Embattled Spotsy School Board Holds Final Meeting

by Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT

Editor’s Note: We apologize for the late delivery this evening.

The Spotsylvania School Board voted to give itself a raise during its marathon final meeting of 2023, which started at 5 p.m. on Monday and did not adjourn until 3 a.m. Tuesday.

Current Chair Lisa Phelps made the original motion to double Board members’ compensation to $2,000 per month and to give the chair an additional $250 per month, citing the “huge” commitment and amount of time spent away from family.

Board member Dawn Shelley called the proposal to double the board’s salary “sickening.” She said board members are “public servants” and that in her 12 years on the board, “not one time did I ever consider raising our salary, much less doubling it.”

Shelley made a substitute motion to raise the salary to $1,500 per month and extend a $500 one-time stipend to the chair, which passed by a 4-to-3 vote, with Phelps and board members Nicole Cole and Lorita Daniels voting against it.

Daniels was reelected in November to a second four-year term on the School Board. Phelps and Cole are in the middle of their terms, which expire in December 2025.

In Phelps’s original motion, she proposed that the pay raise go into effect next month, on January 1, 2024. The board’s attorney, Whit Robinson, said that “if you were to do this legally or procedurally” the raise would not go into effect until January 1, 2025.

However, according to Virginia Code section 22.1-32, “local school board representing a county may establish a salary increase prior to July 1 of any year in which members are to be elected or appointed, or, if such school board is elected or appointed for staggered terms, prior to July 1 of any year in which at least two members are to be elected or appointed. Such increase shall become effective on January 1 of the following year.”

Spotsylvania School Board members are elected for staggered terms. The next School Board elections, for the Lee Hill, Berkeley and Battlefield seats, will take place in 2025, meaning that July 1 of that year would be the earliest a salary raise could be established, and it would not go into effect until January 1, 2026.

Altered Minutes and Settlement Agreements

The salary-raise discussion was one of many contentious points at the board’s final meeting of 2023.

At the start of the meeting, the board approved a consent agenda that included nine sets of minutes from 2022, some of which have been altered since they were first written. (For the full story, see “Spotsylvania School Board Places Altered Minutes on Consent Agenda.”)

Shelley’s motion to pull the minutes from the consent agenda failed by a 4-to-3 vote.

Following public comments, the board went into closed session to discuss personnel matters and to discuss “probable litigation as permitted by Section 2.2-3711(A)(7) of the Code of Virginia.” According to the agenda, the litigation involved two employees from Central Office and one employee in the maintenance department.

The closed session lasted for well over two hours, and when the board came back into public session, it approved settlement agreements with two unnamed litigants – agreements that Cole described as “fiscally irresponsible.”

“I will be voting yes in protest so that, by policy, this matter can be brought back in January to allow the newly seated board to decide how to address the actions that have been brought forward,” Cole said. “I also want to put on record that the decisions being made by the current majority are putting the school division in financial harm, I believe. I am significantly disturbed by the willingness of people … on this board to make financial decisions that are not in the best interest of our students.”

Shelley voted against approving the agreements, stating that they are “just not appropriate.”

Daniels joined Cole in voting affirmatively so the agreements can be brought back for discussion in January.

Phelps said she supports the settlement agreements because “when somebody says they’re a victim, I believe it, because that’s their reality.”

Last-minute changes to materials selection and review policy

The Board also approved changes to the policy and regulation governing the selection and review of instructional materials that were proposed by board member Rabih Abuismail.

Abuismail, whose term expires December 31, said he wrote the changes after listening to concerns expressed by Board members when revisions to the regulations were discussed at last month’s meeting. He said he consulted with “different community members” that he declined to name and with Dante Braden, an assistant to division superintendent Mark Taylor.

Discussion of the policy and regulation were not on the agenda for the December meeting. The proposed changes were not made available to the public and Board members said they received the proposed changes just before Vice Chair April Gillespie made a motion to approve them.

School Board Clerk Patty Boller asked Abuismail for a copy of the changes during the meeting, and the Advance has requested a copy.

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