NEW HANOVER COUNTY — The New Hanover County Board of Education may be staying quiet on any detailed explanation for terminating its superintendent contract, but members of the Black community are vocal in their disapproval.
READ MORE: NHCS will provide Foust’s remaining pay, outline interim superintendent process
E.B. Davis, Kojo Nantambu and Derrick Anderson, prominent advocates for Black residents in New Hanover County, released a co-authored letter on Friday representing thoughts on the board’s firing of Charles Foust. Foust was hired as New Hanover County Schools’ first Black superintendent in 2020.
Their statements represent views of the “citizens of the Black community” in response to the New Hanover County Democratic and Republican parties’ thoughts on the termination.
While the letter condemns the Republican Party’s celebration of Foust’s ousting, its co-authors also call out the Democratic Party for taking Black people’s vote for granted while being complacent on issues that affect them.
“Our community sees a lot of similarities from both parties as it relates to the Black citizens of Wilmington,” a portion of the letter indicates. “The only difference is that the Republican Party does not try to engage the Black community based on their past racist behavior towards Black people, and the Democratic Party does not do enough to truly engage Black people, displaying a form of entitlement where Black people are forever indebted to the party.”
(Read the full letter at the bottom of this article.)
In conversation with Port City Daily on July 10, Anderson said it’s become a pattern of hope and disappointment when Black Wilmingtonians obtain leadership positions.
“There’s always a hold your breath thing,” Anderson said. “It’s like you pray for them to do well, because you know that the margin of error is a lot smaller, and that’s just a fact.”
PCD spoke to several Black leaders willing to share their thoughts and the consensus is, while Foust had deficiencies to improve on, none were so egregious they necessitated his termination.
“I didn’t really care for him, but I felt like anybody can turn things around,” said Kayla Munn, a former NHCS employee.
Munn worked as a desk receptionist at Rachel Freeman School of Engineering before she resigned last year. She described a hostile work environment as a Black woman, something she thought Foust should have made a priority to improve upon when he became superintendent.
“When I first found out that we were getting Dr. Foust, I was excited because he would be the first Black superintendent for the county,” Munn said. “So he could, you know, help us more with our inner city schools and our community schools.”
That wasn’t what happened, she said. Instead, Munn observed him focusing on the “richer” schools and the all-white school board.
“And I felt like the school board, they used him as a puppet to do their dirty work, she said. “So now, after they use you up, they fire you.”
Foust was fired in the same board meeting where staff presented dreadful results of a climate survey conducted this spring. The survey revealed 70% of employees, mostly teachers, are dissatisfied with district leadership and 80% finding the school board is “out of touch.” Over 60% didn’t think they could address concerns with the district for fear of retaliation, with 76% claiming their input wasn’t valued. Most comments placed the blame on Foust and the school board.
PCD talked with Dorian Cromartie, community activist and former school board candidate. He believes the school board used the survey as an excuse to fire Foust, deflecting the blame away from its own failings and taking action on the one other person it could control — the superintendent.
“I think that a lot of people that filled out the survey probably had good intentions of trying to make things better for themselves and others, but I also think that a lot of people do not understand how government works, and that the superintendent is, by statute, the only employee the school board is responsible for,” Cromartie said.
Outside of the school district, the decision to fire Foust over a climate survey looked even more bizarre, Anderson said. For those that don’t follow NHCS closely, Foust looked like he was doing a good job.
There were several indicators, he said — number one being the board had voted 6-1 to renew his contract in September 2023. That was the perfect time for the board, especially Melissa Mason and Pat Bradford having campaigned on firing Foust, to act on their grievances, he said.
“I believe we, as a Board of Education, can successfully work with Dr. Foust and his leadership team to accomplish the advancement of the school district to excellence,” Bradford wrote in a text to PCD at the time.
Having rallied against him only a year earlier, Bradford listed many accomplishments, as she saw them, under Foust’s leadership, including the settlement with the sexual assault victims of Michael Kelly, regaining $2 million from the county due to an enrollment discrepancy, securing an extra $5.5 million for capital investments, and bringing in a grant to address reading proficiency at the district’s Title I schools.
Foust was also named North Carolina Association of School Administrators 2024-2025 Regional Superintendent of the Year and received the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Champion for Change Award in 2023.
Even in the district’s more trying times, Cromartie pointed out Foust did his job with the best interest of the district in mind, regardless of how it made the school board look. Cromartie said Foust did warn the district of a looming funding cliff and advised against using impermanent dollars for permanent positions, both of which culminated in a $20-million shortfall this year.
“People didn’t realize that his hands were completely tied,” Cromartie said.
He added that, sometimes, Foust had to uphold the establishment of power because that was his job and he was bound by state statute. Though Foust has also voiced his opposition to several policies brought forth by the board’s right-wing members. On policies governing student surveys and staff conduct, for example, he resisted mandates that would require more work or unnecessary oversight of employees.
He sometimes received a lot of backlash for doing so, most notably over a policy change that would prohibit teaching any content that comes close to this affirmation: “All Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with 6 certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. U.S. Constitution, among other things.”
“The Constitution was not written for me,” Foust said to the board at a November 2023 meeting. “I don’t want us to get into this, but the Constitution was not written with me in mind.”
In his further comments, Foust went on to say he hated he was getting “emotional” — a character trait Cromartie described as a double-edged sword for the superintendent.
“I think one of the things that he was doing a very good job at was putting aside his feelings and putting aside all the BS that comes with the job,” Cromartie said.
Though this was the main criticism Anderson and Munn shared. Foust wasn’t a “personable” leader, they noted; his demeanor and approach could have been “softer” or “more polished.”
Cromartie said Foust’s leadership style upheld the chain of command, using a time he was advocating for a crosswalk at one school as an example. Cromartie sent an email requesting it, but Foust never replied. The next time the two saw each other, Foust explained Cromartie should approach the school’s principal first. Cromartie said he didn’t take it personally.
“I think a lot of people react on feelings and emotions and not the facts, and that’s part of the reason why he’s gone,” Cromartie said.
“Personable” and “polished,” however, are largely subjective and influenced by a variety of experiences and biases; Cromartie and Anderson agreed race could play a role in how Foust measured up to these traits.
According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, 56% of Black adults say that, in general, racial and ethnic bias is a major problem in performance evaluations. A 2017 study from the American Psychological Association found that Black men are perceived as larger and more threatening than their white counterparts.
NHCS is not far-removed from these perceptions; the district is still under federal sanction for disproportionate discipline. Black students are suspended six times more than their white peers. Black students with disabilities are suspended 4.5 times more than their white peers; sanctions kick in when a district exceeds three times more than another demographic.
Over half of offenses leading to these suspension are what the federal Office of Civil Rights refers to as subjective discipline that lends itself to more bias. These offenses include disrespect, defiance, inappropriate behavior, and disruption.
These disciplinary actions are done by the same group of people that took the climate survey.
As is suggested in the letter, Anderson said some will perceive the Black community’s criticisms as “playing the race card.”
“When you see things happen, what is the reaction supposed to be when you lived through those experiences, when you lived through the Wilmington Ten, when you lived through Richard Nixon sitting in federal troops because there are riots in the streets of burning and curfews and all of that kind of stuff?”
Anderson also pointed to the erosion of Black leadership from different local institutions as remindful of what should be a bygone era — an age of Jim Crow, the 1898 Wilmington massacre, the Black Codes.
For example, the New Hanover Community Endowment, which oversees the distribution of grants to local entities with funds from the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center. Its Black CEO, William Buster, resigned without any warning signs nor explanation in February.
Six months prior, in September 2023, the county commissioners, with its Republican majority, removed founding endowment board members Hannah Gage and Virginia Adams despite the recommendation from board chair Bill Cameron that they stay on. Adams was the board’s only person of color. They were replaced with former commissioners, conservatives Woody White and Pat Kusek, both white — the latter of whom also quit the board a month after Buster left.
Attorney General Josh Stein, upon approving the endowment’s creation, requested two more board members be added to the makeup with the intention of creating more diversity. The AG sent a letter to the county and Novant, who appoint five and six members respectively — the endowment appoints the other two — reminding them the directors are supposed to reflect ‘[d]iversity that fairly and equitably ensure[s] gender, racial and ethnicity considerations, as well as lived experiences reflecting different rates of educational attainment, economic prosperity and social mobility.’”.‘
Currently, the 13-member board currently has two African-American representatives and one Latina; the remaining 10 are white. The gender breakdown is four women to nine men.
Then came the elimination of Port City United, a county department created in 2022 to reduce violence through a call center, school-based mentors and a mediation and outreach team. The latter employed gang members to use their connections to intervene before situations developed into violence.
Republican county commissioners Dane Scalise and LeAnn Pierce called for defunding the entire program after several employees were arrested, including the mediation and outreach supervisor, Stephen Barnett, for being an accessory to attempted murder while on the job.
The future direction of NHCS, a county-funded agency, remains in limbo.
Anderson and others in the community now see a future where NHCS is run by a Republican superintendent that will push the GOP’s agenda on all children and parents. But they have made clear they will not stand idle if, or when, this occurs.
“We have participated in and continue to participate in every aspect of this community and expect to be treated as such,” the letter states. “We will no longer tolerate your blatant racist disrespect towards us and our children. We will no longer tolerate the downplaying of our mental capacity as it relates to leadership and productivity in this community as a whole.”
PCD reached out to New Hanover County GOP and Democratic party chairs for a response on the Black citizens’ letter. No response was received by press.
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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