Crook County residents hold protest signs at a special school board meeting Jan. 6, 2025, when the board voted to negotiate terminating the superintendent's contract.
Emily Cureton Cook / OPB
When Joel Hoff received wild applause for his unexpected promotion to the top of Crook County School District on Monday night, he smiled and facepalmed at the same time.
More than 250 people packed an elementary school gym, many of them cheering and whistling as the school board ousted Hoff’s boss, Superintendent Melissa Skinner, and put him temporarily in charge as acting superintendent of a Central Oregon district with roughly 3,300 students.
“I’m happy to step up, but I also wish this wasn’t the case. I wish we were a high-functioning district that was focused on student learning,” Hoff said after a raucous special school board meeting.
He replaced Skinner less than six months into her tenure leading a district embattled by infighting since 2023. The school board put Skinner on paid administrative leave Monday, pending negotiations to officially terminate her contract. Since she was hired in July, Skinner’s critics have accused her of retaliation, nepotism and unpopular curriculum changes.
Organizers from the group, Crook County Parents, said they collected more than 1,000 signatures calling for the superintendent to go. But some of the parents, students and teachers who fought to remove Skinner say the conflict goes beyond warring local personalities, touching on the national debate over political activism in public education.
Crook County Schools assistant superintendent Joel Hoff as he's appointed the district's acting superintendent during a contentious public meeting Jan. 6, 2025. "This is a special community and it's hard to see such division," Hoff says.
Emily Cureton Cook / OPB
A host of specific complaints about Skinner gained momentum last month. For example, the district hired her husband to be a principal. She then chose a school board member who had been involved in hiring her to be the district’s transportation manager, triggering accusations of a quid pro quo. Skinner also allegedly sought to demote the district’s popular athletic director.
Skinner wasn’t at the meeting when the school board voted to terminate her contract, and she declined an interview request through a district spokesperson.
The backdrop for all this turmoil is the fallout of a 2023 school board takeover by far-right activists who promised to champion parental rights and police learning materials, said Gayden Pack, a parent of three and an organizer behind the effort to remove Skinner.
“They want to ban books, and at the end of the day, I think they want to tank public education,” Pack said. “But frankly, they’re not well organized.”
While school board seats are nonpartisan positions, Oregon has seen highly charged, partisan drama play out in districts around the state, such as Albany and Newberg-Dundee, which is now facing mounting debts and a lawsuit from its own forced-out superintendent.
What remains to be seen is how the incoming presidential administration may temper, or energize local divisions like these.
Crook County voters overwhelmingly backed Donald Trump in November. The president-elect is a vocal critic of public education, who’s promised to leverage federal funding to rid schools of what he has called “left-wing indoctrination.”
Crook County English as a second language teacher Jason Ritter holds a protest sign alleging school officials had a “hit list” of people deemed to be ideological enemies at a Jan. 6, 2025 special meeting of the school board. "I'm here as a parent," says Ritter. "There has been some undue scrutiny and attention focused on various programs headed by individuals that were purportedly on that hit list."
Emily Cureton Cook / OPB
At the Monday meeting in Crook County, numerous people, including teachers, held up signs claiming that the right-leaning school officials had a “hit list” of people deemed to be ideological enemies, like athletic director Rob Bonner. The school district did not immediately respond to a public records request by OPB seeking any such list.
Claims that Skinner intended to demote Bonner sparked a massive student protest in December. Sami Ramos, 17, was among the hundreds of middle and high-schoolers to walk out of class.
“I think it’s going to be more beneficial for our district to find someone who knows our community and knows how to help our community the best,” Ramos, a high school senior, said at the school board meeting.
Crook County school board members Scott Cooper, left reacts as Cheyenne Edgerly, right, proposes hiring a third-party with law enforcement experience from outside of Oregon to investigate a complaint against a school board member at a Jan. 6, 2025 special meeting. Her motion fails after not getting a second.
Emily Cureton Cook / OPB
Skinner appears to be leaving willingly, and the school board voted to begin negotiating the terms of a “mutual termination,” with just one no vote coming from board member Cheyenne Edgerly.
At the meeting, many more protest signs mentioned Edgerly by name than Skinner.
Before she was elected to serve on the school board, Edgerly was an activist intent on segregating library books depicting LGBTQ people. In 2023, she ran as part of a slate of three candidates who called themselves “mama bears,” and said they represented parental rights. In campaign mailers, the candidates claimed other school officials, many of them fellow Republicans, had “invited the sexualization of kids into our schools.”
The “mama bears” won a majority on the board, and then-superintendent Sara Johnson resigned as a result.
Edgerly, who declined to comment Monday night, was a champion of hiring Skinner from a district in Texas. Under Edgerly’s leadership, Crook County schools launched an online database for parents to search library books.
Skinner’s dismissal further emphasized that the once-aligned “mama bear” majority has crumbled since taking office. Board member Jessica Brumble resigned last month, after Skinner announced her as the district’s pick for transportation manager. Meanwhile, current board chair Jennifer Knight has repeatedly broken with Edgerly and Brumble on key votes.
Crook County school district students at a special school board meeting Jan. 6, 2025.
Emily Cureton Cook / OPB
“Well, this just gets better,” Knight quipped at the meeting to terminate Skinner, getting a few laughs as she tried to keep track of dueling motions leading up to the board’s 3-1 vote.
One of those motions came from Edgerly, who proposed the district pay for an independent investigator to review complaints filed against school board members. While the school district did not immediately confirm who those complaints were against, multiple sources told OPB that at least one complaint had been filed against Edgerly.
“There are those in our community who appear intent on intimidating or silencing critics by using the district complaint system inappropriately,” Edgerly wrote in a statement Tuesday. “Parents and students' rights are violated when districts hire within the ‘Good Ol’ Boy club,' and hire investigators that are tied to the school system.”
Edgerly said in her statement that other board members had “blatantly violated” Crook County School District policy by discussing personnel matters in an open board session.
“It’s just nerve-wracking,” Knight said after Monday’s meeting. “I want to get to work for the kids. So, if we can get through all of the things that need to be done and do them correctly … then we can start getting some work done.”
Pack, the parent who helped organize the superintendent’s ouster, said she now wants school officials to deprioritize efforts like policing library reading materials, and instead focus more on students and getting funding for outdated facilities. She’s also exploring a recall effort to remove Edgerly.
“The lesson is culture warriors don’t make good board members. We need business people, people that are well-educated that know how to run a school district and aren’t here just to fight for things like banning books,” she said.