The Cabal Against Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt

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.

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.