Incumbent member Bonnie Hauser is the only candidate running in Tuesday’s runoff election for the Orange County Schools Board of Education’s seventh seat—kind of. Her opponent, Jennifer Moore, dropped out of the race and resigned from the school board in April after the News & Observer reported that she lied about having a doctoral degree.
But Election Day is Tuesday, early voting totals have been tallied, and Moore dropped out too late for election officials to take her name off the ballot.
Her name, coupled with Hauser stationed outside Hillsborough’s only polling place with a “MS. MOORE HAS WITHDRAWN” sign, has caused some confusion. Regardless, the county reported 1,627 voters cast early ballots. (The school board runoff is paired with two Republican second primaries, so it’s not clear how many of those actually voted in the school board race).
In the fallout from the N&O story, Moore issued a brief statement and retreated from public view. She said that she would not take the seat if elected. Still, some of her supporters have continued to campaign—not for Moore as much as against Hauser.
“Sitting out the election would give Hauser the race, so I’ve decided to fill in the bubble next to Jennifer Moore’s name,” wrote Katie Harper in a WCHL-Chapelboro op-ed this month. Harper is the treasurer of Communities Supporting Orange County Schools, a political action committee (PAC) that supported Moore, incumbent school board member Carrie Doyle, and newcomer Wendy Padilla in the March election.
In an interview with the INDY, Harper says she hopes that if Moore is elected, the other six board members (three progressives and three moderates) would come to a consensus on an appointee to serve out that term.
The Communities PAC recently took out an ad in the News of Orange, a local publication, writing that its members were “blindsided and saddened by [Moore’s] dishonesty,” but that “Checking the box next to Jennifer Moore’s name in the runoff election will be a vote for the school board to fill her position with someone who supports the vision of academic excellence and equity we voted for in March.”
It concluded that “for others, the answer is to refrain from voting and accept that the runoff challenger, though not selected by a majority of the voters in the March 5 election, will likely be seated on the school board.”
That challenger, Hauser, is incredulous at the idea that voters should pick an unknown over her. (Moore and Hauser are both Democrats).
“I’m not a bad person,” Hauser tells the INDY. “And I think we believe in the same things. So it feels personal.”
This personalistic approach to politics, especially at the most local levels where everyone seems to know one another and comes together to talk it out in the town square, is part of the American tradition. But it’s certainly messy, with grudges spanning decades and interpersonal disputes eclipsing the vast areas of policy agreements between many of those involved. Social media has moved the town square to a digital realm that allows anyone to post their late-night, knee-jerk reaction to every single development, and then argue about it in the comments. Each side has accused the other of using the tactics of the Trumpian right.
But it’s not clear how much this election may impact the board’s policy decisions, because most of the votes this year have been unanimous and uncontroversial. The county, with the encouragement of the board, has indicated it will place a $300 million schools bond on the November ballot for some desperately needed capital improvements, and all members have been extremely supportive of Danielle Jones, the new superintendent who has a background in principal oversight and coaching.
If Hauser wins the runoff, the board will only have gained one new member, Padilla, from this election cycle, and the board will likely continue on its current track.
Topics like race and equity, often mentioned in school board meetings, are headlining the election as well.
Moore ran in the March school board election on a slate with Doyle and Padilla, who won first and second place, respectively. Moore came in third, roughly 500 votes ahead of Hauser, who was the top vote-getter for her own slate of three candidates. North Carolina law allowed Hauser to request a runoff because Moore did not receive more than 50 percent of the vote.
Moore is Black, and Hauser is white. So when Hauser requested a runoff, Moore supporters pointed to the racist politics behind the creation of runoff systems across the South, echoing conversations about Georgia’s 2022 U.S. Senate runoff.
“[The runoff system] was likely to stop Black folks from being able to ‘single-shot’ and get somebody onto a board even when they didn’t have enough votes to get to a majority,” state Senator Graig Meyer, who represents Orange County, told the N&O last week. Earlier this month, Meyer introduced a bill in the legislature to eliminate the runoff system in Orange County elections.
“The election was not too close to call; it was not close enough to ask for a recount,” wrote Kay Singer, former school board member, in a WCHL-Chapelboro op-ed in March. “Yet rather than accept her defeat, Bonnie Hauser is using NC GS 163-293 to call for a runoff election, effectively suppressing those 482 votes,”
The racial element became more pronounced as the N&O investigated Moore’s degree. No one, Moore supporters argued, was asking the white board members for proof of their degrees.
At the beginning of this year, progressives watched as Harvard pushed out its first Black and second female president, Claudine Gay, in a process that seemingly unfairly called her credentials into question. Last year, in Orange County’s other school district, Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, the N&O also reported on superintendent Nyah Hamlett allegedly wrongly attributing sources in her own doctoral dissertation.
Even when the N&O published its story reporting that there was no record of Moore receiving a doctoral degree from the school she claimed, some supporters still saw it as a race-based attack. One public schools advocacy group that supported Moore in the March election referred to the N&O story with the hashtag “#JimCrow.”
It’s still not at all clear why Moore decided to claim a degree that she didn’t have. She first requested to be addressed as Dr. Moore in 2021, after her first year on the board, and well before any reelection campaign.
While Moore didn’t hold a position as powerful as the head of one of the nation’s foremost universities, and wasn’t wrongfully persecuted, she’s also not exactly a George Santos-type of pathological liar who was able to build an entire career around an egregiously large and often-contradictory web of lies.
After the N&O story broke, Moore released a brief statement in the News of Orange.
“I accept responsibility for not clarifying that I do not have a Ph.D.,” it concluded.
Moore did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Harper lists several reasons that she and others will not vote for Hauser in the runoff election. One of those is the departure last year of Dr. Monique Felder, the former superintendent, which caused an uproar. Felder, a Black woman who steered the district through the COVID pandemic and oversaw an increase in graduation rates for Black students and a decrease in racial disparities in school discipline, left before her contract with the district expired.
The conversations regarding the departure took place in closed sessions, with members legally unable to disclose information. That secrecy has allowed anyone with a keyboard to provide their own speculation on Facebook. Some Hauser supporters say Felder mishandled thousands of dollars. Some Moore supporters say that the board majority, with Hauser at the helm, pushed out Felder because they didn’t agree with her focus on equity.
“Which is all bullshit,” says Hauser of all the rumors, arguing that no one except the board and Felder herself know why she departed before her contract ended. “I will just say, by fact, that is all a lie. That is bullshit.”
In her campaign literature, Hauser notes that all seven of the board members voted for the separation agreement with Felder. Harper, the treasurer of the Communities PAC, says that’s misleading.
“While all board members voted publicly to accept Dr. Felder’s resignation, it’s incorrect to imply that all board members wanted Dr. Felder to leave,” Harper wrote in her WCHL op-ed. “Carrie Doyle, Jennifer Moore, and Sarah Smylie were vocal in their support of Dr. Felder’s leadership and disappointed by her departure.”
And at the time, Felder said she wanted to continue her work.
Both Harper and Hauser say that they hope voters see this election as a referendum on decisions that the current board has made. These include a few areas of disagreement, but many votes that were taken unanimously.
One vote that split the board was its 4-3 decision in 2022 to delay the implementation of the improvement plan for Gravelly Hill Middle School. The board members who voted in the minority (which included Moore) argued that it was an overreach. Not long after, the principal of Gravelly Hill—another Black woman—stepped down in the middle of the school year.
Hauser, who voted in the majority, says she stands by the decision to delay the plan.
Some progressives have said the board was too moderate in implementing Senate Bill 49, the so-called “parents’ bill of rights,” even though the board voted unanimously.
The new law from the Republican state legislature, among other provisions, bans curricula from including discussion of gender identity or sexuality for students in kindergarten through fourth grade. It also requires that schools notify parents if their child changes their pronouns at school.
The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board decided not to comply with the law, arguing that it could put LGBTQ+ students at risk by forcing schools to “out” the kids to their parents. That decision has triggered backlash and potential legal trouble.
Orange County’s current board took a quiet approach, unanimously deciding to comply with the law in a way that would make minimal changes to the district’s already-existing (and progressive) policies to support LGBTQ+ and minority students.
“If [students] don’t want to change their pronouns or names on their permanent school records, then nothing happens,” Hauser said at a forum this spring. All of the sitting members running for reelection—including Hauser and Moore—reaffirmed their support for the existing policy.
“Nobody had been able to explain to me why we should break the law, because it doesn’t do anybody any good,” Hauser says.
The board also unanimously voted to keep several explicit books in school libraries after backlash from conservatives. Hauser says that some people have wrongly linked her to the movement to ban those books.
“I am spiritually against book-banning,” says Hauser, who is influenced by her mother’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. She says she voted against the ban because it’s not the board’s job to regulate books.
Part of the criticism against Hauser comes because Cindy Shriner and Michael Johnson, the candidates who she ran with in March, seemed to be further to her right on some issues that came up at forums. Neither Shriner nor Johnson were registered with either major party and at the time, the Orange County Republican party recommended via tweet that voters pick Shriner and Johnson, but didn’t mention Hauser. Last month, the GOP recommended Hauser for the runoff.
Friends of Orange County Schools, a PAC founded in 2022, also backed Hauser’s original slate. The Friends PAC is backed by Susan and Steven Halkiotis, an education power couple who both have decades of experience working in and managing Orange County Schools.
Steven Halkiotis, who previously chaired the board, is still the target of community criticism for his response to the 2016 movement to ban the confederate flag from schools. He was called out for slow-walking the movement, but argued that a good decision would take time. He ultimately was part of the unanimous vote to ban it.
To Meyer, the district’s progressive state senator, the Halkiotises’ support for Hauser was enough of a reason to not vote for her.
Meyer says he worked on a committee that presented a report on racial achievement gaps to the board back in 2007 (when George W. Bush was president and Orange County’s current high school seniors were just learning to walk),
In his endorsements this year, Meyer wrote that “Steve Halkiotis staged a coup and became Board Chair in his very first meeting. After receiving our report, he thanked us and moved on. Progress on equity work stalled.”
Hauser says that she is “good friends” with the Halkiotises but that she is an independent thinker.
“I am not their puppet,” Hauser says. “They’ll be the first to tell you that Bonnie is nobody’s puppet.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].