CMS board fires Superintendent Crystal Hill in a 5-4 vote hours after the chair steps down

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education voted 5 to 4 on Tuesday night, September 22, to terminate Superintendent Crystal Hill, a decision that was not on the published agenda when the day began. The board voted to fire her for convenience, meaning without cause, which under her contract entitles her to a full year’s salary of about $341,000 in severance, according to WSOC.

Hill was in the building before the meeting and was not at the dais when her future was discussed. A board attorney escorted her out before the session began, WCCB reported, and Deputy Superintendent Melissa Balknight took her seat. Balknight was later named acting superintendent. She is scheduled to retire on January 1.

How the night unfolded

Tuesday’s meeting had been called for a different purpose. Three board members, Monty Witherspoon, Lenora Shipp and Cynthia Stone, had asked for a vote on removing Stephanie Sneed as chair, the step we reported yesterday in our story on the district attorney’s request for a criminal investigation. Hours before the meeting, Sneed announced to WSOC that she was resigning the chair, though she remains a board member, WFAE reported.

The board came to the dais about half an hour late after a closed session that began at 4 p.m., according to The Charlotte Post. As soon as the public meeting opened, the new presiding officer, former vice chair Dee Rankin, recognized member Charlitta Hatch to make motions changing the agenda. The board voted 5 to 4 to add several items, including a motion to terminate Hill for convenience. The termination itself then passed by the same margin.

The Charlotte Post reported the split. Voting to fire Hill were Hatch, Liz Monterrey-Duvall, Shamaiye Haynes, Sneed and Rankin. Voting against were at-large members Witherspoon and Shipp and district members Stone and Anna London. The board then elected Rankin as chair and Monterrey-Duvall as vice chair.

What the board said

The board offered no detailed explanation of the firing, WFAE reported. In a written statement after the vote it said it had determined that a leadership transition was in the district’s best long-term interest. Hatch, who made the motion, said the board needed to make bold changes to refocus on what matters and that there had been too many distractions in the media, according to Queen City News.

Members on the losing side were blunt. Witherspoon said the board had spiraled into complete chaos and was dysfunctional, WCCB reported. Stone pointed to the pending SBI request, a coming state audit and unresolved grievances and said it seemed the wrong time to change leaders. Shipp said she was very concerned the decision would set back academic gains the district had started to make. Monterrey-Duvall, on the majority side, said there were two sides to the story and that as employers the board could not say much.

The findings released the same night

The board also released the report from its summer investigation of Hill, which had placed her on paid leave in June and reinstated her in August after about two months. The vote to fire her came before the report was made public, WBTV reported. Its conclusions, as reported by WSOC, undercut the case for her removal:

• The review did not find evidence of improper conduct by the superintendent.
• It did not identify conflicts of interest or improper activity in the superintendent’s contracting.
• The investigation itself cost about $379,000, which the report noted was two hundredths of a percent of the district’s $2.1 billion budget.
• The review covered workplace culture, personnel decisions, the handling of open positions and district contracting.

Hill had fought back in the week before the vote. Her 14-page memo, first obtained by The Charlotte Ledger, accused Sneed of working behind the superintendent’s back to hire law firms and direct staff, and questioned payments to a consultant, Raki McGregor, that appeared to have no contract or purchase order behind them. On Friday, September 18, Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather asked the State Bureau of Investigation to open a formal criminal investigation into alleged financial irregularities at the district, not limited to any single party, WBTV reported.

A leadership vacuum at the top

The firing comes as most of the district’s senior team is already on its way out. WBTV reported that Balknight, Chief Financial Officer Kelly Kluttz and Chief Operations Officer Tim Ivey are all expected to retire on January 1, 2027, and that Chief Human Resources Officer Angela Wood resigned on September 14. The acting superintendent, in other words, has a little over three months left, and the district must find a permanent superintendent, a chief financial officer and a chief operations officer at the same time.

Hill had led the district since January 2023 and was, until this year, widely praised. She was named the 2027 Southwest Education Alliance Superintendent of the Year, WCCB noted, and the district had announced its best academic results on record only weeks before the vote, according to QCity Metro. She is now the seventh superintendent to leave since 2011, WSOC counted, and by QCity Metro’s count the fifth including interims in the last ten years.

What comes next

Several processes are now running at once, and none of them ended with Tuesday’s vote. The board has an acting superintendent with a retirement date, a state criminal investigation request, a state audit and a set of grievances from staff. By The Charlotte Post’s roll call, the new chair, Rankin, was among the five who voted with Sneed both to add the termination to the agenda and to carry it out, so the board’s majority and its new leadership are the same five members whose conduct Hill’s memo questioned.

For families, the practical questions are who runs the district on January 2 and what the SBI decides to do with the DA’s request. CMS enrolls roughly 140,000 students. Its board faces a school year with a leadership team that is largely retiring and a superintendent search that will begin under an investigation. We will report the acting superintendent’s first decisions and any response from the SBI as they come.

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