Faculty against him, Governor’s School president is leaving
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Hector Flores is on his way out as president of the Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics in Hartsville.
During an emergency meeting of the school’s board of trustees July 12 in Columbia, Flores submitted his resignation and was placed on temporary leave from his $200,000-a-year job, according to news media reports.
Earlier, the GSSM faculty had given Flores a vote of “no confidence,” and the Greenville News obtained an e-mail, purportedly sent from Flores to the school’s board, in which the president said he had to leave because of a “relentless flow of personal and professional attacks” on him that reached “a level of hostility and animosity that I have never experienced.”
Ershela Sims, an official at the school, will run the “day to day operations” of GSSM for now, board chairwoman Carolyne Williams said in a letter posted on GSSM’s Facebook page July 15.
Sims is also a member of the board that governs Florence-Darlington Technical College.
In the letter posted on Facebook, Williams said the board had accepted Flores’ resignation “as he has requested.”
There were very few comments about the changeover on GSSM’s Facebook page. One person wrote, “This resignation is a great opportunity to restart the mythos of the school. I believe our intentions should lie in cultivating unrivaled education … and NOT in chasing a larger bottom line.”
As of last week, Flores’ greeting to people joining the “GSSM community” remained on the school’s website.
“Having been here about a year and four months, I continue to be affirmed by the uniqueness of this place, in the small miracles of learning that happen every day for our students, and how those miracles are shared and woven into something much larger than any of us,” he wrote. “For we are more than a collection of souls, we are a community of teachers and learners, a place to grow together, a haven where academics, art, sports and music converge and enrich each other.”
He continued: “At GSSM, we aim to learn, to change, to innovate, to inspire, to lead. We support and celebrate those who dwell in possibility and we never stop.”