Chuck Hughes, Board of Education, Salisbury, N.C.
♦ At last night’s Board of Education debate at the Wallace Education Forum, my downtown Salisbury opponent, Gene Miller, took his first opportunity to tell the county how he would make the school system “better” by attacking me with the following accusations he knew were not true:
Miller said: “Mr. Hughes voted for the Central Office Building but now says he was against it.”
Fact: Miller knew that I spoke out vehemently against building a Central Office Building from 2012 to its completion. My opposition was not because centralization was not needed, but because the $7 million domed building was being built at the expense of millions of dollars of school safety issues such as security cameras, key-less entry and vestibules for our schools, a small detail that Miller ignored over his 14 years as Assistant Superintendent of Operations.
Miller said: “Mr. Hughes voted to allow high school students to carry pepper spray on school grounds.”
Fact: Miller knew I was the only one not to vote for the initial motion to allow high school students to carry pepper spray. When it came up again for a reversal vote, I again voted with the majority to reverse their earlier position.
Miller said: (Paraphrased) Mr. Hughes told the board that students should take pepper spray into the bathrooms and spray LGBT students if they go into the bathroom.”
Fact: Miller knew that the Salisbury Post had chastised the AP, the Huffington Post and LGBT media for falsely changing my tongue-in-cheek comment, “Depending on how the courts view HB2, our students may need pepper spray when they go to the bathroom” to make it a more newsworthy story.
In today’s paper the Salisbury Post confirmed Miller’s false statement that I voted for pepper spray. However, after showing the Post minutes from the May 9th board meeting, they agreed to correct the e-paper and print a retraction in the newspaper tomorrow.
That Mr. Miller thought these blatant lies would help fulfill his persistent need to be elected to something, somewhere, says more about his character and integrity than it does about mine.
Mr. Miller was also wrong about his presumption that it was not until he challenged me for the school board that I became critical of him and his work. Every time I saw a table of unused iPads stored away or saw hundreds of books and children’s dictionaries dropped off at the recycling center to be destroyed, I was critical of him. He just wasn’t listening.
When Miller continued to boast about his Golden Years as Assistant Superintendent of Operations, I responded by telling him they may have been golden for him, but they weren’t golden years for the school system or taxpayers.
