The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center has served as a theater for many shameful productions in its nearly 40 years.
Few, if any, top last night’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools meeting.
Here’s what your school board, which oversees $2.1 billion in taxpayer dollars, did over the course of a few hours last night, with children in the audience:
They fired Superintendent Crystal Hill, whom they’d reinstated a month ago after a summer-long suspension, and who was hired three years ago to bring stability to the most unstable leadership position in the county. Of course they have every right to do that, even an obligation to do that when necessary. But they made this earth-shifting decision that will affect families of 139,000 kids in the least-convincing fashion: a 5-4 vote, “for convenience,” meaning they didn’t have to cite performance or misconduct.
Later, the board released a summary of its own investigation into Hill, which included 86 interviews with board members and district employees and more than 1.5 million documents, and concluded that investigators “did not find evidence of improper conduct by the Superintendent.”
“Our children are watching,” board member Charlitta Hatch, who voted for termination, said in the meeting.
“Our children are watching,” the now-former board chair Stephanie Sneed said in a labyrinth of a statement shared with a television station before the meeting.
Indeed, if they were, the children would have seen a board that volleyed reasons for or against termination, talked over each other, smirked and rolled their eyes at each other, and blamed the media for the dysfunction that was self-evident.
And they would have seen one board member, Liz Monterrey Duvall, suggest that forcing out another superintendent — the fourth time in the last 12 years it’s happened — was OK because the superintendent wanted to leave anyway. “There’s a lot that we can’t say,” she said. “I just want to put to the public that there’s an assumption here that the superintendent didn’t want [the job]. I just want to put it out there.”
“I just want to put it out there,” she said again.
Also Tuesday, the board elected Monterrey Duvall as vice chair.
***
For about 30 minutes before the 6 p.m. public meeting, Superintendent Crystal Hill sat alone at the dais, flipping through papers and smiling at audience members as they filtered in.
A line of students and their families formed in the lobby, waiting to receive recognition for improving their grades.
Earlier in the evening, Sneed gave up the board chair position in a statement she shared with WSOC, just in time for the station’s 5 p.m. broadcast. To most of us taking our seats, Sneed’s resignation as chair figured to be the biggest news of the night.
Sneed and Hill had been at odds for months. Sneed chaired a board that suspended Hill in June for still-cloudy reasons involving administrative and operational oversight. Sneed also was the board member who in August told the community that Hill would return to her job.
Tension skyrocketed last week when Hill released a 14-page memorandum that included staggering allegations, including that Sneed worked around standard contracting rules to route hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Raleigh law firm to a consultant. Sneed hasn’t responded publicly to the specific allegations, but in her statement Tuesday she blamed “media leaks and public speculation.”
Hill’s memo also included a disturbing detail that when she was told a suspension was coming on June 9, a Tuesday, “I was told this information would never be made public if I resigned by Friday. I consider this extortion.” Dee Rankin, then vice chair, denied that claim.
Those claims caught the attention of District Attorney Spencer Merriweather, who on Friday asked the State Bureau of Investigation to launch a criminal investigation into the district’s financial transactions “beginning in fiscal year 2026 and into fiscal year 2027.” They also caused three board members to call for Sneed’s removal as chair.
As Hill sat alone at the dais last night, a CMS staff member pulled her aside for a private conversation just before 6 p.m. Hill stood face to face with the staffer, with one leg propped up on a scooter because of her recent broken foot. It wasn’t clear what the staffer said, but Hill then left the chamber.
She wouldn’t return.
At 6:35 p.m., Sneed appeared in the chamber, took a peek at the dais, then turned around and walked out the door. A minute later, the rest of the board entered, and she followed them.
The board’s first order of business was to take a photo with the students who’d earned awards. The kids held certificates with pride, but most of the board members wore ghostly faces. Several didn’t smile until the photographer told them to, and even then it was a quick flash.
When the meeting started, nobody on the board publicly acknowledged the change in chair. Instead they called Rankin “Mr. Chair,” while Sneed sat behind a nameplate that indicated she was the chair. I imagine for those who hadn’t seen the WSOC report, this was pretty confusing.
The start of the meeting was a carnival ride of alterations to the agenda. The most important was a motion to add an item to terminate the superintendent. Nobody spoke to the motion. Rankin called the vote. Five hands went up in favor. Four went up against.
My phone lit up. Eyes popped wide open throughout the room.
Pause here and recap: Your school board was 35 minutes late to their own meeting, leaving a couple of dozen children waiting to receive a certificate, and when they finally decided to make an appearance, they offered no explanation for why they had a new chair or why they would vote to fire the superintendent.
About an hour later, the board called the vote on termination. Hatch, Monterrey Duvall, Rankin, Sneed, and Shamaiye Haynes voted to fire Hill. Anna London, Lenora Shipp, Cynthia Stone, and Monty Witherspoon were against.
Each member except Rankin, the new chair, gave their reasons.
Hatch made the cleanest and most reasonable argument for terminating Hill: “There have been a lot of distractions that have been in the media, in the news, and I think that this board needs to take a stand, to say enough is enough. We need to have bold changes in order to refocus on what matters.”
Fair! But distractions don’t appear on their own, and this board authored plenty of them. Yet Hill’s the one who stood to lose her job.
Monterrey Duvall followed and said, “I don’t want us to mistake organizational challenges for institutional failure.”
Haynes went a step further, playing the part of Sneed’s defense attorney: “Our chair has been convicted in the court of the public, and what I’m hoping for also is that we can get some closure to all of the questions, to the looming concerns, and we can just move forward as a board.”
Rankin asked if anyone else had anything to say, and for a brief moment it appeared nobody was on Hill’s side. Which, frankly, would make her firing easier to swallow than what happened next.
Lenora Shipp noted that several people in executive roles have resigned or will retire by January. Add in a firing of Hill, and Shipp correctly noted that some parents might have concerns about their child’s education.
I say “correctly noted” not as an opinion but as a fact. I’m a CMS parent, and I have concerns! And I’m not alone. I received text messages from parents all over the county last night, from all races and multiple income levels, who said some version of, “What the hell is CMS doing?”
I struggled to answer without emotion. I’m a product of public schools. My mother taught first grade for 40 years in a public school. My wife’s a product of CMS. My sons are 10th-generation Charlotteans who come from farmers and educators on my wife’s side. The four hours I spent in the government center last night were faith-busters, even for me.
“To do this at this time, in this moment, I question: Do we really have children in the center of all that we’re doing?” Shipp asked.
“Yes,” Haynes interrupted.
***
One bit of positive news, I suppose, is that the board did remember to appoint an acting superintendent. Melissa Balknight, who served in the role during this summer’s investigation and recently announced that she would retire on January 1, will lead the scarred district through another transition.
I’ve lived in Charlotte for nearly 14 years, and I’ve spent months of my life in the government center. Even after the most tense discussions — about difficult matters like I-77’s toll roads, or whether to host the RNC in 2020, or how to move forward after HB2 — I’ve found reasons to laugh afterward. Government work can be inadvertently comical.
The government center’s seen a rogue helicopter guy, people clucking like chickens in public comment, endless sparring between former council member Tariq Bokhari and council member Malcolm Graham, and one memorably awkward dab.
Nothing about last night was funny. Everything about it was disappointing, and much of it embarrassing.
“The frenzy of the public is shameful,” Sneed said in casting her vote to fire Hill.
The public isn’t in a frenzy because they fired a superintendent, which, again, they have every right to do. It’s because they surely know that firing a superintendent is a huge deal, and that firing a superintendent at a time when at least four other members of the CMS leadership are retiring or resigning is a really big deal, and that research shows that student achievement generally decreases in the years after a superintendent’s departure, and that superintendent turnover is most detrimental to large, urban districts — and that if you’re going to put tens of thousands of families through that kind of transition, you better damn well be sure it’s close to unanimous, and explain yourself honestly, and with a consistent voice.
People could rally around that.
But this?
“This is a sad moment in the history of CMS,” board member Monty Witherspoon said last night, in one of the more appropriately solemn moments. “Quite frankly, this board has spiraled into complete chaos. This board is dysfunctional. This board is broken.”
Just then, Monterrey Duvall interrupted.
“Point of order,” she said, “is that germane to the motion?”
Of course it was.
Related: The CMS Superintendent drama is nothing and everything all at once (August 16, 2026)