Ava Tasker-Mitchell felt so threatened during a call with the Somerset County school board chair in March that the superintendent left town, afraid for her safety.

At an open school board meeting in April, the chair, Matthew Lankford, played recorded excerpts from a book that explicitly described oral sex between two men. He falsely claimed the book was part of the county’s curriculum.

Then in June, the Somerset County school board violated Tasker-Mitchell’s due process rights by firing her for insubordination before giving her a chance to defend herself.

Those details — from two lengthy opinions issued by the Maryland State Board of Education on Monday — offer a window into the dysfunction in Somerset County, where a MAGA-aligned school board has collided with the Eastern Shore community’s quiet conservatism.

Somerset parents and teachers are now at war with the newly elected county school board. A Black parent has twice been escorted out of raucous public meetings, and the board has stopped holding in-person meetings and is only allowing written public comment. The Republican-controlled county commissioners sided with the superintendent this summer, and gave the school system $1 million more than the school board asked for.

In Monday’s opinions, the state board ruled there was not sufficient cause to bring charges to remove Lankford, who was elected to his unpaid position last November. In addition, it sided with Tasker-Mitchell in an appeal claiming she had been fired without due process.

“Mr. Lankford has engaged in repeated unprofessional, insulting, rude, demeaning language and behavior” toward the superintendent, the staff and fellow board members, one opinion said. The state board said it remained concerned but did not take the next steps to remove him.

Lankford did not respond to a request for comment.

The public airing of the details of a nasty feud between the community, the superintendent and the school board is unusual in Maryland.

The Somerset board claimed Tasker-Mitchell had been insubordinate and incompetent. They said she had formally asked the state school board to unseat Lankford. Tasker-Mitchell refused to heed a demand, the school board claimed, that the superintendent remove information from the county schools website outlining protocols to protect student privacy if immigration officers attempted to interview or detain students. Tasker-Mitchell said the state superintendent had instructed school systems to post the information.

“You take it down now, or you’re going to see what is going to happen,” Tasker-Mitchell recalled Lankford telling her.

When Tasker-Mitchell said she felt threatened, Lankford responded, “No I am not threatening you and you cannot prove that I did, take the post down,” he told the state board.

Within an hour, Lankford said, he sent an email saying he was not trying to physically threaten her.

But Tasker-Mitchell left town anyway.

The state board found that despite Tasker-Mitchell’s perception of Lankford’s language, it was not direct or explicit enough to be deemed a threat to her physical safety.

The state board ordered that Somerset must either keep its superintendent until her contract ends nearly three years from now or hold a hearing in which Tasker-Mitchell is allowed to present her case to keep her job before she can be fired.

“We maintain that there are no grounds for her termination. Superintendent Tasker-Mitchell will focus on collaborating with the local board for the benefit of Somerset County Public Schools,” her attorneys Kia Chandler and Hasson Barnes said in a statement.

If she is fired, Tasker-Mitchell can still appeal to the state school board. Her supporters see an attempt by the all-white county school board to fire a Black superintendent as racism. It would be the second time in the county’s history a Black superintendent has been let go. The first time, the superintendent sued and won.

In Maryland, a local school board can only fire its superintendent for cause, such as insubordination or illegal activity. When school boards decide they want to get rid of a superintendent, they must usually buy out the reminder of their four-year contract.

State leaders also criticized a series of actions by Somerset’s board in Monday’s opinions.

For instance, the county school board voted behind closed doors to change how the school system hires its lawyer. The board should have voted on the policy change and the selection of a new lawyer in public, and the state school board warned the board not to violate the Open Meetings Act in the future.

The new attorney, Gordana Schifanelli, is politically aligned with Lankford. She ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket with Dan Cox in the 2022 election.

Lankford and the board repeatedly attempted to usurp the power of the superintendent as defined in state law, Maryland education leaders wrote. For instance, the board introduced policies without any input from or prior warning to school system staff, and some were passed on the same night they were read to the public.

In one case, Tasker-Mitchell said that the board ignored the advice of the Maryland Association of School Librarians when it passed a policy saying the board itself would review the books in school libraries, not librarians or a committee of citizens. The policy, the librarians said, could conflict with the newly passed Maryland Freedom to Read Act.

In March 2025, Lankford requested in an email to Tasker-Mitchell a list of the titles of all the books in school libraries and the names of the students who had checked each one out. And he wanted it by the end of the day. Tasker-Mitchell said sharing that information would violate student privacy laws.

Lankford and another board member also visited two schools with less than 24 hours’ notice. After their visit they pulled video of students in the halls and played it in a closed-door board meeting, despite Tasker-Mitchell’s concerns about violating student privacy laws and school board policies around security footage. The board suggested that the school police officers should discipline students who had their sweatshirt hoods up or were wearing face masks. The police officers said discipline was not their job.

Overall, the opinions criticize the board for trying to micromanage decision-making.

“The board considers intentional efforts to marginalize a local superintendent’s statutory responsibilities to be illegal,” the state board said in one opinion.

While the state board did not bring formal charges to remove Lankford, it gave him a warning:

“We caution Mr. Lankford that his pattern of behavior is deeply problematic.”

State board sides with superintendent

State board: Insufficient evidence to remove Somerset Schools chairman