10/21/2022
Dare school board candidate responds to public information incidents as Elizabeth City administrator
*Editor’s Note: In our search for public information on all school board candidates, no comparable information turned up for the other candidates.*
NAGS HEAD — A former educator running as a candidate for the Dare County Schools Board of Education spent time on administrative leave toward the end of his career and then had an administrative reassignment.
Ron Payne is a Republican running against unaffiliated candidate Jessica Fearns for the school board’s District 2 seat in the 2022 elections.
He said in a phone interview last week that the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools (ECPPS) superintendent put him on administrative leave for three days.
Payne was on administrative leave for one week, from June 7-June 14, 2016, according to the Elizabeth City-based newspaper The Daily Advance, which obtained those dates from ECPPS officials.
Then-principal of Northeastern High School in Elizabeth City, Payne missed that school’s graduation due to his being out on administrative leave at the time, according to The Daily Advance. Two days after his return, the school district had already released information about Payne’s reassignment at the end of that month. Payne would become an assistant principal split between two ECPPS elementary schools, P.W. Moore and Pasquotank, according to the June 16 article in The Daily Advance.
ECPPS officials never publicly released the reasons for the administrative leave or for the reassignment.
Administrative leave is a rare disciplinary action, at least locally.
It could potentially be undertaken “for anything that if proven, could lead to dismissal,” according to Interim Dare County Schools Superintendent Steve Blackstock. “Sometimes employees are suspended during an investigation but reinstated if dismissal was not sought.”
Blackstock, a longtime local educator, said in an email that he didn’t know of any administrative leave situations having taken place in either Dare or Hyde counties.
ECPPS has not responded to a request for its number of principals placed on administrative leave in the past decade.
According to Payne, the ECPPS superintendent regularly sided with parents over staff and “got rid of many principals, Central Office staff and teachers. He actually ruined the school district with his lack of professional leadership.”
A disciplinary situation took place at Northeastern High School that resulted is Payne transferring “a very volatile student” to the alternative school, he said. The student later cursed out Payne and a friend at a restaurant, and Payne “asked him to apologize, which he did not.” The parent was also upset at the transfer to the alternative school and apparently complained.
“The superintendent and I had a disagreement on what happens,” Payne said.
When asked for exactly what reason he was placed on administrative leave, Payne responded: “Not sure. It had to do with an investigation into the situation, and that’s what I was told.”
Payne said he did “not really” have a position title after being reassigned, despite the newspaper having obtained his new “assistant principal” status from ECPPS officials.
Payne said he was moved because of his “expertise in in instructional strategies and classroom management,” working with the teachers at both elementary schools “hopefully to help bring them out of…low-performing status.”
Payne retired in 2017 before the school year ended.
“I was there for seven months, and then I retired,” he said.
Prior to his time at Northeastern High School, which began in January 2012, Payne said he worked in schools in the Richmond and Yorktown areas of Virginia, for a total of 23 years in education.
Payne ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the ECPPS Board of Education twice, in 2018 and 2020, according to North Carolina State Board of Elections data.
“The first time I ran, when I retired, I ran for school board because I wanted to hopefully win a seat on the board so I could fire the superintendent because he was horrible for education,” Payne said.
He blamed both losses as a school board candidate on The Daily Advance newspaper, saying they ran stories about him being a Republican.
School board races in Elizabeth City are nonpartisan, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans there, he said.
“I actually went to the newspaper and complained,” he said.
North Carolina voter registration information is public information.
Following his 2020 school board loss in Elizabeth City, Payne moved to Nags Head. He said he’d owned a house here for many years and always wanted to retire to the area.
