To reflect on the year, Chapelboro.com is re-publishing some of the top stories that impacted and defined our community’s experience in 2023. These stories and topics affected Chapel Hill, Carrboro and the rest of our region.
Orange County’s two school districts each saw controversy surrounding their superintendents in 2023. In January, Chapel Hill-Carrboro superintendent Nyah Hamlett faced scrutiny after a journalist found potential plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation. Hamlett weathered that storm, as community leaders and school officials voiced support for her work in the district. But Orange County Schools superintendent Monique Felder was not as lucky, leaving the position in August amidst ongoing friction with the Orange County school board.
For Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools superintendent Nyah Hamlett, 2023 got off to a very stressful start.
Less than two weeks into the year, News & Observer reporter Dan Kane published a story examining the doctoral dissertation she’d written at William & Mary in 2018, “after receiving a tip that the manuscript contained questionable credits and attributions.”
It did, as it turned out: Kane found 35 sections of the dissertation that matched the phrasing from sources “word-for-word” without proper citation – though those sections comprised only a small portion of a much longer dissertation that was otherwise free of citation errors.
Hamlett issued a statement ahead of the article’s publication, acknowledging that “the placement of some citations and some word choices” could be re-worked – but standing by the dissertation in every other respect, and saying she’d be having the project reviewed again by William & Mary.
Citing Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” approach, Hamlett said little about the matter after that. But other district leaders and community leaders did the talking for her, penning an open letter of support that drew hundreds of signatures. The letter praised Hamlett for her work as superintendent over the previous two years, dismissed the accusation as “an attempt to embarrass and distract” – and questioned Kane for raising the issue in the first place, saying it was another example of Black leaders having to deal with “exaggerated levels of scrutiny and suspicion regarding their academic backgrounds and their work.”
With the school board and the greater community clearly supporting Hamlett, the matter effectively ended there. But the report provided fuel for residents who had already been critical of the superintendent in the past.
That included East Chapel Hill High School student Hunter Klosty and his father Kevin, whose attacks on Hamlett escalated in the early months of 2023. That culminated in a minor altercation at East Chapel Hill’s graduation ceremony – where Hunter swore at several district officials while collecting his diploma, and Kevin had to be separated from Hamlett after approaching her following the event. The incident led Hamlett to obtain a temporary restraining order against the Klostys, while school board chair Rani Dasi issued a statement denouncing what she called their “ongoing personal attacks… (and) demonstrated pattern of rudeness, obnoxiousness and ominous language.”
But while Nyah Hamlett faced scrutiny in 2023, she kept her job as superintendent with the enthusiastic and unanimous support of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board. The same was not true, though, for Orange County Schools superintendent Monique Felder, who abruptly lost her job over the summer.
Orange County Schools superintendent Dr. Monique Felder talks with a family after her official selection to lead Orange County Schools in 2019.
Felder had led the Orange County Schools district since 2019, guiding the district through COVID-19 and earning praise for her equity work. OCS had also outperformed other districts in academic growth and seen a spike in four-year graduation rates in the years after the pandemic. But the district had also spent years at the center of an ongoing firestorm over issues of racial equity and LGBTQ representation, beginning with a push to ban the Confederate flag on school grounds and rename buildings named after white supremacists, and continuing through a Moms For Liberty effort to pull LGBTQ books from school libraries.
The school board banned the flag, renamed the buildings, and unanimously rebuffed the book-censorship effort. But in the process there emerged a bloc of four board members – a narrow majority – who were skeptical of Felder’s attempts to prioritize equity and diversity, and whose criticism of the superintendent became more pointed after the board learned of a significant budget shortfall in the spring.
Finally on July 28, Felder announced her departure “with a heavy heart” after a closed-session meeting with the board.
“My hope is that the core values that we created together as a learning community will continue to hold true,” she wrote. “Most importantly, that we continue to value diversity and put children first. Each and every student in our district deserves to feel welcome, appreciated, valued, seen, and heard for exactly who they are so they can reach their maximum potential. I want those values to shine as a beacon for everyone in Orange County, regardless of their background or beliefs.”
Felder’s departure the following week left Orange County Schools without a permanent superintendent for the fall semester, though Jim Merrill filled in on an interim basis. But the vacancy didn’t last long: in December, the board named Danielle Jones to take over the position in February. Jones currently serves as assistant superintendent for middle schools at Durham Public Schools; she too has a strong record, as Durham’s middle schools significantly outpaced other districts in academic growth in 2023.
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