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Members of the Southampton County Board of Supervisors recently took time to respond to comments made by members of the Southampton County School Board and Southampton County Public Schools administration in January in response to supervisors’ pursuit of a forensic audit of the school division.

In a Feb. 5 interview, Central District Supervisor and Board Chair Dr. Alan W. Edwards took issue with a comment from the Jan. 13 School Board meeting that characterized what was taking place via the forensic audit pursuit as a conflict between the two boards.

“That’s not true,” he said. “This is a conflict between the citizens of Southampton County and the Southampton County school administration and School Board. People need to understand that, and (school leaders) need to understand that.

“In (2022), in November, there was a referendum — 81% of the county said they wanted to elect the School Board,” he continued. “They didn’t trust the appointed School Board.

“Since then, there have been years of no transparency and no response to the citizen’s questions,” he stated.

On Aug. 27, the Board of Supervisors had voted unanimously to pursue a forensic audit of the school division and requested the Southampton County School Board’s cooperation in this effort. The Board of Supervisors’ vote followed a Citizens Comment Period earlier that evening during which 17 people spoke, all expressing concerns about the state of the school system.

The board’s vote also followed a period of about four years in which some members of the board had sought answers to specific questions regarding the school division’s finances.

During this same period, some School Board members had complained that the Board of Supervisors was trying to overstep its authority and should focus its attention on developing the county’s economy rather than trying to run the school system.

On Nov. 6, the Board of Supervisors (BOS) voted unanimously to engage the law firm of Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP to represent the BOS as it sought to learn more about the management and finances of SCPS.

During the Jan. 13 School Board meeting, Board Chair Dr. Deborah Goodwyn highlighted how School Board Counsel Pamela O’Berry, of Sands Anderson PC, had noted in a Sept. 19 letter to the county that “a forensic audit is an examination of financial records to derive evidence to prosecute a party for fraud, embezzlement or other financial crimes.”

In that same letter, O’Berry indicated that there exists no legal authority for the Board of Supervisors’ desired forensic audit of the school division.

Edwards said in an Oct. 21 interview that the BOS was still going to obtain the equivalent of a forensic audit of SCPS. In a Nov. 18 interview, he indicated that the board’s engagement with a law firm was a result of the school division’s lack of cooperation with pursuing the audit.

“If the school system had cooperated, there wouldn’t have been this reaction from the board,” he said.

In the Feb. 5 interview, Edwards referenced multiple BOS meetings in the fall during which a number of citizens addressed the board asking for help with the school system.

“So we consider that a mandate to go ahead and do whatever we needed to do, and that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

During the Jan. 13 School Board meeting, SCPS Superintendent Dr. Gwendolyn P. Shannon noted that the division had received 16 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP in December.

Shannon said that according to the law, a maximum of 12 workdays is allowed to provide the material.

Earlier in the meeting, she noted that the division was probably going to have to try to hire someone to fulfill the law firm’s requests.

“It’ll probably take us about six months to provide everything that they’re asking for,” she said.

Later in the meeting she said, “It’s unrealistic for us to have that volume of material available in 12 days, so our attorneys are working to try to see what type of relief we can have regarding the amount of items that they’re requesting and the number of days that we would have to normally fulfill those requests.”

Edwards said there is a track record by the school division of not responding to FOIA requests at all.

“Several of us on the board, at our own expense as far back as 2020, have filed FOIAs which have gone unanswered, and multiple citizens of this county filed FOIAs, and they’ve not answered a single one, so the time factor is not there,” he said. “The factor is they’re just not going to answer them, they ignore them. And I feel that time has nothing to do with it, but the fear of finding out some facts that they don’t want made public is the reason they don’t answer them.

“I just want to get the FOIAs situation straight that it’s not anything that’s new,” he added.

He reacted to the School Board’s practice of cutting the video and audio feed on its YouTube livestream during public comment periods to limit the spread of potential disinformation.

“Now, if you have disinformation, if somebody’s saying something that is not true, we all know the best thing to do is tackle it head on,” Edwards said. “Take care of it right there, because if you let it go and it’s not answered, many people construe that as being true. I can tell you (at meetings of) the Board of Supervisors, if there’s some disinformation, we’re going to tackle it and get to the truth right there. We’re not going to censor anything. Nothing’s ever been censored on the Board of Supervisors.

“And the other thing is, of FOIAs on the Board of Supervisors, we’re going to respond within the legal five days, sometimes within 24 hours,” he added.

He also reacted to comments made by Shannon with regard to the school division’s efforts to reestablish a liaison committee between the two boards.

Edwards said that in 2020, he, BOS Vice Chair William Hart Gillette and then-County Administrator Michael W. Johnson met with Goodwyn and Shannon.

“We wanted to establish a way that we could talk with each other,” Edwards said. “So they came up with a protocol that said we could not directly ask questions. The questions had to go through the county administrator, they therefore went to the superintendent of schools, who would answer the questions and get it back to the county administrator, and the county administrator would give us the answers.

“They also said at that point that we were forbidden from talking with any School Board members,” he continued, “and the School Board members — I can tell you at that time — were told not to talk to anybody on the Board (of Supervisors).”

Edwards said the BOS followed the communication protocol established by SCPS.

“It lasted for a total of five questions,” he said. “After that, there was no response.

“So they talk about setting up a liaison committee,” he said. “We tried more than that, and that’s not going to work, so I have no faith that any type of liaison committee is going to make any difference.”

Edwards said he thinks there are some new, good, elected members on the School Board.

“And we’re going to have some more elected School Board members, and hopefully things will change with that,” he said. “But you can jump up and down, protest, do whatever you want to do — it’s not going to make any difference until we have an elected School Board and a new superintendent. And that’s the bottom line, and that’s the way it is, and that’s the object of what we’re doing now.”

Later, in summary, he said, “We’ve tried everything that we can try, so if there had been some response, we wouldn’t have had to hire a firm, and they wouldn’t have to hire a lawyer, and most of us suffer financial inroads there because of that, but we were mandated by the citizens of the county.

“And like I said, I want to emphasize it was not a conflict between the Board of Supervisors and the School Board,” he added. “It was a conflict between the citizens of the county and the School Board and school administration.”

Southwest District Supervisor Lynda T. Updike stated that lack of transparency from SCPS has led to a lack of knowledge and opened the door for others to try to fill the void.

“We don’t know anything for a fact because we’re not told anything,” she said. “We get it second hand or from Facebook, and so we don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

She said, “The main point I want to make is that if the School Board was forthcoming with facts, we would not be hiring attorneys. … We owe it to the citizens to get answers, however way we can, and that’s the purpose of the forensic audit.”

She also stated, “I think we will decide at our next meeting or in closed session we will discuss whether we will consider suing because of the FOIA requests that have not been answered.”

Northeast District Supervisor Christopher D. Cornwell Sr. said he thinks it is a shame the situation has reached the point it is at now.

Goodwyn noted during the Jan. 13 School Board meeting that O’Berry wrote about how the School Board’s and the school division’s financial accounts and records had been audited as recently as June 2024.

Cornwell affirmed that he did not think the regular county audit nor the school division’s budget presentations to the BOS are detailed enough.

“It doesn’t satisfy at all the details necessary,” he said, stating that he believes a lot of the information shared is fluff and is cherry-picked. “I really feel like there’s a lot more to it in the weeds of any budget that we would just like to see the finite details of, and I think we have a right to see it, and the citizens have a right to see it.

“And I don’t think (SCPS) should feel like, under normal circumstances, threatened by that,” he added. “They should want to say, ‘Yes, sure, absolutely, here is it. Take a look.’ And it causes me grave concern that they are that concerned about us and the public wanting to look at the books. Why is it that big a deal? Why are we having to pay a lawyer out of Richmond tens of thousands of dollars at this juncture to file FOIA requests on our behalf to get information that belongs to the public in the first place. That’s a shame that that’s where we’re at.”

Gillette highlighted the 17 speakers from the August 2024 BOS meeting and said, “We listened and took all of that in consideration and decided that we could not pretend we didn’t hear it, to be honest with you.”

He said that Shannon’s estimate of it taking the school division six months to respond to the FOIA requests from Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP seemed “a little long to me, but I’m not the judge of that. But there is a law they have to follow … so it’ll all come together and be concluded here, I hope, in the not-too-distant future. 

“But the outcome, I hope, is going to be one that we can talk back and forth with information that we need to help us spend the county taxpayers’ money to the satisfaction of all — not only the Board of Supervisors but the public,” he added.

The Tidewater News reached out to Southwest District Supervisor Carl J. Faison and Southeast District Supervisor Robert T. White but had not connected with them to receive their comments by press time.