‘A new direction’: Shining Rock shakeup signals shift in school strategy
After a recent court ruling, Shining Rock Classical Academy in Haywood County is looking towards the future.
SRCA photo
In its first regular meeting since a superior court judge ruled that Head of School Joshua Morgan was responsible for the “improper use of governmental authority to stop or inhibit the public from accessing public records,” Shining Rock Classical Academy’s governing board doubled down on Morgan’s leadership, bid farewell to two longtime advisors, took substantial steps to bolster transparency and voted not to appeal the case.
“I hope that the community sees that we are trying to push forward in a different direction,” said SRCA Board Chair Alyson Weimar.
The judgement, order and injunction were issued by Judge Shari Elliott on June 26 after a parent, Rebecca Fitzgibbon, filed suit in 2023 over claims the public charter school located in Waynesville failed to comply with public records laws, including several related to requests she made surrounding a disciplinary incident with her son. The school unsuccessfully countersued for defamation.
Elliott declared the school’s public records fulfillment procedure illegal, ordered the school to produce the records Fitzgibbon requested and instructed the school to avoid violating public records laws in the future.
During the July 23 meeting, the board established an unusual procedure to provide more insight into its handling of public records requests.
“We are going to start listing all of the current public record requests, the requester and the fulfillment status. There are a lot of documents,” Weimar said. “These will be published to our public page once minutes are approved, but these are all the different public records that have been requested. In an effort to have full transparency with the board and the community, this is something that we are going to start practicing going forward.”
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Morgan proceeded to go into detail on recent requests, including by The Smoky Mountain News and Fitzgibbon. The requests themselves are public records. Most public bodies don’t post public records requests for public inspection, but some do. No public bodies in SMN’s core coverage area include a regular presentation of pending requests and fulfilment status during governing board meetings.
Although Morgan adopted a dismissive tone during his presentation, it was a significant departure from how the school previously handled requests, including an August 2019 request by SMN that ended up as part of Fitzgibbon’s case against the school.
On July 23, nearly six years after the initial request and a month after Elliott’s ruling, SMN began to receive some — but not all — of the public records requested from SRCA at that time. Morgan delivered those public records personally, through email, foreshadowing another move by SRCA’s board related to its public records procedures.
According to Elliott’s ruling, Morgan and SRCA allowed consultant Katy Ridnouer of KLR Partners LLC to bill exorbitant amounts for routine public records fulfillment tasks in violation of the law. Frank Lay, an attorney and SRCA board member at the time, told Morgan and longtime board attorney David Hostetler he believed some of the costs were not permissible by law. Lay later resigned.
“Despite Lay's concerns, Morgan, in collaboration with Ridnouer, Hostetler and others, implemented Shining Rock's formalized public records response protocol and applied it to Fitzgibbon's public records requests with the intended purpose of stopping or inhibiting Fitzgibbon's submission of public records requests to Shining Rock,” the ruling reads.
When the topic of renewing Ridnouer’s annual retainer — which paid her $1,950 a month for 10 hours of work — came up in the meeting, board members didn’t mention the ruling or her testimony at trial. Instead, they concentrated on what they called duplicative duties and a lack of big-picture thinking.
“With what she is doing, which I'm just seeing this here, isn't that something that is already being done by someone else or could be done by someone else?” Board member Larry Davis asked.
Weimar said she wanted the board “to come around Josh and further empower him to do the job of head of school” while also mentioning the school’s new board governance and compliance tool, called Board on Track. The school has begun using the web-based platform to publish agendas, meeting minutes and documents. Admittedly, it’s not yet perfect, but school officials are working to make it more useful to the public. Board on Track also offers free trainings included with the service, which was another component of Ridnouer’s work.
Board member Rob Gevjan said that in other trainings he’d participated in, he’d seen potentially beneficial insight that the school just wasn’t getting from Ridnouer.
“Moving into some things that I've not seen Katie doing, I think it'd be beneficial looking at defining the vision of the board,” Gevjan said. “How do we figure out how to, in the community, advocate for Shining Rock? What type of people should we be thinking about inviting to the board?”
Ridnouer had been associated with the school since at least 2018 and was involved with the hiring process that elevated Morgan from interim to permanent head of school after his predecessor was fired over sexual assault allegations.
Ultimately, the board decided not to renew Ridnouer’s retainer agreement.
“I feel that perhaps we have outgrown our relationship with Katy and it's time for us to move forward in a new direction,” Weimar said.
The board then moved on to Hostetler’s annual retainer renewal. Hostetler’s firm, Lexis School Law Services, had been retained by SRCA since May 2018, per public records provided by the school. At that time, the annual retainer was $14,500 with various hourly billing amounts based on the type of additional work to be performed. From August 2018 through June 20, 2025, SRCA had paid Lexis nearly $119,000.
Part of the court ruling mentions Hostetler’s role in SRCA’s public records fulfillment process.
“Shining Rock had no legal justification to charge Fitzgibbon the cost for separating out confidential from non-confidential information from otherwise releasable public records prior to release, a function included in the legal review by Hostetler or performed by others at his direction,” it reads.
Davis again spoke first, encouraging separation from Hostetler and Lexis without mentioning the ruling.
“We've had the same attorney for the last seven, eight years. Maybe it is time to get some new lenses, new eyeballs on this stuff,” he said. “Our school’s growing from what it was when they first got Hostetler here, so maybe we do need to focus on someone that does have a lot of experience in charter schools, especially through high school, now that we are a high school.”
The retainer agreement expired at the end of June, but Hostetler performed an open meetings law training for the school on July 16 that he’d have to be paid for, one way or the other.
“The easiest thing, looking at his agreement, would be to pay him through July in terms of work that he has pending with us,” Morgan said, adding that he’d given Hostetler some tasks and didn’t see them coming any closer to completion.
“I’m going to be blunt. I think some of those tasks, we actually need a new lens to look at them,” Weimar interjected.
“I think that is a very fair statement,” Morgan replied.
“I’m not sure I want [Hostetler] to complete those tasks,” Weimar continued.
The board eventually decided to engage Durham-based Stella Law, but not by lump-sum retainer — SRCA will pay an hourly rate between $295 and $400 an hour, based on the type of work and billed in six-minute increments. Weimar said they’d previously met with Lisa Gordon Stella, who represents other public charter schools, and were impressed.
Gevjan, well aware of public scrutiny focusing on the taxpayer-funded school and its unelected board, added a comment once the board voted to sever ties with Hostetler and Lexis.
“I know some optics could seem like, ‘Well, what is Shining Rock doing? What's the board doing? They lost a case. They're firing their counsel,’” he said. “I just want to mention that part of this last training that we had kind of opened my eyes, and I think multiple of our eyes, just to recognizing that a different lens is needed.”
On July 24, the school issued a press release announcing its separation with Hostetler and Ridnouer and thanked them for their service.
The board’s final act of the evening, perhaps the greatest indicator that the school truly wants to push ahead in that “new direction” Weimar called for, was to vote unanimously in open session not to appeal the ruling in the Fitzgibbon case.
“So the insurance company wants a 90% confidence we could win the appeal,” Weimar said. “Our attorney through Utica [National Insurance Group, the school’s liability carrier] Andy [Santaniello] says that he does not feel comfortable giving a 90% confidence.”
With that being said, Weimar felt that the insurer would likely not cover the appeal costs, or would maybe cover part of it, leaving the school — and taxpayers — on the hook for another costly affair. The school is already facing a fee hearing, likely in September, where a judge will consider a request for SRCA to pay up to $111,000 in attorney’s fees incurred by Fitzgibbon over the course of her case.
“I think we should just go with it and let's go ahead and settle this thing and just move on to the future,” Davis said.
