Educator and Business Owner Rob Wood Challenges Will Furry For School Board, Citing Civility and Experience

Asked what his top goals would be as a Flagler County School Board member, Robert Wood, the conservative Republican who announced his run on Friday in District 2, challenging Will Furry, said without hesitating: “First of all, I want the school board to be a prestigious position where people want to serve, and I want it to function. I want it to function well.”

It has not functioned well. It has not been prestigious. For a few years it’s often been an embarrassment of discord and churlishness, most notably when its two veterans–Furry and Christy Chong, now in their fourth year–stretched a meeting to nine hours to prevent Lauren Ramirez from being vice chair last fall. The District 1 seat vacancy has not helped. It’s been vacant since Derek Barrs left in September, after bringing a period of functional civility to the board.

“We need to have board members that are there that do no harm, that leave people better off than when they found them,” Wood says. That, too, is one of his goals. 

A 15-year resident of Flagler County, he’s married to an educator who taught at Old Kings Elementary for eight years–Stacy Wood–and now oversees the Western Governors University program that certifies teachers. Their son and daughter, now in their early 20s and working in Florida, both went through Old Kings Elementary, Indian Trails and Matanzas High School, from where they graduated. 

Wood, too, is an educator. He describes himself as a “leader of leaders” who’s spent the past decade at Western Governors University, where he’s a senior manager of program faculty, overseeing some 150 employees and nine managers responsible for 7,000 students. He’s president of the local Business Network International chapter. (School Board member Lauren Ramirez is a member.) He owns Exo-Pro Pressure and Soft Wash Solutions, whose drones clean the exterior of buildings of up to 18 stories high (he’s a commercial drone pilot). He started the business not so much to “make a bunch of money” but to “dig roots,” create jobs and build relationships. “Not only do I have the academic background and the leadership background, but I also value blue collar jobs,” he says. 

A Glens Falls, N.Y., native, he was an EMT for a couple of years before joining the Air Force in 1996, where he served as a jet mechanic for 11 years. Returning to the private sector in North Carolina real estate in 2007 coincided with the housing crash. His wife, Stacy, wanted to “restart and resettle our life, so we moved here to be near family.” As an adjunct on Daytona State College’s faculty, he taught GED classes at Tomoka state prison for a year then moved into federal contracting for eight years before making the transition to higher ed. He and his wife both earned MBAs and started working at WGU. 

He’s thought of running for the School Board for years. The Woods have a core group of friends who are local teachers. They were looking at the current electoral field. His wife turned to him “and just asked the question,” he said. “Do you think now’s the time?” It was. 

Either Rob–as he is generally known–or Stacy could have run. But he’s the extrovert of the two. He loves to shake hands, to meet people, to talk. In a conversation with him you immediately get the sense that he loves to engage–not to hear himself talk, but to hear what the other guy has to say. “My wife is the very detail-oriented introvert who would prefer to work behind the scenes<’ he says. “We made the decision that we’re a team working together, that I would run and she would support me, and she’ll be my campaign treasurer. She’ll be working right alongside me through the process.”

Wood sums up his approach to leadership as “the things that I want to do well and I want to be accountable for and I would love for the entire school board to be accountable to.” It’s a three-part approach.

“First is you have to be relationship driven,” he says. “You have to value the relationship over the outcome. And if you do that consistently, then you’re going to continue to build trust relationships that you can leverage in the future.” It’s another way of saying that the ends don’t always justify the means: “If you wade into conversations knowing that your goal is to preserve the relationship over everything else, then you speak to people in a way that’s respectful, and you can disagree and you can have dissent. But you can do it in a way that’s professional and productive.”

Second is what he calls “commitment over compliance,” or avoiding the trap of authority over  consensus: “The last thing you want to do is lean on policy or ‘I said so’ as an answer to why people should behave the way that you want them to,” Wood says. “You want people to want to do the right thing for the right reason, and you want them committed to your cause. You want them committed to the mission of Flagler County Schools. And as a school board, the whole School Board should be rallying around a rallying cry that ultimately supports our students.” 

Third is a sort of Hippocratic oath applied to leadership: “We have to have this value of leaving people better off. Do no harm. We’re not here to hurt feelings and cause division. We’re here to keep ourselves mission focused, and to value everyone for who they are. We should value humans for everything they bring to the table, and that’s everything that they believe in, that we agree with, and all the things that they believe in that I don’t [agree with], because the differences between us make us stronger as a group.”

In a performance review from Western Governors University’s vice president, Wood was described as “comfortable being the lone voice of dissent.” Not that the conservative would necessarily often find himself in dissent in Flagler County, though that’s precisely why dissent might be more valuable: “That doesn’t come from a place of being ugly or not respectful,” he says. “I thoroughly want to get us to the best end, and sometimes that’s taking the contrarian view, just so that we can see all the angles.” 

Three seats are up in this year’s School Board election–Districts 1, 2 and 4. Furry and Chong, the incumbents of Districts 2 and 4, are running. Wood is the only challenger in District 2. Chong has drawn two challengers: Ronald Long and Trevor Tucker, who had held the seat for several terms until 2022. The open District 1 seat has drawn former Board member Jill Woolbright and Cathy Moon. 

Furry had announced a run for the 6th Congressional District seat in a challenge to Randy Fine, the Republican incumbent. Furry’s campaign never caught on, so he decided to end it and run again for the School Board seat.