The SCC Files: The ‘mushroom treatment’ rolls right along.
It was easy to expect things to change for the better on the Sandhills Community College campus once John Dempsey and George Little departed. During the reign of that pair, way too much taxpayer-financed work was done with a wink, a nod, and a handshake outside the view of the 
public. The Marxist, race-baiting DEI philosophy had also entangled the school’s operations in its tentacles.
Of course, The Pilot was fine with that.
Sandy Stewart took over the president’s office. We were told DEI was getting wiped off of campus. Actually, it only went through a name change. The DEI team is still in place on campus with basically the same team and the same agenda.
If you regularly checked the very skimpy documentation on board of trustees activities, you saw agendas with language similar to THIS:
The Problem?
The UNC School of Government – the authority on local government operations in North Carolina – has THIS to say about that*not public record* statement from the college:
[…] One important consideration is that any recordings of interactions between a government official and a member of the public can be public records. Although there are many exceptions, the general rule is that any record in any form (including audio recordings) made or received by a government agency in the transaction of public business is a public record.[…]
The team at Sandhills neither had nor has a leg to stand on in declaring recordings *not public record.*
But they keep proceeding like this. The local paper doesn’t call them on this. The appointed trustees just sit there, smile, and allow the paid college employees to proceed however they want.
The college website and the trustee agendas claim the recordings are thrown out after one year. The website appears to be missing a total of SEVEN sets of meeting minutes dating back to February 2020. So, how are we going to ever learn the details of those seven missing trustees meetings?
My theory is that the college higher-ups are afraid of what the public might think if they actually saw or heard these trustee meetings. I got one recording of a trustee meeting and transcribed some of the, um, *highlights.*
Larry Caddell, at his *finest.*
The latest piece of bamboozlery to come out of the Airport Road campus is this *Innovative High School* project. Sandy Stewart and his team just dropped a bomb, so to speak, on the trustees at one meeting. The college was getting $25 million, courtesy of the taxpayers and senator Tom McInnis and Rep. Neal Jackson, to build a new classroom facility on the college campus. It was to be a partnership with the county and the school system.
The problem? No one bothered to let the county commissioners or the school board know that this deal was being cooked up. 
The county school administrators have already allocated some staff for the yet-to-be-built high school at the college. The school board and the commissioners have all said there is no more money to be had from them for building or outfitting the new school.
No one seems to have any idea where the money to fully fund the construction or operation of this new school will come from. Yet, the college has signed up an architect to start working on the design.
If you’ve been around the Sandhills campus during the weekdays, you’ll notice quite a bit of empty classroom space. There has apparently been no interest in doing a study to see if this *Innovative high school* can be housed is some existing unused college space. It’s BUILD, baby, BUILD.
Where is the oversight ???
Lost in all of this shuffle? In 2016, the voters of Moore County shot down a ballot issue to authorize the borrowing of money to build a high school on the Sandhills campus. So, what makes Stewart & co. think the voters have had a change of heart?
While the mood in Washington is shifting toward efficiency and wise use of tax dollars, Sandhills Community College is saying “Let it Ride!”
DC has done a great job of driving our nation to near-bankruptcy. But many of our electeds in Raleigh and locally have contributed greatly to those efforts, as well.
Keep gloating over your board appointments, and allowing the government employees to run wild and unchecked. You TOO can be a co-conspirator and contributor to the breaking of our nation, our state and our community.
