Critics call out lack of transparency, possible violation of Sunshine Law.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: May 21, 2025
Host: Yesterday, in a tight 3-2 vote, the Manatee County School Board fired Dr. Jason Wysong. The sudden and surprising way the superintendent’s termination came about, in just one special meeting without clear advance notice, has prompted calls to investigate possible Sunshine Law violations. In Wysong’s termination, school board member Charlie Kennedy played a key role. Supporters had expected him to be a force of moderation on the panel, but now some say Kennedy just threw a Manatee School Board off course, whose meetings had returned on an even keel recently, after a period of chaos.
Heather Felton
Heather Felton: We are an amazing, amazing district, and we have been boring. And here we are with news cameras and video cameras and people taking pictures of me right now while I’m talking. And we are no longer boring. And, if you followed what happened in Sarasota when they did this, I don’t want to be that.
Johannes Werner: That was a sarcastic Heather Felton, summarizing the effect of the firing. She was elected to the board last fall, together with Kennedy.
Kennedy dismissed any notion that he was the instrument of conservative culture warriors.
Kennedy, as well as Chad Choate and Cindy Spray, the other two board members who voted to oust Wysong, praised the culture Wysong built in the school district in two years, and they praised the rising student performance. Their focus was on Wysong’s alleged failures to communicate.
Trying to explain his reasons, Kennedy called it “a little bit of a long story.” Indeed, it took him more than half an hour to explain. He rattled off a list of small grievances that began to pile up even when he was not on the school board. He began with an incident when he was one of several school board candidates invited by the superintendent for a conversation. Wysong dozed off twice during that meeting, according to Kennedy. At another meeting, he thought Wysong was not listening to what he said. The event Kennedy spent most time on in his monologue was the extended back-and-forth early this year involving the disciplining of a district employee who happens to be Kennedy’s friend.
Charlie Kennedy
Charles Kennedy: Yes, that person is a personal friend, but the reason that I was pushing back on it was that, just like the student case in December, I felt like an injustice was being done to this employee.
JW: Long story short, according to Kennedy, Wysong insisted on fighting that employee’s lawsuit in court, despite a 5-0 vote by board members against his approach. Kennedy claims Wysong laid into him in the presence of staffers after that vote and ignored his communications afterwards.
Board member Richard Tatem, in an effort to change his colleagues’ mind, took up almost an hour. In what sounded almost like a filibuster, he reminisced about how he helped turn a nasty divorce into something less nasty, by singing the first verse of John Denver’s Annie’s song on his ex’s answering machine. His pitch: Let’s try counseling before seeking a divorce from Wysong.
Richard Tatem: (singing) You fill up my senses like a night in a forest—(speaking) right? That first—and then I just hung up.
Chad Choate
JW: Heather Felton was more forceful. She castigated Kennedy, Choate and Spray for lack of transparency and bad timing, and urged them—instead of forcing a vote—to build their criticism into Wysong’s performance review, which was scheduled for June.
Heather Felton: We have to make sure that we are 100% transparent in everything we do, that we are adequately communicating with our constituents and that we cannot be called into question for the same complaints that we’re making here about communication.
JW: She said she had no issue with the superintendent’s communications.
Jason Wysong
Heather Felton: We are just as responsible for communication as he is. We are responsible for supporting him. He supports so many people out there. And yes, there’s communication issues. Yes, sometimes—and I mean this with all due respect—sometimes he’s socially awkward. I know that sounds bad, but you know what I mean. He’s not always good at communicating. Tone is not always there, alright? But I still have absolute trust in what he is doing because I see his integrity and I see his heart. I see him in the classrooms. I see him out in public.
JW: She also laid out the high cost of firing Wysong, including severance, and pay for another 90 days plus 20 weeks. She warned her peers not to trigger the kind of backlash school board incumbents in Sarasota got in the elections after they fired their superintendent last year.
HF: Doing this at 9:00 in the morning was not the way to do it. We should have put this off until his review next month when school’s out, people are able to come weigh in—transparency, guys. Transparency. And the stuff going around the internet is insanity. This short notice—this makes us look so bad. We look terrible right now to the public. And three of you are up for re-election. We look terrible right now. Our staff—all these people—the biggest employer in the district—they are going to lose serious faith in us.
Cindy Spray
JW: To no avail. Kennedy, Choate and Spray stayed on course, and after a tight 3-2 vote, Wysong was gone.
Robin Williams is the chair of the Democratic Public Education Caucus of Manasota. She said she was embarrassed by Kennedy’s role.
Robin Williams: Very shocked, very disappointed and, frankly, I’m embarrassed because we had him as a guest speaker on my ed caucus. He was running against a MAGA-type person and seemed like to me—he had been on the board previously, seemed to be more of a moderate voice on the board, and when I listened to his presentation yesterday, I was kind-of mortified because it just seemed like a list of disjointed grievances.
It just honestly struck me as petty. These are not the types of things that should really have any bearing.
JW: The short notice and cryptic description of the agenda item as a discussion about “change to superintendent’s contract” could amount to violations of Sunshine Law, Williams says.
RW: Doesn’t seem like everything’s kosher in my book in terms of what’s supposed to be under Sunshine. This thing seems—from everything—and I’ve been going over the Sunshine Laws—it seems that they were—I’m not a lawyer, but it doesn’t seem like it followed the spirit or the understanding of what is in there.
JW: Despite such short notice and lack of information, school board members were inundated with emails urging them not to fire Wysong.
Manatee County Schools’ Chief of Staff Kevin Chapman will serve in the interim—probably two months—while a search for the next superintendent is getting underway.
Reporting for WSLR News, Johannes Werner.
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