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The Cabal Against Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt

April 3, 2023 | FlaglerLive | 19 Comments

cathy mittelstadt
Lost in the noise. (© FlaglerLive)

Flagler County Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt is the target of a cabal. Tuesday evening she may well be fired, with no justification. Her detractors call it a contract non-renewal. That’s just a cover for the machinations that have been unfolding since last November.

pierre tristam column flaglerlive.com flaglerlive Just as book-banning in this county comes down to the work of three individuals imposing their standards on thousands of students and parents, this cabal is made up of a clique who claim to speak for a broader mass than they do, and who do so on the flimsiest pretexts and, whispering campaign aside, nonexistent evidence worth a firing.

Who makes up the cabal? There’s School Board member Sally Hunt, of course, whose volatility is a district liability. There’s Paul Peacock, the Wadsworth Elementary principal who just lost a grievance and is threatening to sue the district, possibly over his demotion last year after School Board member Colleen Conklin called him “an idiot” for his role in mucking up union negotiations. There’s School Board member Will Furry, who had his own meeting with Peacock and now appears to be Hunt’s second in Tuesday’s duel with Mittelstadt.




And there’s a chamber of commerce that claims that because it has most of the same old suits on its board that animated the chamber that went bankrupt in 2020, it somehow a) represents the business community and b) should have a greater say in the district’s direction than “mere” parents who may address the board at any meeting.

Keep in mind: the district is almost certainly a bigger business many times over than all the chambers’ businesses put together. We can’t say for sure, because this chamber arrogates a sense of importance behind a convenient shield of secrecy: we don’t know who they represent, but we should somehow put weight on its 181-word declaration of “no confidence” in the superintendent because it issued it on letterhead with a cool logo.

The Hunt-Peacock axis is no more credible. He has an ax to grind. She’s been his grindstone (with Palm Coast attorney Mike Chiumento, a member of the chamber board, as his attorney and one of the people Hunt met with when she was loading up on ammo against Mittelstadt: Chiumento had gone head-to-head against Mittelstadt over that impact fee brawl last year). We now know from the copious texts Peacock and Hunt exchanged between November and March that they had such a cozy relationship that he was a shadow board member, down to orchestrating a step-by-step firing of the superintendent with a “script” he sent her before a February board meeting.




Peacock’s insubordination and defiance are in the open, as is his defiance of the open records law. How he is still an employee of this school district is inexplicable. How Furry factors Peacock’s legal threats–the threats of a discredited employee–into the superintendent’s evaluation to lower the superintendent’s standing only speaks to Furry’s blinkered perspective. But there’s been a lot of that surrounding Mittelstadt’s fate.

Hunt was the school board liaison for Wadsworth Elementary. Each board member is assigned a couple of schools in that role. That meant attending the School Improvement Councils there, not turning the principal into a personal puppeteer. Smartly, Hunt announced last week she had severed the liaison role and asked for a different school. Presumably, Peacock is no longer her Rasputin. Only future record requests can tell. But her misjudgment’s damage is done. What should have been a routine contract renewal for the superintendent has turned into a slow crucifixion.

Sleazy method and lies aside, it’s Hunt’s prerogative to dislike a superintendent and seek her replacement. I also don’t buy the argument that just because the school board has three new members, they don’t have the right to make a decision about the superintendent just yet. Of course they do. They’re grown adults. The electorate put them there for a full four years, not for an apprenticeship. If they can vote on policies, contracts and personnel matters, they certainly have the right to vote on the superintendent’s future without condescending comments about how they should sit back and learn. They’ve had that right since the first day they were sworn in, and could have legitimately made a motion to fire Mittelstadt at their very first board meeting four months ago.

That said, method and reasoning matter, as does history. We have yet to know what exactly has been so disastrous about a superintendent who shepherded the district through Covid and handled with superhuman diplomacy three different sets of board members and fractious boards in three years, in a fractured county, all with the kind of centrism that keeps the system moving without necessarily pleasing everyone all the time. In others words, with the kind of non-ideological centrism laser-focused on the district’s and the students’ best interests–not the the interests of the ACLU, not Equality Florida, not the American Library Association, not the NAACP, not Parkview Church, certainly not the self-appointed pontiffs of the nonexistent monolith known as “the business community.”




The superintendent’s evaluations by each board member, published today, might have given us an idea why some of the board members want her gone. Instead, we got the equivalent of Facebook posts from Furry and Hunt’s usual scatterbrained heaves bulked up by cut-and-paste jobs from the local chamber of commerce’s attack on Mittelstadt, and the same old outdated claim about four volunteers whose background checks the district couldn’t readily produce. That’s it. The rest is all anonymous, unsourced, McCarthyist-like “feedback” these two experts in hearsay want us to take at face value, and fire Mittelstadt–a member of this community for nearly two decades who’s built two homes here–over that.

There’s no such thing as universal agreement with the CEO of the largest organization in the county, with 13,000 students, 1,800 employees, perhaps 20,000 parents. No organization of this size can be without its cliques and disenchanted, myself (and even Colleen Conklin, her biggest champion) among them at times.

I was disappointed by some of her half measures during Covid, not about masks, but about free testing the health department was providing and that she kept out of school. I’m disappointed that she doesn’t back teachers more vocally and that she fired one of the district’s best when pressured by a former board member.




I’m appalled that Mittelstadt is willing to ban books, as she did last year, as she did again last week. Oddly, I find myself in agreement with Christy Chong, if from different angles: the board member thinks the superintendent isn’t banning books strictly enough. I think she’s banning too much. But so goes one of the most divisive issues of the day, but either way not one worth sacrificing a superintendent over.

It can’t all be smooth. It’s not the perpetual summer of love, as some members of the chamber of commerce seem to want it to be. They want a back-slapping lackey who goes around the community glad handing everyone and having beer with the good ol’ boys. (In the words of Flagler Broadcasting’s David Ayres, a member of the chamber board, “we need more of a PR engaging person and not somebody that runs the schools from inside.”)

Thankfully, that’s not Mittelstadt, and it’s diametrically opposed from what this district needs. She’s a serious, smart, nose-to-the-grinder superintendent who gets things done and, most of all, stays out of the culture-war fray that’s been corroding public education everywhere. She is the fourth superintendent in less than 10 years. We don’t need a fifth. We need stability, a sense of proportion and cool heads. Sure she could spend a bit more time in schools and in the community. But that’s an easy fix. Having someone who knows how to run a district isn’t.

So while the board has every right to fire her Tuesday, I hope it doesn’t come to that. Not if board members mean it when they claim to have students’ and the district’s best interest at heart.

Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor.

Click On:


  • School Board Wants ‘Standing’ Closed-Door Meetings Every 3 Months. That Would Be Illegal.
  • Sally Hunt Raises Questions About Using Schools as Shelters During Hurricane Emergencies
  • Sally Hunt Hijacks New Superintendent’s Triumph with a Hit List of Resentments
  • At Budget Hearing, School Board's Sally Hunt Reveals Alarming Ignorance of Tax Structure and State Funding
  • School Board’s Sally Hunt Feels Unsafe in Workshops and Asks for Permanent Deputy Security
  • First Book Bans. Now School Libraries: Sally Hunt Thinks Media Centers Could Be Shrunk.
  • Behind Principal Paul Peacock’s $7,500 Grievance, a Roil of Politics and Sideshow Maneuvers
  • Superintendent’s Self-Evaluation Is 2 Points Short of ‘Highly Effective,’ With Notable Gaps
  • Peacock Sent Sally Hunt Script on Firing Superintendent Even as She Claimed ‘Due Diligence’
  • Sally Hunt Courted Ex-FPC Principal Dusty Sims for Superintendent Outside School Board’s and Public’s Purview
  • Sally Hunt Has Problems. The School District Is Paying the Price.
  • School Board’s Sally Hunt Claims That She Resigned, Then, Bizarrely, Retracts the Claim
  • School Board Will Decide Superintendent’s Fate in April as Back-Channel Jockeying Intensifies
  • Superintendent’s Fate Darkens as Sally Hunt, Board’s Swing Vote, Turns Agnostic on Mittlestadt’s Future
  • School Board Is Timidly Mum on Superintendent’s Future as She Hints of Looking Elsewhere
  • Sally Hunt: The Live Interview
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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. LAW ABIDING CITIZEN says

    April 3, 2023 at 7:29 pm

    Pierre, I agree 150 % with everything that you had mentioned, you are also right about “The Cabal”, that exist down here, I have seen this in the many positions which are taken up by a bunch of bought and sold souls who have ties with developers, attorneys,politicians , they are all tied into together, who think because they were put into
    positions by their cohorts or use their power of money to buy their way into elections, also part of the dark money from Tally who need to be gone too, this sick cycle will continue to grow like tumble weed. They also have people who have been brainwashed by their cult leaders who vote for them. Bottom line it is up to we the people to VOTE THEM OUT, as we did with the last elections, some of them are still morning the loss of Mullins but think that they are still going to make it into other positions that they intend to run for, we CANNOT make this happen, ultimately we hold the power, they don’t want us to think so but we do. Remember this at election time folks, the more of them we can get rid of the better off our County will be.

  2. Robin says

    April 3, 2023 at 8:37 pm

    Keep her.
    And let’s be more discerning about who is elected to the School Board.

  3. K says

    April 3, 2023 at 10:10 pm

    I agree

  4. blerbfamilyfive says

    April 3, 2023 at 10:15 pm

    Hate to say this, and hopefully Ms. Middlestadt will not be terminated, but maybe it would be a blessing for her to get away from the lunacy that seems to be running rampart on this school board. What a circus!

  5. Baileys Mom says

    April 3, 2023 at 10:24 pm

    Agree 100%, let’s keep a Leader like Cathy in the position. She has kept our students and staff focused on results.
    She is qualified! We don’t need another bowling coach or football coach as superintendent!

  6. Sherri S says

    April 3, 2023 at 10:26 pm

    Yes! Let’s vote for qualified candidates. It’s not a political position.

  7. Michael Cocchiola says

    April 4, 2023 at 8:18 am

    Circus it is. And most unfortunately, a good school superintendent is caught up in the clown show.

    I can only hope for the third vote to keep Cathy Mittlestadt in her job.

  8. Duane says

    April 4, 2023 at 8:21 am

    Let’s take a broader look at this situation.
    If Pierre had a readership that reach those people visiting Flagler county thinking of moving their family here, what message does all of this send about the school system. This crap is the best solution to stop the population growth in Flagler county.

    Congratulations!

  9. Bad Call says

    April 4, 2023 at 8:23 am

    Uh, Why is Sally meeting with an attorney of a potential litigant? What was the agenda? The purpose? Does she have some level of negotiation power on behalf of the district? Was she given talking points or parameters? Did she brief the board / district on the topic of the meeting(s)? Did she commit the district to anything?

    Unacceptably bad judgement, Sally.

  10. Lynne says

    April 4, 2023 at 8:35 am

    After watching all this from afar for many months, if I were in Ms. Middlestadt’s position, I think I’d quote Johnny Paycheck: “take this job and ….” No one should have to tolerate the slurs of those yahoos. She has done an admirable job through several years of absolute chaos, some of which was out of the control of voters but some was within the control of the voters of Flagler County.

    Personal vendettas, off-the-wall beliefs, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans have no place when it comes to educating our children.

  11. Been There says

    April 4, 2023 at 9:18 am

    IDK, anyone who vetoes the reccommendations of a committee made up of volunteer citizens to keep a book on the shelves to go with her own agenda, maybe is not acting in the best interest of the citizenry of the County she works for. Read Brad West’s article. https://flaglerlive.com/188239/book-decision-overruled/

  12. Cabal is Right says

    April 4, 2023 at 9:38 am

    Chiumento and his little cronies being at the center of this is the least surprising news of 2023.

  13. c says

    April 4, 2023 at 9:42 am

    @Robin ;

    While I agree with you completely, I have to point out that in the last few elections the choices we were offered resulted in a decision of “Who will do the LEAST harm?”, not “Who is the BEST candidate” – (my personal feelings).

  14. coyote says

    April 4, 2023 at 9:50 am

    @Sherri

    Unfortunately, while you are currently correct – that’s probably going to change :

    “Partisan School Board Races: HJR 31: Places on the 2024 ballot the question whether school board candidates must run as a political party nominee. ”

    SJR 94 – The Senate version of this resolution has already been passed.

    Read more at : “https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/bills.aspx”

  15. Pogo says

    April 4, 2023 at 9:57 am

    @D

    Here’s what you’re missing: FC, and PC, have accumulated (accumulated) the current mix — attracted by what?

    Mutual attraction — warts and all.

    This tune has been on a loop for over 30 years.

  16. Been There says

    April 4, 2023 at 4:24 pm

    Aren’t they (the kings and king makers of Flagler County) at the center of everything?

  17. Deborah Coffey says

    April 5, 2023 at 4:58 pm

    Sally Hunt lied to every person that voted for her. Does anyone know what the process is to recall her in Flagler County?

  18. Tierney Hamilton says

    April 5, 2023 at 5:47 pm

    Before I talk about the subject at hand, I want to give praise to the author. Very even-handed reporting. Which amazing I find in both TV and news journalism. Not so much in the government. The basics should GOOD governance for the public in the area in which you have been assigned. For the PUBLIC. I come from a city where three members of city council were caught taking bribes. Immediately, there was reform. The Speaker of the House has just been found guilty of bribery. Why are people who have no expertise so involved in something in an area in which they have no expertise. In fact, how about doing something to help. Like increasing graduation rates, by lending their expertise, telecommunications and computers to the school. I am very happy I do not have children in school here. Sounds like a soap opera.

  19. Cowgirl Diva says

    October 17, 2023 at 10:34 am

    Staying above the political fray, (political activists/political operatives) is imperative when it comes to educating our children..!! We must focus on what is best for them…physically….morally….mentally….emotionally….when it comes to learning and stay focused on educating them with the skills they need to navigate life ..!! Just my two cents..!!

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