as he can from the site of this “train-wreck.” Oh, and then you hear out that one of the County Commissioners has a child that goes to one of your “doomed” schools.
All in all, you have to be concerned for your contract renewal.
