In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost: the Flagler County School Board will be called to order under god and the gavel of its new chairman, Will Furry, on Tuesday. Get ready for the board’s most grandstanding chairman and least brainy majority in memory.
It’s an indication of the majority’s churlishness that the school board member with the most experience, the most education, the most legislative, parliamentary and institutional knowledge by far (Colleen Conklin, who is in her last year), is being passed over as chair for her polar opposite in every respect, and a rookie.
LaShakia Moore is a brand new superintendent. She’s facing an exodus of talent and institutional knowledge from the district, Jason Wheeler being the latest escapee and Kristy Gavin the next. She could use an intelligent board chair with depth and perspective. (Current Chairman Cheryl Massaro would be just as good.) Instead, Moore’s getting a messianic wannabe with the intellectual curiosity of a tic, right?
That’s where Furry, Christy Chong and Sally Hunt want to go. The school board was once a happily boring and effective engine of governance, the kind of place where Andy Dance used to set the tone. He’s unfortunately taken that productive dullness to the County Commission. With Jill Woolbright and Janet McDonald corroding the path for them, the three rookies spent their first year on the board turning it into the most embarrassing and sophomoric local government in Flagler County, at least since Joe Mullins exited stage crash.
Furry and Chong in fealty to their allegiance to DeSantistan are fairly good at demolishing safe spaces and giving succor to bigots. They make prejudice pose as virtue. Hunt isn’t that base, being woke at heart–sneeze the wrong way and she’ll accuse you of a microaggression. When she deigns to lower her nose down to us commoners her venom is more secular and entirely personal, gladly joining the other two to rip apart people, programs and the district office. But the three together cannot point to a single achievement all year.
They may want to take credit for Moore’s appointment. They’d be wrong. She was in the wings, where former Superintendents Jim Tager and Cathy Mittlestadt had placed her. Tager fast-tracked her to a principalship–pissing off a few people because she was good enough to skip the assistant principal step–and Mittelstadt elevated her to second in command. Both saw her potential. Someone had to step in to save the board’s rear after the rookies putsched Mittelstadt.
In the end the firing squad got outmaneuvered by Conklin’sand Cheryl Massaro’s jujitsu. It was Massaro who suggested halting the search for a superintendent and going with the obvious choice. Now the three are using her as cover, taking credit for something, and someone, they had nothing to do with.
Moore is playing along–for now. But unless she’s cut a mephistophelean deal with the majority, which wouldn’t be like her, she may find the arrangement untenable: the Moore we know does not suffer fools.
Furry and the perpetually sulking Chong–her Bible belt is on too tight–are ideological hacks who take their talking points from yesterday’s Fox scripts and three idiots on Facebook, when, like Hunt, they’re not taking them from the chamber. You know them: every time Furry and Chong say they’re getting “feedback” on this or that outrage, they’re referring to those three idiots. Their emails are bare of more substantive “feedback.”
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Hunt could’ve been a saving grace before she decided to go Manchurian on us, at least when she shows up. She’s taken herself off the grid, refusing to engage with anyone who doesn’t first sign a loyalty oath to her magnificence. Lately she’s been toadying up to Furry in a warm-up act to giving him the third vote for the chairmanship, because his limited capacities make her look smart the way short people make DeSantis look less small, and because she admires Furry’s contempt for law.
You may have caught the explicit declaration by Furry that following the law is for suckers. He was badgering his bête noire the school board attorney at a meeting earlier this month. Gavin had not censored an investigative report to his liking. She told him that she could not legally do so more than Florida’s public record law allows. Furry’s response? She should have done it anyway.
“I don’t think there would have been a lot of pushback on that,” Furry said. “I don’t think somebody would have gone and found an attorney to sue us.” In other words, this man who is not an attorney was telling the board attorney knowingly to break the law, knowingly to risk a costly lawsuit. He has no idea that governments that lose public record suits must pay all legal fees for both sides, and doesn’t seem to care that the district just lost $726,000 because someone was probably too drunk to notice they were being phished.
But that attitude is the Rosetta stone to Furry’s methods. It’s all you need to know about him: a zealot not only willing to violate the law, but to cover up public information. Enough to make Hunt and Chong swoon. That’s the trio, after all, that wants to have quarterly secret meetings, even though that would be patently illegal. That’s the trio, unfortunately with the complicity of the other two, that had an illegal huddle before a recent press conference on the segregated assemblies at Bunnell Elementary, and another illegal one afterward. That’s the group that, with Chong playing Nixon, thinks any information disseminated without board approval is a “leak,” as if every public employee who “leaks” is a traitor and Chong’s district were a privately held company. Gavin couldn’t have been surprised.
Those three are about to fire Gavin, and to do it illegally. They have no cause. They’re either fabricating it or they’ll fire her anyway, probably at the same meeting where Furry will be elected ayatollah, and dare her to sue.
I hope Gavin does sue, for the same reason that the district’s teacher union is sounding the alarm: to these three, there is no such thing as due process. It’s about back room shenanigans, secrecy and the politics of destruction. None of them is much interested in governance or doing their homework. They don’t prepare for meetings, don’t read their back-ups, hardly meet with district staff to educate themselves. You can tell they have no idea what they’re talking about most of the time, considering how much of what they say gasifies out of the wrong end. But they pay attention to their Facebook idiots and chamber junta, and give them veto power.
The holy ghost could always pull a coup and slip in Conklin or Massaro on Tuesday. But that’s as likely as Chong breaking a smile, Furry having an idea and Hunt completing a coherent sentence without hosannas to the first person singular. Not gonna happen. They want the gavel. They have gawd on their side. They’re in a crusading mood. This is what they call “Flagler Forward.”
Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
