By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

Among five members of the public who addressed the Lee County Board of Education on November 12 was Democratic County Commissioner Cameron Sharpe, who had been re-elected to another four-year term as a commissioner seven days earlier, and who decried internet comments made against him by a member of the school board.

Sharpe said up front that his remarks were not in the context of his role as a public official, but those of a private citizen.

Sharpe began by reminding school board members about their responsibility to always uphold the highest standards of professionalism by exercising the greatest of care in all of their postings on social media platforms. He also said all public officials should continue to keep in mind that whatever they may say in the public square of the internet remains there for anyone around the world to see and hear throughout eternity, even if that communication was meant for only one or two people.

“It is essential that we maintain respect in all our interactions,” he said. “Resorting to name calling because a board cannot fulfill your wish on demand, especially to a board member who tried to fulfill that wish in three previous years when it was a viable option … Name-calling is not going to make me or anyone else more inclined to work with you.”

Sharpe didn’t publicly name the person that he was referring to, but the incident he referred to had occurred on Facebook a few days before the school board’s November 12 meeting in a posting between Republican school board member Alan Rummel and another person.

In that conversation, Rummel said Sharpe campaigned on how local Democrats would support schools if they were in charge of the school board, but then laments that the commissioners do little to support them now. He wrote that Sharpe was “a freaking clown” and went on to say a few sentences later that he’s “a terrible elected official.” Sharpe told the school board that those remarks “offended me, but I’m a grown man and I can deal with that.”

“For the two years that this member has been on this board, Republicans have been in control of it. And Republicans have been in control of the county commission for the last six years. So, I will say to that board member, ‘you ain’t got no juice, and you can’t even deal with your own people. They ain’t listening to you.'”

Sharpe did at one point refer to “the board member” … “whin(ing) and cry(ing) like a little seventh grade girl whose boyfriend broke up with her” during a committee meeting.

During his closing moments, he looked directly at Rummel.

“So, let’s keep that in mind,” he said. “I’m not your problem. The majorities (on both boards) need to get together and work this out.”

Rummel didn’t respond to Sharpe’s comments.

What’s behind this?

Sharpe’s appearance at the school board meeting related to a vote that had taken place at a meeting of the county commissioners on October 21. After a discussion by the full board in closed session, Sharpe made a motion to increase the salary of County Manager Lisa Minter by one percent. With one member absent, the proposal passed on a 4-2 vote.

This was the subject that Rummel had been discussing during the Facebook chat when Sharpe’s name had come up during that conversation, and it is also apparently what led Rummel to say what he did about Sharpe.

But the real story behind all this is a circumstance The Rant has been following for the past four years. The Lee County Board of Education and the county Board of Commissioners are quickly moving toward a point of impasse where progress isn’t possible because the people involved cannot agree.

Since the budget negotiations held in the spring of 2021, the school board has gone to the commissioners each spring with a list of specific needs that went beyond what the county had indicated it was willing to fund. Usually, those requests were in the form of increases in the local supplements paid to teachers and other personnel to retain them in Lee County instead of watching them flee to surrounding communities that offered more cash and incentives.

Two years ago, after the Republicans took control of the board of education after the 2022 election, the school board asked instead for funding to begin the implementation of a proposed salary plan for all school district employees. The thinking was, in part, that the commissioners may not have an interest in funding those local supplements.

But just as it had done previously, the county answered with “no” two more years in a row on funding the school board’s salary plan, and that has left the board of education and its staff scratching their heads as they try in vain to find a winning approach the commissioners will be receptive to.

For its part, the county has provided increases in funding to Lee County Schools in each of those same four years and given it with no strings attached, leaving the school system to direct those dollars to where they are needed most. But in each instance, those same county dollars fell short of the special needs that the school board asked the county for, leaving the school board with a choice between funding their original initiative at a greatly reduced level or scrapping their plans altogether.

In recent years, the state legislature has provided small amounts of money for raising the salaries of teachers across North Carolina. But the state doesn’t provide money for the salaries of most “classified” school employees (those not required to hold certification before employment, like office staff, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, or instructional assistants).

That money has to come from the county, and many of those same classified school employees have found it particularly galling that the commissioners have been able to find money to increase the salaries of county employees for the past three years, but all the while being told that there is just not enough money for most school workers again this year.

The result has been that the school board has gone to the commissioners repeatedly over the past four years to ask for money to grant these salary increases, only to be told “no.” When Republicans took over the school board following the election of 2022, there was optimism that this log jam might finally be broken because a single party held a majority of seats on both boards.

But the result was the same each year as budget time came and went. After being told two years ago by the commissioners that they were not provided enough information with which to grant those kinds of increases, the school board went back to the commissioners this past spring with a budget request of great detail, one that seemed to be the result of many hours of thought and deliberation. And still, the answer was no.

As the budget for the county was adopted in June, the county approached the school board with a novel idea to construct a joint county/school board maintenance facility on land where the old Jonesboro Elementary School had once stood, but the school board put off any further discussions on the idea until the 2024 elections were concluded.

This brief summary provides an explanation on how the two most influential governing bodies in the county have reached a stalemate that’s preventing them from cooperating on even the simplest of matters as the first half of the 2024-25 Fiscal Year is nearing the Thanksgiving Holiday break.

And it demonstrates how the breakdown in relationships between those two boards has reached a point where words spoken without proper consideration of their potential impact have served only to make that already bad situation even worse.

One new member was elected in the November 5 election to serve on the county commission, and three new members of the school board were selected by the voters on November 5, so there may yet be hope that this seemingly insoluble problem has a chance for resolution.