The Campaign in the Comments: When School Employees Become Foot Soldiers in the Old Guard Playbook

MoCo's Voice | Montgomery County, NC

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Not every Facebook post is a cry for help. Some of them are strategy.

In Montgomery County, a pattern has emerged on social media that deserves to be named clearly and examined honestly. School employees, people employed by and paid through the Montgomery County Schools system, have been posting publicly online in what amounts to a coordinated campaign to undermine and ultimately remove the current superintendent. The posts carry the hallmarks of organized effort: consistent messaging, shared narratives, amplification across networks, and a timeline that tracks closely with the broader pressure campaign being waged against her leadership.

This is not a group of frustrated employees independently venting. This is a chapter of the Old Guard Playbook — and the students of Montgomery County are the ones paying the price for it.

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Recognizing a Campaign When You See One

There is a meaningful difference between an employee who posts out of genuine frustration and a coordinated group of employees who post as part of a deliberate effort to shape public opinion, pressure a school board, and manufacture a narrative of crisis. The distinction matters, not because frustration is illegitimate, but because a campaign has a goal that goes beyond expression. It has a target. It has a strategy. And it has casualties.

The posts appearing on Montgomery County social media threads share several features that distinguish them from isolated venting. The language is consistent, the same themes, the same framing, the same conclusions repeated across different accounts. The timing is coordinated, posts appear in clusters, often following school board meetings, newspaper articles, or other moments when public attention is already focused on district leadership. The amplification is organized, posts are shared, liked, and commented on by the same network of individuals, creating the appearance of broad community consensus where there may be something far more targeted.

This is not coincidence. This is the playbook.

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The Playbook, Applied

In the article The Revenge of the Old Guard: Playbook 2.0, published on this platform, we documented the specific tactics used when entrenched interests in small communities feel threatened by new leadership. One of the most effective tools in that playbook is the manufactured groundswell, the strategic mobilization of voices inside an institution to create the public impression that leadership has lost the confidence of those closest to it.

The logic is simple and cynical: if employees are publicly saying the institution is in crisis, the public will believe the institution is in crisis. The school board, sensitive to community pressure, will feel compelled to act. And the superintendent, regardless of her actual performance, regardless of the data, regardless of the contract she was hired under, becomes politically untenable.

What makes this tactic particularly effective in a school system is the inherent trust the public extends to school employees. When a parent reads that a long-tenured staff member is considering leaving, the instinct is to believe that something must be terribly wrong. When a veteran employee publicly calls leadership "a cancer," the instinct is to take that characterization seriously. The public does not typically ask: Is this person acting independently, or is this part of a coordinated effort? What does this person stand to gain or lose from a change in leadership? Who else in this network is posting the same message?

Those are the questions that need to be asked.

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What the Students Are Absorbing

Here is what gets lost in the strategy: the children.

Montgomery County's students are not abstract bystanders to this campaign. They are active witnesses to it. They are on the same platforms. They are in the same comment threads. They hear their parents discussing the posts at home. They walk into school buildings where the adults around them are visibly divided, and they absorb that division into their understanding of whether school is a safe, stable, and trustworthy place.

Research on school climate is consistent on this point. Students in schools with high levels of perceived staff discord report significantly higher levels of anxiety and a measurably lower sense of belonging than students in schools where staff relationships appear stable , and this holds regardless of academic performance metrics.¹ In high-poverty districts like Montgomery County, where the school is often the most stable environment many students experience in a given day, the disruption of that perceived stability carries consequences that extend far beyond the political goals of the adults engineering it.

When a student reads that a school employee they trust is considering leaving, the question they carry, often silently, often without being able to name it, is: Are we not worth staying for? That is not a rational conclusion. It is a human one. And it is happening in Montgomery County right now, not because employees are genuinely at a breaking point, but because someone decided that manufacturing the appearance of a breaking point was a useful political tool.

The students did not make that decision. They are simply living with its consequences.

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The Triangulation of Children

There is a specific harm that coordinated adult conflict inflicts on children in small communities, and it has a name: triangulation. It is the process by which children are positioned, without being explicitly asked, as witnesses to adult conflict and implicitly recruited to take a side. In a county as small and interconnected as Montgomery County, every student who reads a post from a school employee they know is being triangulated. They cannot be neutral. They cannot be uninformed. And they cannot un-see what they have seen.

The adult campaign becomes the children's burden. The political strategy of the Old Guard becomes the anxiety of a twelve-year-old who does not understand why the adults around her seem to be at war, but who feels the weight of it every time she walks through the school doors.

This is not collateral damage in the abstract sense. This is a specific, documentable harm being done to specific children in a specific community, and it is being done deliberately, by adults who have made a choice to prioritize the removal of a superintendent over the stability of the students in their care.

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The Accountability Question

School employees in Montgomery County are public servants. They are paid with public funds, they serve a public institution, and they have accepted a professional responsibility to the students in their care that does not pause when they log onto Facebook. The MCS Employee Handbook is explicit: employees are held to the same professional standards in their public use of social media as they are for any other public conduct.

But the accountability question here runs deeper than policy. It runs to character and to professional ethics. When a school employee uses their public platform, a platform built on years of community trust, to advance a political campaign against district leadership, they are making a choice. They are choosing the goals of the campaign over the well-being of the students who trust them. They are choosing to be a foot soldier in someone else's strategy over being the stable, trustworthy adult that their students need them to be.

That is a choice. And the community has the right to name it as such.

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The Harder Question: Who Is Running the Campaign?

Foot soldiers do not appear spontaneously. Coordinated campaigns do not organize themselves. When multiple school employees are posting consistent messages, sharing each other's content, and amplifying the same narrative at the same time, the relevant question is not just what they are posting, it is who is coordinating them, what those individuals stand to gain from a change in leadership, and whether any of the organizing is happening on school time or through school channels.

These are questions for the school board. There are also questions for the community. Montgomery County residents deserve to know whether the campaign being waged against their superintendent on social media is a genuine expression of employee concern or a manufactured operation being run by people whose interests are not aligned with the students, the staff, or the community at large.

The Old Guard does not announce itself. It works through proxies, through whisper networks, through the strategic deployment of trusted voices in service of goals that are never stated plainly. The playbook depends on the community not recognizing it for what it is.

This community is recognizing it.

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What Students Deserve

Montgomery County's students are, by every account, capable, resilient, and deserving of far better than what the adults around them are currently modeling. They show up every day and do the work. They navigate poverty, instability, and the accumulated weight of a county that has not always invested in them the way they deserve. They do not need to navigate the fallout of a political campaign being waged through their school system.

They deserve school employees who have made a genuine commitment to their well-being, not employees who are willing to use the trust those students have placed in them as a weapon in an adult power struggle. They deserve a school board that asks hard questions about who is organizing this campaign and why. They deserve a community that is willing to look clearly at what is happening and call it by its name.

What is happening is not a crisis of leadership. It is a crisis of integrity, and it is being manufactured by people who are counting on the community not to notice.

The community is noticing.

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MoCo's Voice is a community publication dedicated to accountability, equity, and the voices of Montgomery County, NC. MoCoVoice.com

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Footnotes

1. Aldridge, J. M., & McChesney, K. (2022). The relationships between school climate and student wellbeing. Journal of School Psychology, 90, 1–18. ↩