WHQR's Sunday Edition is a free weekly newsletter delivered every Sunday morning. You can sign up for Sunday Edition here.
This week, at the end of a nearly three-and-a-half-hour meeting, the New Hanover County Board of Education emerged from closed session. As some board members packed up their things, Chairman Pete Wildeboer made a brief announcement.
“The board has been notified that its insurance carrier has reached a settlement with the claimants in the two final Jane Doe cases, New Hanover files number 20-CVS-1395 and 21-CVS-4707. Formal settlement agreements have been signed. Dismissals have been filed in both matters last week, and we understand the insurance carrier has already tendered payment. No New Hanover County Schools funds were used,” Wildeboer said.
It was a fleeting, anticlimactic moment that technically concluded over five years of litigation. It went unremarked, followed only by a brief notice for an upcoming meeting and a motion to adjourn.
Listening to the end of the meeting, and Wildeboer’s statement, the word “final” caught my ear.
Final. I thought about that for some time.
***
The cases Wildeboer referred to were filed by three women who, as children, had been abused by Peter Michael Frank, a former band teacher at Roland Grise Middle School. As with the lawsuits filed by the victims of former teacher Michael Earl Kelly, plaintiffs alleged not only abuse by New Hanover County Schools employees, but a broader system of negligence that failed to protect children.
Since 2018, these cases have hung over New Hanover County, first in criminal court and then as civil actions. They’ve cast a pall of mistrust and suspicion on the school district, the Sheriff’s Office, and the establishment writ large. They’ve been an inspiration for reform – and fuel for conspiracy theories. They’ve reshaped the political landscape; they’ve made and broken political careers.
Over the years, attorneys for the Rhine Law Firm and the Lea/Schultz Law Firm have spent countless hours on research, depositions, and hearings for the Frank and Kelly cases, representing about 20 plaintiffs. On Tuesday, they released a statement, marking the end of that work.
“Our abiding hope is that the settlements in the Peter Frank case and for the final Kelly Plaintiffs bring an end to a shameful period in New Hanover County Schools history. Our clients exhibited tremendous courage in bringing these cases and holding their abusers and the school system accountable. If policies had been followed, these abusers would have been caught far earlier. These settlements are a reminder to the school system that this kind of grooming and abuse cannot — and will not — be tolerated here in New Hanover County,” they wrote.
The settlement of the last case is an ambivalent milestone.
Over the last few years, the district’s insurance carriers have paid out close to seven million dollars. That’s provided some measure of comfort to the survivors, although obviously it’s hard — likely impossible — to put a dollar amount on their suffering. After legal fees, which were considerable given how long the district and its insurance carriers dragged out litigation, looking for a way to dismiss the case or at least winnow down the number of plaintiffs, I wouldn’t describe it as a life-changing ‘windfall’ for the survivors. The hope is that it helps, knowing that it is insufficient.
The settlement also spared the survivors the ordeal of trial, where they would have to relive the worst moments of their lives, while having their credibility and honesty questioned by insurance company lawyers.
And it’s some measure of acknowledgement. Without the civil cases, the broader systemic concerns might never have come to light. Kelly and Frank would have been arrested, but questions about how they were able to commit their crimes and continue to be employed might never have been even asked.
But at the same time, while the district has committed to making policy changes, it has never admitted liability. It has never really apologized; the lawyers would never let them.
One of my first mentors in the journalism business used to say, “Whose fault was it? Who got fired? Who went to jail?” If you couldn’t answer that question, then, in his opinion, there really wasn’t any accountability.
The administrators who were in charge when Kelly and Frank abused students, the top staff who missed warning signs, who ignored or downplayed concerns from students and parents, in the years after the story first broke: they all resigned or retired.
In 2023, then-Attorney General Josh Stein closed the massive, four-year criminal investigation into NHCS. He said, point-blank, that administrators failed to protect children. But no charges were filed, and the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) report remains sealed, despite calls from the public – and the school board itself – for its release.
Kelly and Frank were arrested, tried, and convicted. But for the system that failed to stop them, there was little, if any, accountability.
No one was named. No one was fired. No one went to jail.
***
In late February, after the district settled with the last of the plaintiffs in the Kelly case, I was curious how people felt about it, especially those who had followed the story for a long time.
“Where are we now?” I asked on Facebook. “Has trust been restored, wholly or in part? Was justice served? How do you feel, eight years after Kelly’s arrest?
Clyde Edgerton, a now-retired UNCW professor, had tangled with NHCS over issues of transparency and retaliation dating back to the Spanish Immersion program scandal in 2016. In 2018, he was part of a community organization that started pushing for answers after Kelly’s arrest, delivering a document with a host of sex abuse cases and other issues to NHCS leadership and asking them to investigate.
“We received no response,” Edgerton told me in a text message. “And then in July 2019, two of us requested a meeting with the governor, and he refused. The SBI took over three years to determine that they had no case regarding failure to report child sex abuse. And to this day, no one knows nor has anyone with authority asked in a formal hearing what was said in a meeting between Rick Holliday, Michael Kelly, Tim Markley, and a deputy in a room at the jailhouse on the night Kelly was arrested.”
Edgerton refers to a troubling detail in the Kelly story that emerged as the case progressed: after Kelly was arrested, then-Superintendent Dr. Tim Markley and then-Deputy Superintendent Dr. Rick Holliday were allowed to meet with him in a room at the detention center usually reserved for detainees to confer with their legal counsel. It was apparently unusual under both Sheriff’s Office and NHCS policy for the meeting to take place, although some attributed it to the long-term friendship and working relationship between Holliday and Sheriff Ed McMahon.
Why was this allowed? What did they discuss? Those are just some of the many lingering questions that were never answered in either the criminal or civil cases.
Chris Sutton, who had gone to Laney High School and knew some of the students Kelly abused, also became a forceful advocate for transparency and accountability. He eventually ran for school board on those issues. He was unsuccessful in the 2022 Republican primary, but this year won one of four slots headed into the general.
“I don't think Justice was served,” Sutton responded online. “The co-conspirators should have been charged with an obstruction of justice felony. I believe some of the victim statements established mens rea (guilty mind), and it was disheartening that the attorney general's office wouldn't even explain how those specific instances didn't satisfy that prong.”
Sutton refers to Stein’s explanation of why the state couldn’t bring charges against any NHCS administrators, especially Holliday. Essentially, Stein argued that prosecutors couldn’t prove any of the administrators knew they were acting illegally (i.e., that they had guilty minds, or mens rea).
“I also believe that there is still work to be done within our district to help restore the trust that was lost from that cover-up,” Sutton wrote. “I want to see changes in policy that specifically bring a new level of transparency and accountability to our school system. Make it as tough as feasibly possible for future NHCS leaders to cover things up.”
Angie Kahney, a victim’s advocate who has worked with families of NHCS students for many years, took issue with the school board’s statement issued after the announcement of the last Kelly case settlement.
“[NHCS] remains committed to continuous improvement, stronger safeguards, and a culture where every student is seen, heard, and safe,” the statement read in part.
“The board is giving a false illusion here,” Kahney responded to my post. “Since the time that this sexual assault scandal was made public, the board has only focused on painting a false facade and protecting themselves and not children (the majority of them anyway).”
Kahney voiced frustration that the district had dissolved its Title IX committee, ‘effectively running off’ the former Title IX director, and downplaying or ignoring the results of a Title IX survey, which showed concerning levels of harassment and unreported incidents.
Title IX is part of a 1972 federal civil rights law package that has been broadly interpreted to protect students from discrimination based on sex. Historically, the district had wantonly failed to take the law seriously. When Holliday was promoted to Deputy Superintendent, a position reinstituted just for him, Title IX was one of his responsibilities.
In one of the few interviews he ever granted to me, Holliday repeatedly proffered misunderstandings about the laws. One particularly egregious example was his claim that a sexual assault allegation had no bearing on Title IX enforcement unless it happened on-campus. This was his defense for the district not separating a girl from the boy accused of assaulting her. It took years, but the federal government forced NHCS to concede that Holliday and the district had failed to handle the girl’s assault correctly.
The Title IX committee, and its subsequent work, was inspired — at least in part — to address these shortcomings.
Kahney had concerns about other policies that did not center student safety as their highest priority. She also felt the district ”failed to show one ounce of remorse or empathy to the victims and insisted that an apology would never happen, failing to acknowledge the trauma caused by NHCS.”
Many other commenters on that post, and on subsequent articles about the last Kelly and Frank civil suit settlements, voiced similar sentiments, rejecting claims of ‘finality’ or that this story is, in any meaningful way, over.
***
It’s clear that Frank and Kelly’s adjudicated crimes, and the significant evidence of institutional negligence, still cast a shadow over the district. But some commenters did feel strongly that some improvements have been made.
Even some of the harsher critics noted, in particular, they’d appreciated efforts by Superintendent Dr. Chris Barnes to be more open and empathetic about the past — and more responsive to ongoing concerns.
“I’m not going to fault anyone for being horrified and upset, because I was when I got here,” Barnes told me during a phone interview earlier this year. “I was just as horrified and upset, because I've only got two non-negotiables. For me, it's stealing money and hurting kids. Those two things, those are sins of commission. Those are not things we do accidentally. Those are things you do on purpose. And you know, I can teach you how to teach but I can't teach you how to be a decent person.”
Barnes noted that the district’s commitment to make institutional changes, which predate his tenure as superintendent, “called for us to do a deep dive in our processes and policies.” He said his background in human resources gave him insight into how to approach the problem.
“This is one of those areas that you cannot make a mistake with, and that involves over-correcting, if necessary. I would rather apologize for putting someone on leave and investigating them than I would for not doing it,” he said.
Barnes noted that when there's an allegation of abuse, the district immediately puts an employee on leave, and reports to the county Department of Social Services and the Sheriff’s Office.
One issue that’s been a bone of contention on several occasions is that the district does not conduct parallel investigations while law enforcement is reviewing a situation. Barnes explained the decision.
“If I turn something over to law enforcement and they're doing their investigation, I put mine on pause because I'm not going to do anything to muddy the waters for the police on their side of things. And also, it doesn't make sense for me to resolve something and have the police go a different way,” he said.
He also addressed concerns over how complaints are vetted, and which are handled by principals and which go up the chain to his office. Those concerns have unfortunate precedents in the Kelly and Frank cases. Frank, for example, had a note concerning his behavior placed in his local file that reportedly never made it to Central Office.
Barnes said he monitors complaints as well as the ‘Say Something’ app (an anonymous reporting app created by the Sandy Hook Promise organization). Barnes said some complaints should be handled locally at a school.
“I got one last week that said this teacher doesn't let us have our last five minutes of recess,” he said. “Yep, I’m sending that back to a principal.”
But more serious incidents “skip the line” and go right to his desk, he said.
“You being late to work isn’t a superintendent thing or an HR thing. You calling a kid an MF-er — that skips the line,” Barnes.
Other efforts included mandatory training on “recognizing, preventing, and reporting misconduct,” Barnes said, adding that NHCS is “one of the only school systems in the state that does background checks and fingerprinting.”
There’s also what’s officially called a DNR (‘do not rehire’) list that tracks employees who leave without being fired, sometimes while under investigation or other concerning circumstances. It’s a scenario that is, unfortunately, not uncommon. Just last year, a teacher resigned while under criminal investigation — and it’s plausible the charges could be dismissed, while the concern about the teacher’s conduct would remain.
“So if you leave in lieu of dismissal, you're actually tagged by your social security numbers, and you can’t can't reapply,” he said.
And, of course, when it comes to government employees like teachers, firing someone is not a simple process.
“A lot of this is wrapped up in personnel law, and a lot is wrapped up in what the state says are the 14 or 15 reasons to terminate a teacher contract, right? And half of those are things like moral turpitude, which is a little bit hard to prove, or plotting the overthrow of the government,” Barnes said (yes, that’s actually listed as a fireable offense in state statute).
“The one I usually use is ‘fails to comply with the reasonable expectations the board would provide,’ which is basically policy,” he said.
Asked about the dissolution of the Title IX committee, Barnes said, candidly, that with or without the committee, he was committed to the same work.
“The fact that the committee was dissolved, that is a board decision,” he said. “But the work isn’t. The work is the work — at the very basic, bare bones of it, it’s about protecting children.”
I asked Barnes if he thought things had improved over the five years he’s been at the district, with going on two years spent as interim and then permanent superintendent.
“First off, I'm going to tell you that that was unacceptable. I don't care if you're talking about the district's response pattern, the district’s speed in making sure that it got addressed, or the behaviors of Michael Earl Kelly and Peter Michael Frank,” he said.
“I want people to know that I'm not going to make excuses for what happened before. I'm responsible for what happens going forward. I'm never going to say that we're going to be perfect, but I'm going to say that we need to watch. We need to be diligent, we need to be aware, and we need to recognize the courage that people have when they do come forward. So my job is to put the best structures in place that maximize the opportunity for kids to be safe,” he said.
***
Settlements are often the least worst option for everyone involved. They allow defendants to avoid admitting guilt; they allow plaintiffs to avoid the financial and psychological cost of litigating their trauma at trial. They smooth, to some extent, a very difficult road.
There is a lot to say about what’s best for the survivors, and sometimes, the public's 'need to know’ might need to take a back seat to their best interests.
But when the cases are against public institutions, a trial might be the only way to cut through the opacity of personnel law and government confidentiality. This goes for the Kelly and Frank cases, but also the recent settlement between former CFCC Trustee Ray Funderburk and the college, and it may well be how it goes with the crime-lab suit, which alleged that authorities downplayed issues at the lab and kept quiet about missing drugs.
Whatever else we say about the NHCS story in particular, the truth is that we can’t say we know what happened. Not really; not fully. It’s hard to overstate the impact that’s had on our community.
The gravity of the story, the weight of the anger, frustration, and sorrow, has pulled together a group of advocates from disparate walks of life. But it also has a shearing force, a reality-warping effect that’s anything but heartwarming.
The very real crimes of Kelly and Frank, and the damning signs that the system protected them (through incompetence, indifference, or something even worse), are there for everyone to see. But to some, they are the tip of the iceberg – the visible part of a vast and even more sinister spectrum.
Take the sealed SBI report, which, for a while, was something of our very own Cape Fear Epstein files; because it remained confidential, anyone could speculate about what, and who, was in it. Or take the hyperbolic and generally groundless claims that teachers were on a slippery slope from ‘woke indoctrination’ to actual sexual grooming — when people (including me) pushed back, people could say ‘it’s happened before. More than once.’
It’s my job as a journalist to challenge conspiracy thinking, to reject unfalsifiable hypotheses. It’s also my job to understand those mindsets, the result of confusion and doubt — but also institutional lies and gaslighting.
There’s a cloud of fearful skepticism, of cynicism and even nihilism, that accretes around the black hole of secrecy. Or, to use another metaphor, there’s an incurable infection that grows around the wound of not knowing.
Going to trial, releasing the SBI report, knowing what really happened, all of that is – of course – about accountability, about knowing who was really responsible. But it is also about knowing the limits of that responsibility, about facing the horrors of the story for what it was, but also for what it was not. Real transparency condemns the guilty, but exonerates the innocent. It provides, at last, the final accounting.
The settlements foreclosed that – leaving us in the limbo of implication, insinuation, and intuition. It’s not an ending, it’s an unfinished work, an unbalanced equation, an uneasy ellipsis … and so we have to press on.
***
Rev. Dante Murphy was one of the most passionate advocates for truth and justice after Kelly’s arrest. The former head of the Pender County NAACP, Murphy left the Democratic Party to become a Republican in recent years, but changing political affiliation hasn’t changed his fundamental commitments.
In response to my social media post, Murphy wrote me an eloquent letter about the situation, which I’m including here in full, because I think he presented a thoughtful and balanced take on the long, sad story, which he has seen from start to finish – though ‘finish’ is perhaps the wrong word. I think Murphy and I would agree, if there’s a last word to say about this, it’s not yet the time to speak it.
So instead I’ll say that Murphy has been here the whole time, and so I’ll close with his thoughts:
Eight years later, I think we have to be honest about a harsh reality: we still operate within a system where institutions keep lawyers at the hip to protect the institution first. That often means problems are managed, minimized, and made to go away as quietly as possible — not necessarily brought fully into the light.
Settlements can provide compensation. They can even provide a measure of relief. But they are not the same thing as transparency. They are not the same thing as accountability. And they are certainly not the same thing as restored trust.
We still live in a society where the most vulnerable people are often the least protected people. Children without power. Families without resources. Employees afraid to speak. When systems fail them, the burden is usually on the victim to prove harm rather than on the institution to prove integrity.
It is also difficult to talk about “closure” when there is still an NC SBI investigation that remains sealed. That unanswered piece continues to sit in the background. Transparency matters. Sunlight matters. Without it, trust can only be partial at best.
Where are we now? I think we are further than we were — awareness is higher, policies are stronger, and people are more alert. But trust is fragile. It is rebuilt slowly and lost quickly.
Was justice served? In part, perhaps. But justice is more than a financial settlement. Justice includes truth, accountability, and systemic change that ensures it never happens again.
As for how I feel eight years later — I remain resolved. Resolved that vulnerable people deserve protection, not just promises. Resolved that silence should never be more comfortable than truth. And resolved that institutions, no matter how respected, must always be accountable to the people they serve.
