Four more years: Levy & co. stab their voters in the back yet AGAIN
Things looked good at the Moore County Board of Education in November 2022. It appeared that we had thrown out a leftist majority that rubber-stamped the will of the central office bureaucrats and had replaced them with a 6-1 majority of conservatives actually interested in pressing and pursuing the will of the people.
Here we are – two years later – with a board, “led” by Bob Levy, more compliant and submissive to the will of central office bureaucrats than the one thrown out in 2022. What happened to holding government accountable to the will of the people paying the taxes? (Search me.)
The spending is still runaway and out of control. ANYTHING the bureaucrats “suggest” gets passed with little to no debate. The undisputed smartest person in the room during school board meetings – David Hensley – has been stripped of committee memberships and his vice-chairmanship and sat in the corner. The crew that won in 2020 and 2022 – promising to restore transparency and accountability to the county school system – is openly thumbing its collective noses at the voters and taxpayers of Moore County.
The fears of the statists running the public schools have been abated. All that election-time talk about giving power back to the people has evaporated into the same subservience and submissiveness we saw during the Grimesey and prior eras at the central office in Carthage.
Speaking of the Grimesey era — the county’s current superintendent, Dr. Tim Locklair, was well-known as a close ally of Bob Grimesey when he was superintendent. The supposed conservative school board majority got started off on the wrong foot by hiring Locklair to replace the retiring Grimesey. There did not appear to be any kind of serious statewide or nationwide search. The new superintendent would be a guy who aided and abetted the policies that got voted down and out of office in 2020 and 2022.
On Monday, the school board wound things down for the summer ahead of the election. Chairman Bob Levy and his allies rammed through a four-year contract extension — another 6 to 1 vote, of course — for Locklair.
A four year extension is A LOT. That’s the kind of contract extension ball teams offer winning coaches and star players. (*I have yet to see Locklair’s star. Are other counties trying to poach him from us?*)
The contract extension is good until June 30, 2028. It also includes an additional 56 hours of comp time for the superintendent.
Here’s what Levy had to say (around the video’s 3 hr., 35 minute mark) about the contract extension:
[…] “Congratulations once again, Dr. Locklair. I want to say that this board gives you our confidence in extending your contract. We want to tell the entire county of Moore, and we want to tell everyone, that we truly approve of the work you’re doing but we’re very very proud of your development of the Moore County way. […] We’re looking forward to many more years. At least four.” […]
Interestingly (and I guess ironically), Levy preceded those comments with a rambling monologue about the beauty of our Founding Fathers taking power away from government and giving it to the people. (*That is a beautiful thing. It’s what many of us thought we were getting in the wake of the 2020 and 2022 school board elections.*)
Some people may try to still reward some of these Board of Education bad actors at the ballot box in November — simply because they have (R) next to their name. (You could very likely vote out every incumbent and see little to no change from what you have NOW. )
It is extraordinarily unfortunate that that under Mr Levy, this School Board has, in many measures, become worse than the one it replaced. The above is just one example.
When we ran for office, many people were critical of the previous board’s practice of “automatically” renewing the Superintendant’s contract to keep it at the maximum number of years allowed by NC state law. I was critical of the practice, JD Zumwalt was critical of the practice, and, while in the minority, Mr Levy was critical of the practice.
But, now that he is in control, Mr Levy adopts the practice he condemned.
With that background, let’s talk about the issues surrounding this issue:
#1. Had I not objected to them being placed on the consent agenda because I wanted to vote against them, there would have been no action items for yesterday’s meeting. They literally would have put everything on the consent agenda, just like they started doing once they got me out of the way.
#2. Although I didn’t state why I voted against this in open session, I will share my thoughts here:
First, per the above, I am not going to campaign against something, and them start doing it once I am in power. That is called hypocrisy, and I despise hypocrites and work hard not to be one.
Secondly, after lengthy negotiations, we signed a five (four?) year contract with Dr Locklair. Dr Locklair is an experienced administrator. His experience includes ~20 years as an administrator. That experience includes being a senior administrator in Woke County NC, and being second in charge at MCS for a number of years. During those years as a senior administrator, Dr Locklair had lots of experience in negotiating contracts and plenty of time to think about what was important to him.
In good faith, we negotiated a contract which we believed met his desires. In spite of that, on the anniversary of his contract, Dr Locklair has made requests to get more perks added to his contract, and he started those requests on the first anniversary of his contract. If Dr Locklair wanted all of the things he keeps asking to get added to his contract, he should have stated those things at the beginning of his contract. We have a contract. Fulfill the contract and when it comes up for renewal, like at the ACTUAL END OF THE CONTRACT, then propose and negotiate for new terms. That is how contracts work.
Thirdly, as the highest paid employee at MCS, Dr Locklair should not get perks over and above the lowest paid employee. But here we are with the School Board giving Dr Locklair and additional seven days vacation, oops I mean “comp time” per year. Sure Dr Locklair spends a lot of time attending extracurricular activities and doing work outside of school hours, but so do Principles, coaches, and teachers, and other salaries professionals who make far, far less money. Yet they do not ask, nor do we give them an additional seven days of vacation, oops, I mean comp time.
Finally, if you watch the meeting at the link below, you will notice that Levy isn’t forthcoming about the additional 7 days’ vacation which the board voted 5-1 to give Dr Locklair with me dissenting. When announcing the agenda item, Mr Levy said ‘This extends the contract for four years……and also makes some additional other additions to the contract”
Since that wasn’t exactly forthcoming or transparent, I insisted that the “some additional other additions” be publicly stated. It was only then that the public learned that the “some additional other additions” were, in reality, one thing. An additional seven days vacation.
Mr Levy clearly knew that in addition to the extension of the contract, the other item was an additional seven days’ vacation. He just didn’t want to say it because he knew it wouldn’t be popular, so he tried to bury it by saying “some additional additions”
Here is the link directly to the discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/live/-CIGTkwyvTQ?si=me9e1xMhc-AzVDA0&t=12470
These contract extensions are all too common in public school systems and are a corrupting influence that needs to be ended. School boards should wait until the end of an existing contract and then decide if they want a new contract based on performance and responsiveness. That way the policy makers, not the bureaucrats, maintain control.
A superintendant can up and leave at any time if he finds a better job in a bigger system but the school board is bound to let him stay until the end of the contract, barring serious misconduct, or pay out the rest of the contract if they discharge him early. There are all too many times an arrogant out of control superintendant will face down his board with the threat of “yeah, you can let me go, but you still have to pay me to the end of my contract”. Superintendants should NEVER NEVER NEVER be given this type of leverage over the elected school board.
In my county, our rubber stamp school board majority has routinely every year given a one year contract extension, so Moore County is hardly alone, but four years seems particularly extreme. These liberal superintendants always want to have the whip hand over the school board and too many school boards are stupid enough to let them have it.
It appears that in Moore County, as in too many school systems, the tail is wagging the dog. Too many weak school board members consider the superintendant to be their boss, when in reality he is their employee.
Sir,
Your comments are 100% spot on and show remarkable insight to the scheme.
I have always been disturbed by the “one sidedness” of the contract where the Superintendant can void the contract and leave after a short notice (60 days?), yet we are bound to keep him/her for the duration of the contract. No sane person in private industry would ever sign such a one sided contract, yet it is common practice in academia.
If you look back to when Dr Locklair was first appointed to Superintendant, he asked for, and the School Board granted, blanket contract extensions for existing principals. This was done without one bit of justification and several of the principals who were rotely extended were demonstrable failures in leading their schools as they ranked near the bottom of teacher satisfaction surveys and their schools were chronically failing. But none of that mattered. Noone (except me) on the School Board wanted to have the Superintendent justify, by person, each contract extenstion. It was simply “The superintendent wants, the superintendent gets”.
Given the declining enrollment and abysmal academic performance of MCS schools, despite exploding costs, the CEO should have been fired a long time ago, what would be normal in any publicly-owned company. Why isn’t his pay and contract directly tied to raising performance and lowering costs? What are the criteria for a contract extension? Frequent smiling?
Why would anyone send their child to the Moore County Public School? It’s a cesspool for drugs, violence, sexual antics and assault, DEI, and piss poor academics. It doesn’t matter who is in charge on the Board. It’s always has been and always will be nothing but garbage. But at least the Board meetings provide comedy and a display of why even when the conservatives win, they beat each other up and the disaster continues. Kent is right. Shut it down like Hells Kitchen.
During the last school board meeting, Mr. Hensley uncovered a budgeting maneuver used by the administration to “balance” the budget. It involves budgeting for zero staff vacancies but then having 40 to 50 vacancies with no salaries paid. (The actual number, as revealed during the meeting is 220 vacancies.) The analysis by Mr. Hensley is brilliant and is the kind that a business person would recognize. You’d think the rest of the school board would be all over it. Nope.
Moore County is lucky to have Mr. Hensley on the school board. He’s a little abrupt at times, but you do what you have to do to be heard over the noise. Everyone should watch the meetings on YouTube each month. You get to see politics at its worst.