Schools Supt. Farrelly’s retirement announcement comes amid controversy
By Michelle Wagner and Mark Jurkowitz
Dare County Schools Superintendent John Farrelly’s May 25 announcement that he would retire after the 2022-2023 school year came amid controversy over him sending a Cease-and-Desist letter to a former teacher who, at several board of education meetings, cited his leadership as a primary cause of district staff retention problems.
On May 12, shortly after she spoke during public comment at one of those meetings, Liv Cook received a Cease-and-Desist letter from Farrelly. It stated that “you will Cease-and-Desist your illegal actions” and warned her of a civil suit and criminal charges if she continued to make “FALSE” “SLANDEROUS” and “DEFAMATORY’’ statements about him that have damaged his reputation and harmed his family.
Farrelly’s letter was cc’d to the Dare County District Attorney, the NC State Bureau of Investigations, the NC Federal Bureau of Investigation, the NC Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education.
On May 23, Cook posted that letter on her Facebook page, a post that prompted several hundred to voice support for her. On May 25, hours after Farrelly announced his June 2023 retirement date, Cook and her husband started an online petition drive asking the Dare County Board of Education to make that retirement effective at the end of the current school year.
Aside from the letter to Cook, Farrelly sent a Cease-and-Desist letter in early May to the group known as “Dare To Share,” which has engaged in a campaign of protest and allegations against the superintendent and the school board, dating to the earlier days of the COVID pandemic. In that letter, Farrelly warned of civil litigation if the group continued “defaming me and damaging my reputation.”
In preparing this story, the Voice conducted lengthy interviews with Cook and Farrelly. It also contacted Dare to Share, which responded: “Thank you for reaching out. We have no further comment at this time. Have a blessed day.”
In her interview with the Voice, Cook made clear that she is not connected with the Dare to Share efforts or with any group.
She responded to Farrelly’s letter by telling the Voice that “It was just me presenting three times [at school board meetings], and then to be immediately shut down, silenced, oppressed, was something I have never experienced before. I am a woman, we live in a modern-day society, and I have never been silenced like this. It’s appalling that this would even be an avenue of action before any kind of conversation.”
Farrelly, who became Dare County superintendent in 2017 after serving in that same post in several other communities, declined to directly address the specifics of the Cook situation. But he refuted the idea that there is a growing staff retention problem in the Dare school district. He also spoke of his decision to retire, noting that the last several years have been difficult ones, particularly given the challenges presented by the COVID pandemic.
“The grind of the superintendency is significant, even pre-pandemic,” he told the Voice. “In the last couple years, with everything we’ve dealt with, there’s been some heavy lifting and navigating. I’ve been doing [a superintendent’s job] for thirteen years, I’ve been an administrator for twenty-one, and I’m exhausted. I’m concerned about my health…The demands are very heavy on the family.”
Liv Cook goes public with her concerns
In her interview with the Voice, Cook said that the May 10 school board meeting was the third time she had spoken during a meeting, the first being in March 2022.
Cook said she resigned from the Dare County Schools in June of 2017 for personal reasons, shortly before Farrelly became superintendent. A former Dare County Teacher of the Year, she pointed out that she has ties to the school system and has children in the Dare County schools.
At the May 10 meeting, Cook presented the results of an “unofficial exit interview” survey she conducted of former district employees. She told the board that of the 16 anonymous employees who responded, all of them said they left during Farrelly’s tenure and 15 of them indicated that one of their top reasons for leaving was inadequate support from central office administration.
“You cannot deny that we are losing our educators,” Cook asserted at the May 10 meeting. “In fact, Dare County Schools educators are proving quickly to be Dare County’s greatest export, right up there with sport-fishing yachts and softshell crabs.”
Addressing her reasons for posting the Cease-and-Desist letter on her Facebook page, Cook stated that, “I think that the letter had to be shared so that our community could know what’s going on, and I think you can see on social media that our community members are outraged, I think they are astonished…I think that this is a conversation that should be allowed to happen.”
Since posting that letter, a number of educators have come forward on social media to support Cook’s claims that teachers are leaving the district as a result of leadership problems.
One former teacher wrote, “Thank you for standing up for our students and educators. I have been an educator for 23 years and have just changed jobs because of the leadership in Dare County.” Cook also said that since her May 23 posting, she has been contacted by another 38 former or current teachers in Dare County offering support.
Cook also told the Voice that since the letter she received was emailed initially from Farrelly’s daretolearn.org account and delivered via certified mail in a Board of Education-addressed envelope, it “added to the fear and the intimidation because I don’t know who to speak to about it.”
When asked about the envelope, Dare County Board of Education Chair David Twiddy said the board had nothing to do with the Cease-and-Desist letter and that Farrelly “has reimbursed the school for the letter.”
Twiddy added that the Cease-and-Desist letter “has nothing to do with Dare County Schools. That is his personal [undertaking].”
Dare to Share becomes a vocal presence
The recipient of the May 5 Cease-and-Desist letter, Dare To Share OBX or Dare County Citizens for Constitutional Rights, has been waging a campaign against the policies and practices of the Board of Education and Farrelly for a year or so.
Initially zeroing in on COVID-19 related issues, such as pandemic-related funding, quarantining and masking mandates, the group has widened its scope by also confronting the board and administration at meetings on controversial issues ranging from Critical Race Theory to charges that there is obscene or inappropriate material in library books.
To that end, its goals and methods appear to be part of broader efforts to challenge COVID policies, curricula and books in school systems around the country, a development that has garnered national attention, replete with images of tense scenes at board of education meetings.
The tenor of Dare County Board of Education meetings has also changed over the past year. Outbursts and heckling became more common, and on one occasion, law enforcement personnel were called on to escort people out.
The tensions between the Dare to Share group and the school district came to a head at a Feb. 8, 2022, school board meeting when it accused the district of “lawlessness” and presented the board members with letters of intent, listing a series of demands related to its agenda. Among other things, the letters accused the school board of violating the Geneva Declaration, the Nuremberg Code and other international humanitarian laws.
In an apparent response to disruptions at the meetings, the board of education met virtually during a Feb. 28 special meeting to revise its policy, titled “Board Meeting Procedures,” in an effort to avoid such incidents in the future.
Farrelly’s May 5 Cease-and-Desist letter to Dare to Share also threatened civil litigation, declaring, among other things, that he has “video evidence of the slanderous and defamatory statements that have been made and are injurious to my reputation as Superintendent of Dare County Schools.”
John Farrelly says criticism has crossed a line
While declining to talk publicly about the Cook situation specifically, Farrelly takes issue with the idea that there is a staffing problem on his watch, citing the district’s hiring numbers.
“Since I’ve been here, we’ve averaged hiring about, with attrition, thirty to thirty-five teachers a year, starting back in 2017. Last year was different, because we had the ESSER [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund] positions, so we actually hired 62 or 63 positions total because we had 23 federally funded…We’re one of the few districts this past year that actually filled all our vacancies…The biggest things that we hear in folks that we try to recruit to come, or a lot of times why they leave, is the housing situation here,”
In discussing his pending retirement, Farrelly said the decision was not hasty, and that he knew he would step down “around December, Christmastime. I thought strongly about this.”
Asked about making the announcement a year before his planned departure, the superintendent said he wanted to give staff and administration a year to work on “a transition.” That transition will no doubt include replacing two of Farrelly’s assistant superintendents – Sandy Kinzel who retired, and Keith Parker, who is leaving to become superintendent for Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools.
“When you take the job of superintendent, you know that you’re going to be criticized,” Farrelly added. “I’ve accepted that a long time ago.” But he contends that some of that criticism has crossed a line.
“I’ve always tried to…take the tack that people have the right to make public comments, freedom of speech,” he said. “There’s a huge difference between being critical and speaking what’s on your mind, and then something that’s blatantly false.”
“A lot of those [school board] meetings that were kind of high leverage meetings, people have strong feelings, and certainly [wearing] face masks was a lightning rod,” he continued. “The only time I think that we veered off into unacceptable is when there have been either stated or posted defamatory, slanderous lies…I think we’ve lost civility in some spots.”
Farrelly, who has retained an attorney, also said that “If I’m going to send out a Cease-and-Desist letter, then that’s something that I’m taking very seriously.”
What’s next
At the Voice deadline, about 400 people had signed Liv Cook’s “We Want Change in Leadership Now” petition which asks the board of education to implement Farrelly’s retirement at the end of the current 2021-2022 school year rather than after the 2022-2023 year.
She told the Voice that she plans to present the petition at the June 14 Dare County Board of Education meeting and added that she would continue to speak out on the issue.
“I have to,” she asserted. “I don’t want to be bullied into silence. It’s not acceptable for a community member, a woman, to be silenced by a public figure during a public meeting.”
For his part, Farrelly told the Voice that, “I’m aware the overwhelming majority of school parents are and have been behind us. For that, I’m so very grateful.”
According to Dare County Board of Education Chair David Twiddy, the process for finding a successor to Farrelly will be discussed at the June 14 board meeting.
And on May 27, the board suddenly announced it would convene a special meeting on May 31 that will include a closed-session meeting with its attorney and will consider confidential personnel matters. No other details are known.
