When Rich Lieberman joined the Spotsylvania County School Board in January, one of his first orders of business was to advocate for additional funds for the county’s five high school marching bands.
But Lieberman and fellow first-year board member Larry DiBella were taken aback when the proposal was met with skepticism — not just from their fellow school board members but also Superintendent Clint Mitchell, who questioned the need for the board to focus on such a “granular” issue.
“I don’t think it’s the appropriate role of this board to be managing at this level,” Spotsylvania School Board Vice Chair Belen Rodas said at a budget work session on Feb. 2.
Lieberman’s push for band funds highlights an awakening for school board members once they transition from the campaign trail to the dais. They’re forced to balance promises made to constituents — and their own desires to influence change — with the reality that their role is limited to governance and policymaking, while the superintendent manages the division’s day-to-day operations.
Since January, DiBella and Lieberman have continued to clash with Mitchell as they adapt to their new roles. Fellow board member Carol Medawar said the tension exists between Mitchell and the two board members because of a lack of understanding of the position.
“We are sort of ‘The What’ and the superintendent is ‘The How,’” Medawar said. “He’s going to figure out how it gets done. I feel like if we decide we’re ‘The What’ and ‘The How,’ it causes problems.”
‘The voice of constituents’
According to the Virginia School Board Association, school boards oversee the superintendent and budgets, as well as formulate policy, set out a long-term vision through strategic planning and operate as a bridge between the community and the division.
DiBella and Lieberman don’t agree that their behavior falls outside the VSBA’s guidelines on governance. DiBella said board members were elected to represent the interests of constituents, not to be beholden to a hired school official.
“The superintendent has too strong of a hold on the school board,” DiBella said of Mitchell.
DiBella’s grievances include a dispute over the Rap Back program for continuous background checks on employees, what he perceives as Mitchell’s lack of interest in Career and Technical Education programs, questions over how a new elementary school gained precedence over a new CTE center in a $237.2 million bond referendum, and the proposed location of a sixth high school.
The most heated debate concerned Mitchell’s proposal, which was ultimately adopted by the board, to require his approval before board members visit schools.
“This board … needs to get back to doing the job we’re elected to do, and that’s being the voice of our constituents in the school system,” DiBella said.
Power struggles between board members and the superintendent is not uncommon in Spotsylvania; Mitchell was hired in 2024 following a tumultuous period that led to the dismissal of former Superintendent Mark Taylor.
None of the other school divisions in the Fredericksburg area — Stafford, King George or Caroline counties and the City of Fredericksburg — seem to have similar issues, although Caroline Superintendent Sarah Calveric has repeatedly clashed with the county’s board of supervisors.
Calveric credits the Caroline School Board as the reason she’s served in the role for nine years. She said the Caroline School Board works well together because the members are “a fully functioning group of adult humans.”
“I truly believe that it helps when you develop protocols, norms, and bylaws, and you hold one another accountable and you develop modes of communication that take paper form, that take email form, that there is a wide array of communication channels that we can use to keep each other in the loop,” Calveric said. “We also have very well-established forms of feedback and engagement.”
Trusting the process
Calveric, who also serves as president of the Virginia Association of School Superintendents, said that differentiating between governance and day-to-day operations is a challenging balancing act, which is why she invites school board candidates to meet with her during election seasons to discuss the division’s organizational chart and other matters.
After the election, school officials meet with newly elected board members for a Caroline-specific onboarding process, followed by VSBA governance training and then VSBA Master Board training, where the members come together to become a more cohesive unit. Caroline and Fredericksburg were recognized in recent years as master boards.
“I really feel like we stay focused on the main thing which is students and staff,” Calveric said. “We have good clarity of governance and administration, where administration is the daily grind, where they’ve charged me and our team with carrying out the mission, and the board is visionary with policy, and data review, and appropriating funds to the right thing that the data and our strategic plan show that we need.”
It wasn’t always easy for Caroline School Board Chair Lydell Fortune to focus solely on governance. The former Caroline NAACP president admits that when he was elected in 2023, he entered the position determined to be a “change agent.” However, his enthusiasm was tempered a bit by VSBA governance training about the school board’s role.
“When I was elected, I was thinking, ‘Yes, there are issues that we want to address. I’m gung ho. I’m going to do this.’ I wasn’t even thinking about whether or not it falls within the school board from a governance perspective or a day-to-day operational perspective,” Fortune said. “You want to be responsive to the constituents that bring about these concerns. But that VSBA training does ground you as a board member to know that our lane is definitely governance, and when we are made aware of certain issues that are truly operational, we need to lean on our superintendent and her staff to make it happen.”
Fortune and Calveric both said there are times when board members do challenge the staff’s decisions, but it’s done with respect — and oftentimes in workshops that are held prior to each regular board meeting.
“Obviously, the lines can be blurred at times,” Fortune said. “We know situations do occur where there’s a fine line between, ‘Is this issue really governance or is it day-to-day operations?’ One thing I can say about our relationship with the superintendent is we have, in my opinion, excellent communication and that goes a long way when situations arise that fall in that gray area.”
Not backing down
Spotsylvania board members are still working to find the balance between challenging school division staff and maintaining peace with the superintendent.
DiBella said it’s difficult to do the job of overseeing Mitchell and his staff because he keeps a “tight circle, an echo chamber that doesn’t accept any outside feedback.”
“Me and Mr. Lieberman have brought up concerning things to him that we have seen,” DiBella said. “But any time that we have any difference of opinion with him, he turns it into something more than what it is.”
Mitchell told the Free Press on Tuesday that his relationship with the two hasn’t improved since they took office. He’s yet to experience major issues with the other five members of the board — Chair Megan Jackson, Rodas, Medawar, Jennifer Craig Ford, and Lorita Daniels.
Medawar said more than 30 years of experience as a special education teacher and math coach, among other roles, in large and small, urban and rural school divisions, prepared her to know her responsibilities as a board member. She believes DiBella and Lieberman have good intentions but, in her opinion, are misguided in their approach. She stressed that Spotsylvania is a diverse school division with students requiring various needs and open-minded decision makers.
“If you’ve only had your own children or maybe just a few children, you sort of have the lens of, ‘This is what works for my kid,’” Medawar said … “You have to think about what’s going to work for all our kids.”
For Jackson, she said a humble spirit allows her to work with Mitchell seamlessly. She realizes “I’m not the expert” and allows Mitchell and his staff to make decisions as long as they aren’t strictly policy or budget related. Once new members begin “getting into the weeds of daily operations,” those habits are hard to break, she said.
“I think it takes a willingness to learn what your role is and what it is not,” Jackson said. “Then you have to respect that, by respecting staff in their positions. I try to be as collaborative as possible, so I may offer suggestions to the superintendent. However, sometimes I have good ideas and sometimes they’re not so practical.”
DiBella and Lieberman have no intentions of relenting from their challenges of Mitchell.
Lieberman cited the National School Boards Association, which declares that the primary role of school board members is to “represent the community’s voice in public education,” among other duties such as budget, policy, and overseeing the superintendent.
“The problem is there are times our superintendent kind of skips some of those steps and kind of says, ‘This is what the board’s doing’ and that’s what the board does,” Lieberman said.
Lieberman questioned Mitchell about presenting budget cuts to the board of supervisors in March that were recommended by his staff but not approved by the school board. He also said Mitchell’s staff presented the bond referendum prioritizing the construction of an elementary school to the school board at noon on the day of the vote.
“We had a study in February of what the population growth was, but we had no discussion about schools and all that,” Lieberman said. “The board never said anything about that, and all of a sudden, in this referendum, we’re voting on an elementary school and we’re going to put it on the Route 1 corridor.”
To Lieberman, the decision about the prioritization and placement of schools, is “100% governance,” and the board should’ve had a more robust discussion about the matter before adopting the referendum to place it on the ballot this fall.
Mitchell defended his handling of all the concerns brought forth by Lieberman and DiBella during his superintendent’s remarks at the June 8 meeting. Two two board members don’t trust Mitchell or his staff, he said, and they have their own thoughts about how the division should be managed, making it difficult for them to see different perspectives.
“They not only want to write the policy, but write how we want to do it, which is the operational side, which is the superintendent’s responsibility,” Mitchell said. “That is the confusion. That confusion exists because they don’t have the proper training to learn how to govern. Until they learn how to govern, we’re going to continue to have those problems.”
