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Kingery, last of prior state school board leaders, resigns

By RYAN QUINN

Charleston Gazette-Mail

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The last of the three officers on the West Virginia Board of Education before Gov. Jim Justice took office last month resigned Monday.

Beverly Kingery’s resignation means that Justice, who has already appointed four new voting members to the state school board since his Jan. 16 inauguration, will be able to fill both her seat and another existing vacancy.

That would equal six voting members appointed by Justice on the board, which has a maximum of nine voting members.

“I turned my letter in because it seems that the governor, you know, has a new direction that he wants to go and as a professional I will respect that opinion,” Kingery said. “I think I should afford the governor the right to set the direction for the state as he chooses.”

She declined to say what parts of Justice’s direction she disagrees with, saying “I choose to remain professional.”

Kingery served as superintendent of Nicholas County’s public school system for seven years before former governor Earl Ray Tomblin appointed her to the board in January 2015. Her resignation comes after the old board’s president, Mike Green, and vice president, Lloyd Jackson, resigned Jan. 31.

Kingery had served as the board’s third officer position — called secretary, a position separate from that of Virginia Harris, a board paid staff member — since July.

On Feb. 2, she didn’t attend the first meeting of the newly reconfigured board.

At that meeting, Tom Campbell — a continuing board member and Justice supporter whom all board members but the absent Kingery chose, without dissenting votes, as the new president that day — read a letter from Kingery stating that she was resigning her officer position but wasn’t resigning from the board completely.

Kingery also didn’t show up to the new board’s second meeting last week.

She told the Gazette-Mail after the Feb. 2 meeting that Campbell had called her the night of Jan. 31. That was the night Green and Jackson announced their resignations in a news release.

Kingery said Campbell was “talking around things” in their conversation and she knew where the talk was going. She said she then asked him whether he’d like to be president, and he said yes, and he asked her whether she’d like to be vice president, and she said yes.

She said that in a follow-up talk with Campbell Feb. 1, he said some of the members and “the administration” had problems with her being vice president, and he said he would talk with some more people and get back to her later that day. Campbell said, according to Kingery, that some of the members and administration felt she needed to “prove” herself.

“And I found that odd because I have proven myself for over 40 years in education,” Kingery said at the time.

In what Kingery said was their second and final conversation Feb. 1, she said Campbell told her that he knew that three members would not vote for both him as president and her as vice president as a single ticket, and asked her if she’d be in favor of them being voted on separately.

She said she then asked him why he would favor splitting the ticket.

“I think the reasoning was that he was certain he could be president but he knew there were issues from some of the others with me being vice president,” Kingery said.

She said she then asked him if he’d personally still vote for her as vice president.

“And he said, ‘I can’t, I have to go with the will of the administration,’” Kingery recalled.

She said Campbell didn’t say which other members opposed her — she thinks he was referring to three members, not including himself, in opposition — or to whom he was referring as “the administration.”

“He stated to me the votes are just not there,” Kingery said.

She said that because she saw her leadership wasn’t wanted as vice president, she felt the secretary role should also come from within “the new leadership realm,” so she resigned that role.

Campbell said Feb. 2 that he had spoken to Kingery and new board member Chuck Hatfield about who should be selected as the board leaders — he said they both asked about nominating him. But he also said he wasn’t going to say anything Kingery had said was wrong.

Kingery said a set of recent lawsuits filed by Cherry River Elementary employees against her and several other defendants had “absolutely no bearing” on her decision to resign. She personally declined to confirm or deny the suits’ allegations against her, referring a reporter to her attorney, Victor Flanagan.

Flanagan said Kingery didn’t in any way harass or threaten employees, as the suits allege.

“It will be our goal to get her dismissed from those lawsuits,” Flanagan said.

The allegations include that she made “threating [sic] and harassing phone calls” to employees of Nicholas County’s Cherry River Elementary after those employees reported alleged “illegal sexual behavior” by that school’s now-former principal, Timothy Bennett.

In a criminal case, Bennett was indicted on charges of sexual abuse in the first degree, but an October dismissal order stated the charges were dropped because Bennett pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and further “because the State lacks sufficient evidence to sustain a felony conviction, as evidenced by the jury failing to reach a verdict at trial in this matter.”

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