By Delayna Earley
The Island News
Former Beaufort High School principal Carla Shelton has filed a defamation lawsuit against members of Beaufort County Board of Education (BOE), local daily newspaper The Island Packet, and its parent company McClatchy Company, LLC.
The suit names the Board of Education members who were on the board as of April 2023 – Ingrid Boatright, Earl Campbell, Carlton Dallas, Richard Geier, Chloe Gordon, Christina Gwozdz, Elizabeth Hey, Angela Middleton, Victor Ney, William Smith and Rachel Wisnefski.
Shelton began the 2022-2023 school year as the principal of Beaufort High School.
In the lawsuit, she alleges that the environment in the school was “turbulent” when she was hired due to a change to the school’s mascot that “had stoked community tensions due to a past merger of majority white and majority Black high schools.”
Shelton alleges that in Fall 2022 she had issues with “long-tenured teacher who ran an academic program that was beneficial for college applicants” who had created “arbitrary prerequisite barriers.”
One of the “barriers” alleged in the suit was a pre-entry interview process that was not required by the College board and discouraged minority students from joining.
She allegedly ordered the teacher to stop requiring a pre-entry interview and to remove any other unnecessary barriers in the process.
The lawsuit alleges that the teacher retaliated against Shelton in Spring 2023 by becoming “insubordinate” with her and “filed frivolous complaints with the [BCSD] Office” about her while encouraging other educators to follow suit.
She says that despite meeting with the Beaufort County School District (BCSD) on March 30, 2023, to tell her side of the story, she was informed that she would be receiving an “informal letter to counsel about her interactions with the teacher.”
Shelton alleges that she resigned effective the end of the school year at that time, and on April 24, 2023, the BCSD agreed to put her on Administrative Leave for the remainder of her contract year, until her resignation, but later that day an article ran in The Island Packet newspaper stating that she had been fired.
The article in question currently bears a correction stating that “an earlier version of this story said the principal was fired but was changed to reflect that she was put on leave, according to two board members,” but does not list the two board members.
The amended version of the article states that Board Members Richard Geier and Will Smith confirmed to The Island Packet that Superintendent Frank Rodriguez was the one who made the decision to put Shelton on leave.
Per the article, Geier would not state publicly why she was put on leave, but the article also states that she was put on leave for disciplinary reasons.
“[Shelton’s] administrative leave was voluntary and mutually agreed to allow [her] to be removed from a mutually acknowledged toxic environment and to allow the district to try and remedy that environment with a fresh set of hands,” according to the lawsuit.
Additionally, the lawsuit alleges that Shelton was never contacted for comment by the paper before running either of the stories and the members of the Board of Education named in the suit “each deny having made the false statements at issue in this case to The Island Packet.”
The lawsuit states that Shelton has “suffered reputational harm, loss of good will, emotional pain and suffering and stress and anxiety” from both the alleged actions of the members of the Board of Education and The Island Packet and is seeking a jury trial and an undisclosed sum for all damages, including punitive damages.
Shelton is being represented by Cromer Babb & Porter, LLC, a law firm located in Columbia.
Delayna Earley formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
