[Ed Note: This is the 6th installment of a series around missing public education information and active disinformation by city actors that would appear to (or actually does) empower those with power while keeping nearly everyone else in the dark. Here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth posts in the series.]

Tale #6: The Mystery Of The Disappearing Charter Board Chair

On November 21, 2025, the public got its last view of Shantelle Wright as a member of the DC charter board. In the video of that meeting, Wright as board chair opened the meeting–then promptly closed it to the public to discuss matters not for public purview. Per the meeting’s posted minutes, those nonpublic items included deliberations about charter renewals and reviews; SEED’s out of cycle review; and the “economic viability” of Capital Village.

The next meeting of the charter board, also closed to the public, was supposed to take place a short time later, on December 1—and like the November 21 meeting, that 12/1/25 meeting was to discuss both SEED and Capital Village. (See here if the preceding link doesn’t work.) 

But at some moment in late November (or even on December 1), that December 1 meeting was cancelled and another closed meeting was noticed for December 5. The person who chaired that December 5 meeting was not Wright, however, but the charter board’s vice chair, James Sandman. Without a word about Wright in the meeting video, Sandman opened then promptly closed the meeting. The posted notice of that December 5 meeting said it was closed in part to “obtain legal advice regarding the DCPSCB board”—and mentioned nothing about SEED or Capital Village. (See here if the preceding link doesn’t work.)

Thereafter, no charter board meetings featured Wright—and to this day, I have been unable to find anything the charter board has said about her departure. 

To highlight how deeply weird this silence is, consider that other charter board members have been sent off with gracious public eulogies—as have charter board staff members—with omission of any negative news around them or their departures. 

Former charter board member Barbara Nophlin is a good example. A decade ago, it was determined that as a charter board member, Nophlin had financial conflicts through her work for Friendship charter schools that could be resolved through recusal. Months later she stepped down from the board before her term ended. No reason was publicly given for her resignation, while the charter board literally had only good words. Indeed, a charter supporter noted in this contemporary blog post that he got no answer for his questions about why, exactly, Nophlin left (though the link he included in that post, to a charter board website announcing Nophlin’s departure, https://www.dcpcsb.org/blog/barbara-nophlin-steps-down-pcsb-board, no longer works; see here for a screen shot). 

Perhaps the most famous example of such silence around possible (or actual) charter board problems concerns former charter board chair Thomas Nida. More than a year after the Washington Post in December 2008 ran an expose of Nida’s extensive financial conflicts as charter board chair, Nida left his charter board chairmanship apparently on his own accord, as his board term expired—and apparently with only warm wishes. (See here if that Post link above doesn’t work.) 

But the DC charter board cannot by itself build such verbal Potemkin villages. 

While the charter board breathed an obvious sigh of relief that DC’s then-attorney general Peter Nickles apparently found no wrongdoing with Nida and/or the charter board, I was unable to find the January 13, 2009 letter from the AG that the charter board’s January 14, 2009 announcement (linked above) referenced. I also found no news coverage of this April 2009 admonishment of Nida by the office of campaign finance. (See here if that preceding link doesn’t work.) And I found no Post story about Nida’s leaving the board in February 2010 after serving on it since 2003—and no mention of it at other DC print news outlets when I did a search online (Informer; Afro; Examiner; Times; City Paper).

Given this pattern, the current omerta around Wright’s sudden disappearance from the charter board would suggest some problem someone somewhere wants to avoid calling attention to. But exactly what that problem is remains a mystery. It is possible that Wright committed some serious ethical error (or even lawbreaking) that warranted her quick removal. The only problem with that theory is the distinct lack of speed in other charter board departures after ethical (or legal) problems—and the ensuing encomia for the departed. 

None of that happened with Shantelle Wright. 

That said, a January 2026 Informer story sheds some light on what may have occurred. There, the chair of the DC council, Phil Mendelson, suggested that Wright’s departure was because she made powerful charter interests unhappy. The article depicts both the mayor and Mendelson seemingly of one mind about sending Wright off expeditiously without a millisecond of protest, explanation, thanks, or even citation of code that allows the mayor to remove a charter board member. (Please LMK if you find that bit in the DC code about charter board members, and I will put it here.)

Indeed, the speed and silence with which Wright was dispatched lends credence to the theory that the unhappiness of powerful people was behind it. The person approved to replace Wright on the charter board—Antonio Williams—was nominated by the mayor in a letter to the council chair dated December 2. We thus know that at some publicly unstated moment between November 21 and December 2, 2025, someone (the mayor, presumably, although we do not know that for certain) got rid of Wright on the board and was ready, seemingly on a dime, with someone to replace her. Reporter Martin Austermuhle has opined that Wright’s removal was sometime “post-Thanksgiving.” That timing (ie after November 27) would have allowed for the strange cancellation of the December 1 charter board meeting; the December 2 nomination letter for Wright’s replacement; and the even stranger agenda of the December 5 charter board meeting. 

In fact, though the charter board has publicized through the DC Register so-called “special” board meetings like those on November 21, December 1, and December 5, I was unable to find any notice of those specific meetings in the register. (See here for a screenshot of what was noticed for the charter board in the register in the latter part of 2025.) It thus appears that these late 2025 charter board meetings were called by the charter board in some haste and/or desire for secrecy.

But as odd as all of that is, it is made even weirder by the fact that the mayor herself had renominated Wright as a charter board member earlier in 2025, in the wake of Wright’s board peers choosing her as board chair–and the council unanimously approved her renomination. 

So to perhaps illuminate how Shantelle Wright got to where few (if any) charter board associates have gone before, let us go down a few rabbit holes.

The Beginning (Of The End?)

Shantelle Wright joined the charter board in June 2022, replacing Naomi Shelton after a unanimous council vote. Wright was then renominated by the mayor in a letter dated January 8, 2025 and unanimously approved by the council to a term to end in February 2029. Wright’s renomination hearing was on March 6, 2025. 

Fascinatingly, the only person to speak on Wright’s behalf at that March 2025 renomination hearing was the charter board’s executive director, Michelle Walker-Davis. By contrast, other board members have had numerous people and groups provide testimony on their specific behalf for their nominations. Wright’s 2025 confirmation mirrored Wright’s initial confirmation hearing in 2022, where there were only three testimonials touting her—all of which also touted the rest of the nominees. (One charter supporter even characterized Wright as a “shocking” nominee, noting her propensity for criticizing the charter board.)

In other words, out the gate Wright could have been regarded as relatively unsupported by her charter peers. 

But that was seemingly belied by the fact that Wright was unanimously elected board chair in November 2024—a move that could not have been possible if she had not garnered the respect of her board peers. In fact, Wright was charter board chair until the moment of her disappearance from the board a year later.

During Wright’s tenure as chair, the board’s behaviors could hardly have been described as controversial. For the 15 open meetings that Wright chaired from December 2024 through November 2025, I was able to find only one thing not approved: a new school application (NewU) in May 2025. That disapproval was unanimous and in accord with the recommendation of charter board staff.

But as chair, Wright occasionally landed hard criticism of charters and DC charter policy. 

For instance, at the January 27, 2025 board meeting she argued against conditions for charter renewals, noting that if the schools are not doing what they are supposed to do, why allow them to continue with conditions? Nonetheless, the board voted that year to renew several schools with conditions—and even after she criticized them, Wright voted with the majority of board members to continue the schools, even as some have since relinquished their charters voluntarily (Hope, Capital Village).

So it would appear that what Wright presided over (and how) was not necessarily controversial on any level. That said, Wright’s involvement with other board matters could easily be construed by charter interests as problematic. 

Eagle Academy (Again)

Examining Shantelle Wright’s actions around Eagle in 2024 may give insight into how she was viewed by charter interests. 

For years, in the face of incredible evidence otherwise, DC officials remained silent about problems with Eagle, apparently ignoring (among other things) interest-bearing loans to the school by staff; years of low cash on hand; illegal construction; and exorbitant salaries. That enabled Eagle to expand its charter business in DC as well as to both Nevada and Ohio. As with Eagle in DC, those other charter schools had money problems, including $800,000 of missing public funds in Nevada and issues with taxes in Ohio.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was not until after Eagle had very publicly flamed out early in 2024 in Nevada that DC officials began looking at Eagle in DC with much more scrutiny. Nonetheless, it took the charter board nearly a month after its July 10, 2024 board meeting on Eagle to post its (previously publicly undisclosed) January 2024 notices around fiscal concerns with Eagle (see here and here). In fact, the inaccurate description of these notices resulted in the charter board correcting its 7/10/24 hearing memo weeks after that board meeting (see footnote 3 on p. 4 of the 7/10/24 board memo here).

The board’s apparent lack of public connection and concern around Eagle was further underscored when, in the wake of Wright asking probing questions around Eagle’s finances at the July 10, 2024, charter board meeting, the charter board’s executive director said, in response to a board member’s query about Eagle’s potential misuse of funds, that (boldface mine)

“if we do find that there is an incident that requires criminal investigation at that level, we would start our own level of investigation to determine if it needs to be escalated, and then we would have to engage the district attorney general to be able to act on our behalf.”

(See the 1 hour 31 minute mark of the meeting video and p. 82 of the 7/10/24 meeting transcript.)

The next month, in response to my public comment that the statement above suggests the charter board was self-policing potential crimes, then-chair of the charter board, Lea Crusey, declared that the statement actually meant that “if in the course of [the charter board’s] routine financial oversight work we have concerns about criminality or irregularities, we would look into it to understand the problem clearly and turn it over to law enforcement.” (See the meeting video starting at the 12 minute 45 second mark.) 

That same August 14, 2024 charter board meeting was brought about solely to present and discuss a takeover bid by Friendship of Eagle. Given its close proximity to the start of the 24-25 school year, this bid was a risky gambit—albeit one that both Friendship and Eagle appeared to want urgently. I was unable to find a transcript for the 8/14/24 meeting, but during it Wright pushed hard against Eagle’s mismanagement of its own finances, planning, and communication.

The charter board then met days later, on August 19, 2024, to vote on the Friendship takeover. In the face of charter board staff recommending the board approve the Friendship bid, Wright pushed even harder, noting that the entire charter board policy of asset acquisition needed to be overhauled. Wright’s take was that Eagle had violated the terms of its charter and, by way of asking for the takeover, wrongly wanted to determine its own fate. In Wright’s view, that privilege was precluded by Eagle’s charter violations and belonged to the charter board only.

So it was that in both August 2024 open charter board meetings, Wright outlined how the charter board’s authority was undermined by Eagle and, indirectly, by Friendship in the takeover bid. She demanded that the board—not charter operators or interests—control that process entirely. 

The charter board vote on 8/19/24 to not approve the Friendship takeover of Eagle was close—though Wright’s view prevailed. But while the charter board has since embarked on formulating a new mergers and acquisitions policy, it is possible (if not likely) that Wright’s harsh words about the baleful consequences of such unrestricted charter autonomy resulted in quite a few unhappy charter operatives. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the draft of the charter board’s new mergers and acquisitions policy has no input from families and teachers.)

Certainly, one person in DC was very unhappy about that Friendship/Eagle vote: Council Chair Phil Mendelson. 

In a December 2024 council hearing on Eagle, for instance, Mendelson openly criticized the charter board’s decision to not have Friendship take over Eagle. (Naturally, for the children’s sake—with nary a syllable about how a takeover would fiscally benefit DC’s second largest charter franchise and the multimillionaires who lead it and donate generously to DC politicians.) Since then, Mendelson has expressed concern about the sad effects of similar charter closures on—wait for it–school choice. (Because the children, naturally—with nothing uttered about actual accountability.) Incredibly, Mendelson arrived at this apparent embrace of the so-called “free” market for charters after active charter board obfuscation in response to council questions in August 2024 around Eagle. 

Under such circumstances, anyone perceived to be going against the status quo in any way would be politically vulnerable. But Wright’s criticism of Eagle and charter autonomy (and, indirectly, the charter board’s oversight) was hardly her only political vulnerability.

Friendship (Again)

Friendship’s power in DC’s public education sphere is considerable–and involves Shantelle Wright at critical junctures that were not about Eagle Academy.

For instance, in 2020 while Wright was the head of Achievement Prep, that school attempted to have Friendship take over its middle school, which was struggling. But there was considerable public cloudiness over the timing of that takeover as well as whether Friendship was allowed to conduct its own lottery for the school (as approved years before by the charter board). 

Charter interests were not happy about the denial of Friendship’s takeover bid (see here too)—while the executive branch took issue with charter board actions and the prior approval of a (powerful) charter having its own lottery outside the official DC school lottery. 

While echoes of that charter unhappiness could be heard in the 2024 denial of Friendship’s takeover of Eagle, the rest of this Friendship-related saga depends in part on a recent FOIA production of the correspondence of charter board staff and board members with Friendship around a federal grant for a new high school, Friendship Collegiate Academy West. Among other things, that FOIA production shows that weeks before the proposed Friendship takeover of Eagle, the head of Friendship emailed charter board staff in June 2024 to inform the board of the LEA’s application for a federal CSP grant to replicate and/or expand its operations. (See here if that preceding link doesn’t work.)

The FOIA production shows nothing more about that grant until May 2025, when charter board staff wrote to Friendship, noting that they had just learned Friendship had been awarded the grant. (See here if that preceding link doesn’t work.) The $2.5 million grant was to replicate Friendship’s existing Collegiate high school to create a new high school (Friendship Collegiate Academy West) at Friendship’s facility at 6200 Kansas Avenue NE. Charter board staff wanted to know more about the grant and set up a meeting for the next week with Friendship to discuss it. 

For the next 4 months, public silence ensued on Friendship’s possible new high school and the grant that would fund it. 

In September 2025, Friendship applied with the charter board to use its building at 6200 Kansas Ave NE only as a space for its online students, not as a new high school. The charter board staff report on Friendship’s charter board application did not mention the high school plan for that facility or the grant. And nothing about either was included in any materials the charter board posted for its 10/27/25 meeting, where Friendship’s September proposal for 6200 Kansas NE was to be discussed.

But the grant (and the high school plan it would have funded for that same location) were discussed at that October meeting only in the wake of me asking board and staff members about both. Friendship made clear at that 10/27/25 meeting that, pending receipt of federal funds, the new high school project would move along at a site close to existing campuses in wards 4 and 5 (and probably not at 6200 Kansas Avenue NE). The timing was dependent on receipt of the funds, whose date was uncertain. 

But while charter board staff clearly knew about the Friendship grant application in 2024, and about the awarding of the grant in May 2025, it remains unclear whether charter board members knew about either until I began emailing them in late September, in the wake of Friendship’s September 2025 application to use that same facility for a different purpose. (You can see my increasingly frantic emails on the subject going back in time from p. 21ff of the FOIA production.)

At the October 27, 2025 meeting, for instance, starting at the 31:51 mark of the video here, Shantelle Wright asked charter board staffer Hannah Cousino about Friendship’s grant application and whether the charter board had seen it. Cousino replied in the affirmative. 

But not only did the head of Friendship reference a revised federal grant application (without any word as to where it is or what it contains), Wright herself noted that the charter board had received “a lot of written commentary” about Friendship and its federal grant (see the 24 minute, 50 second mark of the video). This is exceptionally odd given that my public comment is literally the only public comment posted about the grant on the charter board website. 

So: Was Wright wrong about public comment on Friendship’s grant? Or was she merely referring to my emails to the board and staff? Is something being withheld by the charter board about any of this?

No one outside the charter board knows the answers to those questions. Not only did no one at the charter board ever answer my repeated questions after the October 27 meeting about where the (apparently missing) public comments are, but what I have put here that I didn’t glean from the charter board’s posted materials was obtained through that FOIA production. Sadly, that FOIA production revealed relatively little beyond my own emails to staff and board members and emails about staff setting up that May 2025 meeting with Friendship. 

As a result, plenty of the questions abound. For instance: did charter board members actually know about Friendship’s high school ambitions before I began emailing them about it in late September 2025? Or were their emails on the subject withheld from me in this FOIA production because board members’ work is (always? most of the time?) considered deliberative? I was told there was an October 21, 2025 email that was “responsive” to my FOIA request; it was from a staff member to senior staff and board members in preparation for that October board meeting. But I was also told that email was withheld because it was considered deliberative. 

Compounding the mystery is a November 17, 2025 email from Cousino to Friendship personnel (p. 32 of the FOIA production). That is the same day the charter board voted to approve Friendship’s application for its use of its facility at 6200 Kansas Ave NE as a space for online students. In that 11/17/25 email, Cousino notes that she—not the board, not Friendship—would at the board meeting that day “clarify the relationship between this proposal and the CSP grant and state that you [Friendship] received an ANC letter of support.”

So: Whose is the hand that rocks the cradle? Do charter board staff speak for charters? For board members? For both?

As with so much here–including the most basic explanation of why Shantelle Wright is gone–we don’t have answers. Though we do know that some of the people recently appointed to the board have extensive ties to the charter industry (which I documented for the DC council at a December 22, 2025 hearing). 

So here’s our mystery (cue once again the cheesily scary organ music!):

What happened between January 2025 and some moment in late November/early December 2025 when Shantelle Wright left the DC charter board?

Did Wright leave because charter interests were unhappy with her—or for some other reason?

Were the mayor and/or council chair Phil Mendelson pressured by those same charter interests into quickly and quietly dispatching Wright?

Under what authority can the mayor remove charter board members?

What was the legal advice the charter board discussed at its closed meeting on December 5, 2025?

When did Wright’s apparent transgression occur: before or after her 2025 renomination? 

Where are the copious written public comments about Friendship’s grant that Wright mentioned at the October 27, 2025 board meeting?

Did charter board members know about Friendship’s grant for a new high school before I emailed them about it in late September 2025? 

Who speaks for the board: staff or board members?

Are either empowered to speak for charters?

Was Wright vulnerable with her charter peers because she dared to go against Eagle Academy or Friendship?

What role, if any, did Wright’s opposition to continuing charters with conditions have in her disappearance from the board?

What role, if any, did Wright’s views on charter acquisitions play in her disappearance from the board?

Were some of the newest charter board members chosen specifically because of their ties to the charter industry, such that they would never question charter autonomy?

Are DC taxpayers not entitled to know why someone appointed and approved by our elected officials left their position?

Why do we even have a charter board if issues deemed uncomfortable by charter interests are suppressed?