Alamance-Burlington school board member Chuck Marsh surprised his colleagues at Monday night’s meeting by announcing his resignation from the board. In a letter to the board read at the beginning of the meeting, he said his resignation is effective immediately.
Marsh, first elected in 2022, missed 11 out of 24 meetings of the school board (work sessions, monthly meetings, and/or special called meetings) between March and November of 2024. He told the newspaper at the time, “I don’t want to go into great detail, but it was and continues to be due to health issues. June and July were not good months for me,” Marsh said at the time.
“As some may remember,” Marsh elaborated in early November “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.”
March has missed other, more recent meetings, as well, in December; earlier this month, he participated remotely by phone for the board’s February 11 work session.
In fact, Marsh’s absences coupled with a 2024 case decided by the N.C. Court of Appeals, prompted school board attorney Adam Mitchell to conclude recently that school board members could no longer vote remotely. While they may attend, listen, and comment, they may not vote, the attorney said.
In his letter, Marsh said that while his health “is on the mend,” his businesses are taking considerable time. Marsh, who owns several local radio stations, said he’s decided he’s best “behind a radio microphone.”
Marsh was one of three Republicans elected to the ostensibly non-partisan board in 2022. However, he had become disenchanted with some of this partisan colleagues on the board of county commissioners.
In the fall of 2023, he announced on Facebook 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.
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School board member Chuck Marsh
“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]!”
Since then, Marsh has, in fact, changed his political affiliation from Republican registration to “unaffiliated.”
School board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves read Marsh’s resignation letter – which she said she had just learned of – at the outset of Monday night’s school board meeting.
Ellington-Graves said the school board will decide at is next work session in two weeks how to proceed with filling Marsh’s seat, which will be on the November 2026 ballot.
Marsh is married to ABSS principal Rebecca Marsh, who has served as the principal of Alamance Virtual School since 2023; she had previously served as an assistant principal at Western Middle School.
The full text of Marsh’s resignation letter can be viewed HERE.
