Central Carolina Academy has enjoyed enrollment and academic success in its first five years, which is why parents are fighting decision that led to parting way with the school’s popular principal and administrators
By Gordon Anderson | gordon@rantnc.com
Central Carolina Academy has been a success by most key academic measures.
The charter school on Douglas Drive in Sanford, home to about 600 sixth through 12th graders, received a B from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction on its 2024-25 state School Report Card ranking. That put it ahead of nearly every traditional public school in the county, save for Tramway Elementary, and well ahead of the county’s other two charter schools.
Additionally, CCA in the same year exceeded academic growth expectations for the second consecutive year, and approaching 68 percent of its graduates were considered “career and college ready” — higher than Lee County’s average of 42.7 percent and North Carolina’s average of 53.8 percent. There’s been no public indication that any of that has changed significantly in the months since those rankings were released.
So it was a surprise to many observers and virtually all involved in May, following the end of CCA’s fourth school year, when its entire administrative team — Principal Greg Batten and assistant principals Mary Tatum and Frank Thompson, all of whom have been a part of the school’s leadership since its founding — found itself out of a job.
Student families received an email in mid May informing them that Batten had taken an unexpected retirement; Thompson’s resignation followed shortly. Tatum was told around the same time that her contract would not be renewed. To date, all of the moves have been largely unexplained. Batten has since been replaced with an interim principal.
Batten, Tatum and Thompson are well-known in local educational circles. Batten served for years as principal at Lee County High School and elsewhere around the state.
Tatum taught and coached at Lee County High School beginning in 2005 and retired from Lee County Schools in the spring of 2022, and Thompson worked at multiple schools in the Lee County Schools district beginning in the 1990s, including as a principal at J.R. Ingram Elementary and assistant principal at LCHS until his retirement in 2017. After that he came back as a temporary contract administrator when needed until CCA opened.
Many parents have said Batten, Tatum and Thompson’s reputations were a key factor in choosing the school. A petition calling for their reinstatement that was circulated by a rising senior described the three as “our beloved administration team” and drew nearly 1,400 signatures as of this writing.
Community reacts, board stays silent
Later that month, on May 22, students, parents and teachers looking to protest the decision filled an empty classroom for a meeting of the school’s board of directors. The board took no public action, instead going into closed session, but Board Chair Don Sloan remained afterward for more than an hour answering questions.
“I promise I’m looking out for my children’s best interest, just like yours,” he said at one point. “I can promise this isn’t some vast conspiracy.”
The decision stood, though opposition to it has continued.
“These people are why I succeed so well in school,” one signatory to the petition wrote. “I learned how to have a better drive and apply myself more.”
A ‘replication’ charter school
CCA was founded in 2021 as a replication of Chatham Charter, a charter school in Siler City, and opened its doors a year later. In North Carolina, charter schools are public schools that operate outside the traditional public school system, governed by nonprofit boards and funded directly by the state in exchange for meeting accountability and performance standards outlined in their charters. Unlike traditional public school boards, charter boards are typically self-selecting, with members appointing their own successors rather than being elected by voters. It’s a structure that can make questions about oversight and authority more difficult to resolve when disputes arise.
At the time of its opening to students in 2022, CCA became Lee County’s third operational charter school, joining Rising Leaders Academy (formerly MINA Charter School) and Ascend Leadership Academy.
North Carolina’s charter school system was created in 1996 with a limit of 100 schools statewide, a cap that was intended to allow the state to evaluate the new model before expanding it further. That cap had been reached by 2001 and remained in place for a decade, when lawmakers removed the statewide limit on the number of charter schools.
That removal helped set the stage for rapid charter growth in the state, including replication models like Central Carolina Academy. As of 2026, North Carolina has more than 200 charter schools.
Supporters of the change said it would expand educational options for families and reduce barriers to opening new schools, while critics warned it could accelerate the growth of a system with uneven oversight and accountability, topics that are at the heart of the current dispute.
Graig Meyer, the executive director of the North Carolina Justice Center, a Raleigh-based nonprofit whose work includes tracking public education policy in the state, said opposition to charter school expansion in the 2010s included concerns about accountability and oversight, but was also rooted in the belief that doing so would further inject the private profit motive into public schools.
“The historical opposition to changes to the charter school laws in North Carolina was because a lot of the changes made it easier for the private sector to make a profit off of public education,” Meyer said. “We don’t believe the way we’ve created educational choice opportunities in North Carolina has been the best way to create a unified system of public education that’s equitable.”
Who’s in charge?
CCA’s connection to Chatham Charter takes the story further backward in time. Founded in 1993 as a private school called Chatham Academy, it became Chatham Charter the same year the state’s charter system became operational, making it one of North Carolina’s first charter schools. When Chatham Charter initiated its replication effort in Lee County in 2021, many of the folks involved in the project in Siler City were at the heart of the effort — folks whose roles on both schools’ websites are listed as being a part of the “Central Services Team.”
It’s a phrase — “Central Services” — that’s frequently heard in the discussion surrounding the decision to part ways with Batten, Tatum and Thompson. Described somewhat vaguely in public-facing informational materials for both schools, it has the appearance of a Charter Management Organization — groups that run charter schools on behalf of their boards. Charter school boards function similarly to a traditional board of education, and you could think of a CMO as analogous to a district’s Central Office, carrying out administrative functions and making sure the day to day obligations are met while the board steers the larger ship. With charter schools, a CMO isn’t always employed, but they aren’t uncommon either (Rising Leaders Academy another of Sanford’s charter schools, doesn’t use a CMO; it’s unclear whether Ascend Leadership Academy does).
Although the Central Services Team isn’t a separate legal entity and therefore not exactly a CMO, CCA attorney Donna Rascoe said its members are employees of Chatham Charter who provide services to Central Carolina Academy under the replication model approved by the state. She said a memorandum of understanding between the two schools governs those services and that the schools’ governance policies designate the CST as the “Chief Executive Officer for both governing boards.”
In a written response to The Rant, Sloan said the Central Services Team “functions similarly to a central office or superintendent in a county system” and is responsible for supervising the school’s administration. He said board members are expected to follow established procedures when raising concerns and that bypassing those channels “can undermine the CST.”
Attendees at the May 22 meeting openly asked whether the board was acting at the direction of Central Services, or the other way around. Mitch Stensland, who was named acting principal at CCA after Batten’s departure, was acknowledged by the board to be a part of the Central Services Team, and at the same meeting Tatum said CCA’s board “is being micromanaged by the Central Services committee.”
State law is plain that regardless of CCA’s status as a replication of Chatham Charter, its board has the final say in — and responsibility for — how it operates. Rascoe said the governance structure reflects that arrangement: the board retains ultimate authority, while the Central Services Team acts as the schools’ chief executive office, supervising principals and implementing board policy. The question raised repeatedly by parents, Tatum and others is whether that chain of authority has functioned that way in practice.
Other developments also raise questions about whether CCA’s board is functionally the school’s ultimate authority. In a March 20 email to Tatum that was provided to The Rant, Sloan used language suggesting Central Services — not the board — was being treated as the primary authority.
He said he’d tried to facilitate communication between Tatum and Central Services and “was told in no uncertain terms that facilitation was not needed and that my efforts to help were undermining their authority.” In his written statement for this story, Sloan confirmed that characterization, saying he “overstepped” his role and acknowledging that even well-intentioned efforts by board members can interfere with the CST’s authority if they fall outside established procedures.
In the same March email to Tatum, Sloan said he planned to leave the chairmanship and later the board itself because his term “should have ended a year ago.” He clarified in his statement to The Rant, though, that he had been mistaken and said he has approximately one year remaining and now intends to complete his term.
The Rant made a request for public information covering any contracts between Central Services and both CCA and Chatham Charter on June 18, a request that was acknowledged the next day. Rascoe said on June 30 that there was a memorandum of understanding that governed the relationship between the two schools and offered to provide it. It had not been provided by this publication’s deadline.
When first contacted to comment on this story, Tatum provided only a written statement in which she says the decision not to renew her contract came after she “raised a number of documented governance and compliance concerns internally regarding board operations, transparency, and the relationship between the Board of Directors and the Central Services Team.” Thompson declined to comment on the record; Batten couldn’t be reached.
But Tatum said more at a meeting of the school’s board on June 25, which was ostensibly to hear from members of the public interested in filling multiple vacancies on the board as well as a round of public comments. At least 150 people showed up to that meeting, most of them still looking for answers about the staffing changes — answers they wouldn’t get. After hearing presentations from several would-be members, the board went into another closed session that lasted for more than an hour and a half while the audience remained in the meeting space and held what looked like a rally in support of the three administrators.
Anna Lucas, a Sanford-based attorney and parent of children at the school, was one of the earliest public commenters that night. She said that back in November of 2025, the board made changes to the school’s governance structure that ceded authority from the board to Central Services — changes that were made in closed session, which she said would make them illegal. “Apparently there was a contract signed, but we’ve never seen it,” Lucas said, asking members of the crowd who had requested to see that contract to raise their hands. “We don’t know what it is or what it says, and we don’t know who signed it.”
Lucas added that the board had “bumbled about legally” in the last several months and she wondered if the contract she and other parents had been seeking “even exists.”
Another parent, Brandy Grindle, said at the June 25 meeting that her research into the board’s bylaws and operating structure turned up repeated instances of it not following its own rules, including multiple members having expired terms or who were never formally reappointed. Her comments came prior to Sloan’s later clarification to The Rant that his own term had not expired, and addressed broader concerns about how board terms have been managed.
“Serious issues remain unresolved,” she said. “Board elections that were never held. Board terms that expired without action. Meeting records that are incomplete or corrected months later. And repeated failures to follow the bylaws that define this board’s authority. CCA deserves a board that leads, and a Central Services that supports, not directs.”
Sloan took the opposite view in his written statement to The Rant.
“Personally, I’m more concerned with a board that did not support the CST when they bring forward problems that need addressing. They have been in place longer than any current board members and are highly motivated to see the school succeed,” he said. “Furthermore, the success we are striving for is not measured solely by test scores; we want all teachers and students to feel safe and supported. I and the rest of the Board remain deeply committed to preserving the qualities that make Central Carolina Academy such a special place while also ensuring the school continues to grow, improve, and meet the needs of our students.”
Accountability and a familiar pattern
When Tatum addressed the crowd on June 25, she made clear she’d been raising these and other issues with the board prior to being informed her contract wouldn’t be renewed. She said she was suspended with pay after looking at school documents to which she had legal access as an administrator, and that her actions were referred to the district attorney for investigation. Tatum said she’d been cleared by the district attorney, something The Rant has been unable to verify, but had received no word on the matter’s conclusion from the board.
Centrally, Tatum said she’d been raising questions aimed at uncovering the chain of authority — whether the CCA board or Central Services calls the shots — since the beginning of the year. She said she submitted a compliance report detailing her findings to Sloan in March, findings she thought were particularly important because the school’s charter renewal is on the horizon. She said she believes those questions led Central Services to decide against renewing her contract.
“I’ll be honest,” she told the crowd that night. “In January, I’d been looking for a new contract and it wasn’t coming. I was ready to leave. But I prayed about it and decided to stay and try to make sure we do things the right way.”
Meyer, who isn’t familiar with the situation at CCA, said it doesn’t appear to be an uncommon one.
“Sometimes you’ll have charter schools that are started by one or two charismatic education leaders,” he said. “And when that school becomes a success, you have a long waiting list of kids, there’s pressure to start another site. And suddenly you have a pattern where you’ve got a group that’s acting like a CMO, or even starting a CMO just to serve one or two schools.”
Central Carolina Academy is a public school funded by taxpayers, and ostensibly governed by an unelected board. The lack of clarity about who holds authority — and under what structure — leaves a basic issue unresolved: who, if anyone, is accountable when decisions like these are made?