Johnson faces familiar challenger for Sumter school board Area 4 seat
Editor's note: This is the first in a series on the five Sumter school board area seats that are up for election in November. Each week leading up to Election Day, The Sumter Item will analyze at least one area (alternatively called district) race and interview candidates on the ballot. All candidates will be contacted. Online this series, like other election information, will be free to read as a public service. Candidate Q&As in their own words were included in our Vote 2026 Guide section published in the Sept. 26-29 Weekend edition.
THE AREA 4 RACE
Area 4, also referred to as District 4, is primarily the rural, eastern portion of Sumter County heading toward Interstate 95. A western boundary is U.S. 15 South and the Lakewood area, and the area includes Myrtle Beach Highway, Mayesville and Shiloh. The eastern portion of the area goes until the Florence County line. Lee County is to the north, and Turbeville and Clarendon County are to the south.
Two candidates filed and are in the race: incumbent Tarah Cousar-Johnson and challenger the Rev. Daryl McGhaney. Johnson won the seat in 2022 over three opponents that included McGhaney, who was the incumbent at the time and had served 11 years on the board.
Area 4 was new to the board in 2022 after board representation was changed from seven single-member districts to nine in Sumter County.
TARAH COUSAR-JOHNSON
A native of Lynchburg in Sumter County, Johnson moved back home to live in the St. John/Shiloh community about five years ago.
She was an English teacher for 10 years at the former Mayewood High School in the eastern portion of the county and then moved to Crestwood High School in the late 1990s when it opened. Johnson served two years as an assistant principal at Crestwood and also was a part-time teacher at the school for those years.
She later worked as a pharmaceutical and medical sales professional before retiring in recent years.
Johnson is completing her first four-year term on the board, representing Area 4, and has been an active board member.
In an interview with The Sumter Item on Thursday, she said she supports first-year Superintendent Gerald Gary, describing that he brings a vision to the district leadership role and said there is a false narrative by a few individuals now that she does not support rural schools.
Johnson said the full board is in the midst of conducting strategic planning with Gary to include a district-wide facilities study to help determine where the district will go with realignment - also known as rezoning attendance lines for schools.
The facilities study will be complete in about the February timeframe by an independent consultant that has already started the process and will provide an accurate assessment of the district's facilities and where improvements need to be made. Some district schools are more than 70 years old, outdated and dilapidated and could not take on more students in a rezoning process.
"Strategic planning and the facilities study will help us to know where to go with realignment, which is a hot issue in the community for some," Johnson said. "Strategic planning and the study are areas where we are kind of at right now, but we don't want to move on realignment without being ready to move, if you will. There needs to be order to things."
In that regard, other trustees have said that if a realignment is done first and then a new school, or schools, are built - unless it is in the exact same location - then realignment would need to be conducted again with another move of students to a new attendance zone.
According to Johnson, strategic planning with Gary will help not only with what is next in terms of facilities, but also other improvements to include enhancing school programs, offering greater support for district families, teachers and other staff.
She said she supports Gary, who was the community's choice to be the new superintendent in the spring of this year, and added she thinks he is an educator who also has a business acumen and is for equity for all students in the district.
"I love the fact that when he is asked a question, he can address the question," Johnson said. "He seems to be able to stand on his own, hold his own, and that is a part of accountability. And I like that. From the first day I decided to run, I ran because I felt like there was a greater need for accountability in this district.
"We must all work hand in hand if we want to see this district move forward with the tenacity that we know is necessary for us to be considered a premier school district."
For years, Sumter County Councilman Carlton Washington has been involved in school district affairs and has been outspoken on school board members up for election in this cycle, endorsing candidates that do not live in his district. Nine days after the filing period for Sumter school board races closed, he endorsed McGhaney on Aug. 26 for Area 4 on his Facebook page.
In two community meeting last month - one in Rembert and another in Mayesville - he and a supporter of his, Kenny Rose, implied Johnson did not support rural schools because she was not an advocate for a full-scale realignment plan to be conducted to balance schools' enrollments across the district before any other steps are taken by the board.
Washington has also been critical of Gary as the new superintendent in the meetings and on Facebook regarding his district leadership hires, handling of proposed magnet school alternatives, district bus transportation issues and "mishandling the children and members of the rural community," he said.
Johnson said the idea that she does not support rural schools is incorrect and "ludicrous."
"There is a misnomer in the community because it is being put out by a few individuals that I do not support rural schools," Johnson said. "I am a product of Sumter School District, a product of rural schools - the very same rural schools that a small faction of people again are saying that I don't support. That's ludicrous."
She has a nephew for whom she serves as guardian who attends rural schools - Crestwood High School now and R.E. Davis College Preparatory Academy previously. Johnson added she has taken every opportunity to set the record straight.
"For you to say that to try to gain points in the community is not honest because anyone who truly knows me as a person, as a former teacher, as a former administrator, as a community advocate know that I support rural schools," Johnson added. "As a school board member, I care about every student in Sumter School District. I may be elected by Area 4 residents, but I represent Areas 1 through 9 once a school board member.
"So, it would be difficult for me to just say that I am just for rural schools, without saying I am for all schools. The other thing that I am not going to do is to pit schools that are in the rural areas against schools that are in the city limits. I am not going to do that. It does not help us.
"You don't just represent one faction of it; you represent all of it."
The rural-versus-city-schools issue is what Washington has been discussing in those community meetings and also in his various Facebook posts.
City-versus-county challenges and struggles have been a key part of the board's documented dysfunction since two districts in Sumter consolidated into a single, county-wide district in 2011. That dysfunction has resulted in the district being on its sixth superintendent in 15 years, and it was also a main reason that an independent group in 2021 opened Sumter's first tuition-free public charter school - Liberty STEAM Charter School. At buildout in 2032, Liberty's projected enrollment will be 2,061 students, but it may grow beyond that total.
Washington and McGhaney have also discussed "de-consolidation," or dividing Sumter County back into two districts.
McGhaney emphasized that concept at the Mayesville community meeting he hosted and responded on Friday to The Item that the move "would be extreme; however, it is not far-fetched if the trend of inequities and neglect of some areas is not alleviated."
Johnson said the board majority is well beyond any measure like that.
"We are going to continue to look at what it is that we need to do to ensure we are doing what is in the best interest of all of Sumter County schools," she added. "Not Sumter School District 2, not Sumter School District 17, but Sumter School District."
She also said "de-consolidation" would potentially take a tremendous amount of tax dollars to complete and time and energy.
THE REV. DARYL MCGHANEY
McGhaney served 11 years on the consolidated school district board from 2011 until 2022, when he lost to Johnson.
Before then, he was a member of the former Sumter School District 2 board for three years and over time became a close ally of former long-time District 2 Superintendent Frank Baker. Later, Baker served from 2013-17 as the superintendent in the consolidated district.
A Sumter native and Lynchburg resident, he lives in the Shiloh/St. John area. Since leaving the school board, McGhaney has worked locally as director of an after-school program with Shoot for the Moon Academy childcare center.
He has served in ministry vocationally for more than 20 years and is the senior pastor of Bethany Missionary Baptist Church in Sumter.
Shortly after filing for the Area 4 race in mid-August, he told The Item that he was initially against seeking reelection but he was "bombarded like never before" by his constituents to run.
As stated previously, Washington endorsed him on Aug. 26 on Facebook as his candidate for Area 4, even though the councilman's district is based on the other side of the county in Rembert.
Washington is also a close ally of Baker.
Then, on Sept. 10, McGhaney hosted the Mayesville community meeting to discuss the "educational crisis of rural schools."
Historically, as a board member and now, he says that he is a major advocate for rural schools and shares many of the same talking points as Washington.
McGhaney only took emailed questions from The Item and declined an interview.
His No. 1 platform is what he calls "fair realignment for every community." That is based on a district consultants' study from 2021-22 during his last term as a trustee that would balance "facility utilization" and all schools' enrollments. A project theme in that study was to shuffle students from higher-enrollment schools in the City of Sumter to help better fill lower-enrollment schools in the rural portions of the Sumter County. An estimated 17% of all district students would move to a new school in the plan and about 32% of high school students.
When the proposal was presented in early 2022 to the public at information sessions, it generated outcry from district parents and there was a loss of public trust.
When that board ultimately voted on the realignment measure on April 11, 2022, McGhaney voted it down and was part of the minority in a 5-4 vote that passed it, according to The Item's archives.
The newspaper questioned him on that vote on Thursday, and in emailed remarks, he said, "your assessment of my position is inaccurate."
That proposed rezoning plan is a major realignment effort, but rezoning can take other forms not as drastic, according to other board members. All trustees, including Johnson, agree that some level of rezoning attendance lines needs to be conducted because the lines have not been touched since consolidation.
When McGhaney, Washington and the councilman's supporters discuss realignment, they only consider the consultants' specific study.
Board members against that full-scale realignment plan say that study was shortsighted and would result in the district losing many more students after enrollment has dropped nearly 23% in the last decade due in part to the changing K-12 public education landscape.
Like Washington regarding a district master plan for facilities, McGhaney said "the big elephant in the room" on that matter would be closing rural schools.
"Don't be blindsided if you hear something about two brand-new, state-of-the-art schools down the road," McGhaney said. "In order to do that, you are going to have to close some schools, and experience shows us it is always rural schools."
When asked his view of the new administration and Gary, McGhaney only referenced the district budget shortfall in the fiscal year that ended in June 30 and most recently was reported at $10 million.
"There is a major financial deficit that needs to be fixed," he said. "Clearly, they need help, and that is why my community asked me to run."
McGhaney lists "financial accountability and a clear plan, clear answers on the reported deficit" as his second campaign platform.
Overexpenditures in the fiscal year will require the district to use a portion of its reserves, which currently stand at $63.9 million, to balance the books. Additionally, Gary just started as the district's leader in April when the year was nearly complete.
McGhaney added in his remarks that some say the deficit "is $17 million to $20 million," but administration has never shared those figures with the public. The district's chief financial officer, Shatika Spearman, has detailed various cost-control strategies moving forward in the current school year at board meetings and also with The Item since August.
When McGhaney was the board's chairman in 2016, Baker's administration overspent its budget and drained the reserves level to $106,449. That revelation did not become public until the district's official audit report in December 2016 when the auditor said the reserves total was "a critically low level," according to The Item's archives.
In McGhaney's last term on the board from 2018-22, he was part of the board majority that tried to reopen a school (Mayewood Middle) that had been closed by a previous board that violated the district's financial recovery plan after depleting the reserves account. Then-state Superintendent Molly Spearman placed the district on a "Fiscal Emergency" status for the board's action.
The declaration necessitated state oversight over the district's finances for about two years.
That was also the timeframe when the independent local group came up with the concept and eventually opened Liberty STEAM.
McGhaney also raised the impromptu motion in February 2022 to speed the exit of former Superintendent Penelope Martin-Knox by paying her the remaining portion of her contract to basically allow her to walk away, effective immediately, even though her contract was through June 30 of that year. The motion passed in a 5-4 vote.
Martin-Knox was against those terms, and a judge later ruled in court that the board violated the state Freedom of Information Act with the measure and the board had to hire her back a month later to complete her term.
During The Item's research at the time, district records showed Martin-Knox notified McGhaney's wife - district staff member Vivian Fleming-McGhaney - that her district contract would not be renewed for the next school year less than one week before he made his motion at the Feb. 28, 2022, board meeting.