QUESTION: Why has Alamance-Burlington school board member Chuck Marsh been absent from nearly half of the school board’s meetings since March of this year? Is it due to a medical problem, or something else? He has said he’s not planning to run for a second term, but does Marsh actually intend to complete his current term?
ANSWER: Marsh has missed 11 out of 24 work sessions, monthly meetings, and/or special-called meetings since March of this year, which he recently confirmed for The Alamance News is related to his health. Most recently, Marsh didn’t attend the school board’s latest work session on October 8 or its monthly meeting on October 28; nor did he participate in either meeting via phone.
“I don’t want to go into great detail, but it was and continues to be due to health issues,” Marsh explained last week in an email to the newspaper. “June and July were not good months for me.
“As some may remember,” Marsh elaborated, “I had a stroke in 2021 and then a triple bypass with no less than 6 heart attacks (between March and December 2021) prior to [finding] out I had complications [due to] the Covid vaccine (doctor diagnosed) and had to be life-flighted to Duke for an emergency triple bypass.”
As for his meeting absences, Marsh told the newspaper, “I have no idea how many I have missed.”
Marsh, who was elected to the nonpartisan school board in November 2022, didn’t respond when asked last week whether he intends to complete the remainder of his term, though he’d previously announced on Facebook in September 2023 that he wouldn’t seek a second term on the school board in 2026.
At the time, Marsh attributed his decision to a series of occasionally tense discussions between the school board and Alamance County’s board of commissioners in late August 2023 about how to fund $27 million to remove mold from 33 ABSS facilities, an outbreak that ultimately delayed the start of 2023-24 school year by two weeks.
“I [used] to be independent and switched to Republican when I ran for the school board, but I’m considering switching back after the month long battle we had with our very own party to try to fix our schools after years of neglect,” Marsh wrote on his Facebook page, in announcing his intention not to seek reelection. “I love many folks within the GOP, but I’m not a fan of someone telling me I have to get along while the person I’m to get along with is allowed to be an [expletive]!”
Asked last week about who is responsible for ensuring that school board members attend, or otherwise participate in, board meetings, school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves told The Alamance News last week that the responsibility falls to each individual board member.
While ABSS has a policy limiting the number of meetings that school board members may participate in remotely to no more than three per calendar year, it has no policy that addresses meeting attendance in general.
“It is my understanding that a board member is individually responsible to ensure his/her compliance with both the code of ethics and board member commitments,” Ellington-Graves told the newspaper last week. “Collectively, the board has limited options and tools to address such compliance. As an elected official, a board member is ultimately held accountable by the voters.”
Meanwhile, Marsh – who was registered as a Republican and was endorsed by the county’s GOP when he ran for the school board two years ago – has since switched his voter registration to unaffiliated. (Alamance County’s Republican Party also endorsed school board members Dan Ingle and Dr. Charles Parker for the school board race in 2022.)
Two other incumbent school board members have also defected from the Democratic and Republican parties. Ingle, a longtime Republican and former state representative and county commissioner, revealed to the newspaper late last year that he’d switched his voter registration to unaffiliated.
Retired ABSS administrator Donna Westbrooks, a former Democrat elected to the school board in November 2020, also told the newspaper late last year that she had changed her registration to unaffiliated. (When asked on an Alamance News issues questionnaire in 2020 about whether she had been endorsed by any political party, Westbrooks did not respond; this year, she said she had not).
On the other hand, Parker – one of the three current school board members that the GOP endorsed in 2022 – remains registered as a Republican, as does incumbent Ellington-Graves, the latter of whom ran for a second term in this year’s General Election.
Ellington-Graves had been endorsed by the local GOP for the race in 2020 but didn’t receive the party’s endorsement this year. Rounding out the GOP’s preferred slate in 2020 were outgoing school board
member Ryan Bowden and candidate Linda Kinney, who came in at 11th place out of 11 candidates for four school board seats in November 2020.
Alamance County’s Democratic Party in 2020 endorsed then-incumbent school board Patsy Simpson, who came in third place to win a fourth term that year but later resigned, and incumbent Brian Feeley, who lost his bid for a second term on the school board after coming in at eighth place for four seats.
Rather than seek a second term on the school board, Bowden instead ran for one of three open seats on the commissioner board but was defeated in the Republican primary on March 5 of this year. He continues to be registered as a Republican.
School board member Seneca Rogers – appointed in November 2023 to complete the unexpired portion of Simpson’s term – was and continues to be registered as a Democrat. Rogers also serves as the third vice chair for Alamance County’s Democratic Party, based on a list of the slate of officers for 2023 through 2025 posted on the party’s website.
Along with incumbents Ellington-Graves and Westbrooks, Rogers also ran for a full, four-year term on the school board in the General Election. See related story, this edition, about the results of this and all other local races.
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