Director Randy Cook’s motto seems to be, “Act first, reason later.” He repeatedly demonstrates an alarmist leadership style and causes chaos for our students, faculty, and community—an approach that has landed our district in the national headlines.
The chaos that follows Director Cook was on full display in 2023 when his knee-jerk reaction to a routine directory request triggered parent reactions across the district. For days after his social media rant, families flooded their schools with calls demanding to opt out of sharing directory information—only to reverse the flood of requests when they realized that same directory information is necessary for many in-schools services like school pictures, yearbooks, sports associations/competitions, and even purchasing regalia for graduating seniors.
Despite being elected to a nonpartisan office, nearly all of Cook’s actions run lock-step with party politics. In the last year, Cook has introduced and passed nearly 20 policies. These system changes each reflect his distrust of educators and administrators. This was especially true when it came to library and instructional materials. Long-standing policies have always been in place to ensure that content is fit for classrooms and libraries, parents can screen their own children’s content, or book challenges could be raised. Despite the effectiveness of these systems (and no book challenges being raised since 2022), Cook’s new policies increased board authority over book purchases and challenges and micromanaged the work of district librarians and teachers. The policies also flew in the face of Cook’s promises to protect “parents’ rights” as they now allow any taxpayer to raise challenges to books in classrooms or libraries, even if they do not have children enrolled in our schools..
Other policies censored teacher and parent speech. Instead of encouraging civic engagement, some of Cook’s restrictions effectively silenced discussion of school board elections on school property. In a concerning pattern of stripping quality resources from our schools, Cook successfully led rejections and defunding of textbook adoptions, teacher trainings, and popular resources like Brain Pop (a known target of Moms for Liberty). Another policy was essentially an FHSD version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Even now, Director Cook and other directors continue to advocate for a bathroom policy which would require students to use the bathroom matching the gender marker on their birth certificate, despite there being zero recorded complaints in the district around gender and bathroom usage, as well as countless questions raised about enforcement of such a policy.
A school board director is meant to be a nonpartisan position, filled by those who act in service of our community and in response to the needs of students, staff and teachers. Rather, this leader's agenda is directly in line with party politics. Director Cook’s actions have resulted in rising legal costs, falling teacher retention, and a chilling of free speech.