Why JoAnn Orischak mattered after all that Beaufort County school board dysfunction
The subject never even came up.
It’s dumbfounding, when you think about it, but very telling.
The Beaufort County Board of Education met on Sept. 15, 2015 at the Bluffton public library, only days after our newspaper reported that the superintendent’s wife had been hired to a new $90,000 position in the central office.
Then came another story. Superintendent Jeffrey Moss had deleted a portion of the district’s ethics policy that contained language on nepotism that could have been interpreted as excluding his wife from getting that job.
The board had been told that Darlene Moss might be hired. It did not know about the policy change. This was the first board meeting since the news ripped through the community, but the only person to mention it during the meeting was a citizen, who said the superintendent should resign or be fired.
Our reporter Rebecca Lurye dashed into the dark parking lot after the meeting and cornered board member JoAnn Orischak of Hilton Head Island.
Lurye pressed for a comment. This is what the newspaper has discovered, she said, do you think those actions by your superintendent are right?
The story, filed around 10:30 p.m., included Orischak’s response:
“Knowing what I know now, no.”
Of 11 board members, Michael Rivers was the only other one to say it was wrong.
Three said they had no problem with it.
Worse, six refused to take stand.
That parking-lot question ignited an all-out, very personal war on the school board that still smolders, even though Moss finally left three years later in the wake of an FBI investigation of the district, two separate actions against him from the state Ethics Commission, and two resounding defeats on school construction referendums.
Orischak announced last week she will not seek re-election to a third term in November.
She never stood alone in the fight for what is right. But she was the lightning rod, humiliated by colleagues on a board that lost any semblance of decorum.
She saw something that was wrong, she said it was wrong, and she tried to do something about it.
She irritated people doing it, but that seemingly simple reaction is rare in public life in Beaufort County.
Looking back on her tenure in an interview Friday, Orischak returned to the library parking lot.
“That was my eureka moment,” she said.
Board secrets
Orischak surprised many when she took 65 percent of the vote to represent District 11 in Sea Pines in 2012.
She was a 48-year-old mom whose three children went through the county’s public schools. She bled the blue of Hilton Head Island High School, she had taught school here for a bit, and got involved as an activist pushing for greater opportunities for gifted and talented students.
But she says nothing in life prepared her for what was to come.
The “eureka moment” ended up being more than having to say “yes” or “no.”
It threw the community spotlight on a lightly-considered board.
“I was moving my daughter into an apartment at school in Virginia and I was receiving phone calls all day long,” she said. “People were so angry that that would take place.
“It resonated with the public. It registered with the public immediately. But our board majority was really in denial.”
Also, it revealed that supporting the schools isn’t so much about selling brownies as asking unpopular questions.
“It was important because it spoke to what all is done behind the scenes,” she said.
“There’s so much the board may or may not know. It’s like navigating through a minefield. You didn’t know what information you didn’t know ... but it’s scary.
“You want to think that you have all the facts and information to make an important decision, but you don’t.”
Lightning rod
Twice, fellow board members brought lawyers into executive sessions to help hammer out public reprimands for Orischak.
One followed her public statement that Moss should consider resigning before the end of the school year.
The board formed two groups, the six-person “Moss Majority” who generally wanted to hear nothing bad about him, and a five-person minority. The minority has included Orischak; Rivers, who left to become a state representative; David Striebinger, who was elected on a campaign of change; Christina Gwozdz, now the board chair; Joseph Dunkle and John Dowling.
Even today — with a new superintendent, a largely different board, and Moss long gone with a sweetheart settlement — Orischak is still taking heat.
Former board chairman Mary Cordray of Hilton Head told me Friday that Orischak lost her focus.
“She shifted from trying to help improve the school district to trying to destroy it. That’s my perspective,” Cordray said. “She wanted to help make things better by exposing deficiencies with no next step on how to make it better.”
Cordray said that when a board majority thought Moss should go, his longtime supporters made it happen.
“If it weren’t for us, he’d still be here.”
Striebinger was a stalwart with the old minority, and remains on the board after six new members were elected in 2018.
He said there are positives to Orischak’s constant challenges. He said she and Dowling, who also is leaving the board this year, make you think, and keep you on your toes.
But, he said, “I think JoAnn is a firmly committed contrarian. I’ve kind of moved on from that position. The board changed drastically, but JoAnn never did.”
He said the warfare goes both ways.
“John and JoAnn have taken many shots and me. I was struck, actually, at how quickly JoAnn and John turned on (new chairman Christina Gwozdz). They are anti-authoritarian people. That’s their niche. I’d prefer things to be on the positive side.”
Dowling told our newspaper that Orischak is the “conscience of the board,” who never gave up and never gave in.
Joseph Dunkle, who lost his seat in the 2018 election, said, “She always took a stand. It was never hard for her to ask those pivotal questions, those hard questions.
“They say, ‘trust but verify.’ She did a lot of verifying. The herd mentality is that ‘the superintendent said it, so it must be true.’ Her take would be that ‘the superintendent said it, let’s check it.’ That ruffled feathers at times.”
Ethics Commission
Orischak took on Moss one last time in filing a state ethics complaint against him.
Earlier, the nepotism scandal was scrutinized by the state Ethics Commission on complaints by two citizens. Moss would pay a fine, but the school board decided to do nothing.
This time, Orischak, who was wondering what it would take for the board to seek a new superintendent, “got curious” about a mention of Moss’ outside work in one of the district’s federal subpoenas over two Bluffton school construction projects.
Again, Moss was wrong in the eyes of the Ethics Commission. He had to repay the school district some $7,000 for days of work he was away earning money from an outside firm.
But Orischak said she never saw any personal or angry responses from Moss.
“He was much slicker than that,” she said. “He would present himself as being the one under attack, and then make a threat to you indicating that you had threatened him in some way. It would all be very vague, but you would clearly get the message of what was being done there. It was manipulation. It wasn’t direct. It wasn’t name-calling.”
As for blasts from fellow board members, Orischak said “you can’t take it lying down.”
She sometimes thought of quitting.
“There were nights when I would come home extremely frustrated,” she said. “But if you quit, you give up and you renege on your commitment to the people who placed you there. And I do have to say that during my time on the board, I received a lot of support from those who put me here. And I thought that would not be the right thing to do because of my own frustrations.
“And also, if you quit, they win. It wasn’t in my makeup.”
County Council
Orischak said several people have talked to her about running for Beaufort County Council.
She lives in the district Stu Rodman has represented since 2007, with the next election in 2022.
She said she would consider it if a number of people encouraged her.
But she also said she could move within the county.
“Now we are kicking tires all around the county,” she said. “We’ve been looking north of the Broad (River), but we don’t have our home listed for sale, and we don’t know if we’re going to make that leap or not. Kicking tires — that’s all I would say on that for now.”
She said she’ll likely never be at kum-ba-yah gatherings with old school board members.
But she said, “There are moments, and I have to be honest with you, that I look back and I say you know what, Mary Cordray was the only one in the room who understood this at that time and I didn’t realize it.”
She said the new board is better at sticking to an agenda, and not going beyond the agenda in executive sessions. She said it is notable progress that the board could influence the officers to open agenda-setting meetings to the public.
“That is board reform to me,” she said.
For incoming board members, she would say:
“Everybody has to learn as they go. Just continue to use good judgment. If something doesn’t sound right to you, question it. It’s OK to question things.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 4:40 AM.
