Faculty members at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science & Mathematics were told to destroy copies of the minutes from a special-called meeting in which the school president was criticized, according to documents obtained by The Greenville News and Independent Mail.

Taylor Smith, an attorney for the South Carolina Press Association, said the effort appears to amount to censorship.

The high school in Hartsville is a two-year public boarding school for juniors and seniors from across the state. It's governed by a board of trustees and receives annual funding from the state General Assembly, like the state's other governor's school, which focuses on the arts, in Greenville.

Jon Shannon, the executive vice president and chief information officer for the school in Hartsville, said in a message addressed to faculty on April 6 that the meeting minutes contained “potentially defamatory information about named GSSM employees."

Message 'administratively removed'

The minutes were attached to an email sent by the Faculty Senate to school employees on April 5.

In his message directing the destruction of the file, Shannon said the use of the school's email system to "distribute such communications is inappropriate and potentially harmful to those who were named within the attached document."

"To prevent further harm to those mentioned, the message is being administratively removed from all Outlook mailboxes," Shannon wrote before instructing faculty to delete any copies or printouts and to request the same of any other recipients of the email.

“There’s a lot of conversations within there that really reflect on individuals inside an institution and some unsubstantiated stuff and opinions,” Shannon said in an interview last week. “We removed the message from the system because it contained harmful, defamatory information about members of our community, and those members don’t need to be having that sitting out there for everybody to read.”

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The school's board of trustees hired Hector Flores to replace longtime president Murray Brockman in 2016.

Flores' leadership was criticized during a Faculty Senate meeting that was called on Feb. 12 in response to a petition signed by one-third of the faculty. According to the minutes of that meeting, the petition indicated a need to address “current problems at the school and potential faculty solutions to those problems.”

'Changed for the worse'

Faculty who spoke at the meeting contended that “GSSM has changed for the worse” and argued Flores has been “the primary cause of the recent perceived damage,” according to the minutes, which did not identify the faculty.

No other named administrator was discussed in detail, according to the minutes.

After multiple attempts since last week by The Greenville News and Independent Mail to reach Flores by phone, he emailed a statement this week in response to questions. Flores said he was hired three years ago to introduce "bold changes" to a well-regarded curriculum that had not seen significant change in nearly 30 years.

"It is human nature to react with uneasiness during times of change, and since the faculty and staff of GSSM are deeply connected to our mission, it is natural that the process has involved challenging and passionate conversations from which we have not steered away," Flores said.

Among concerns documented in the meeting minutes were a perceived lack of trust in and respect for faculty by Flores, what was described as his “self-aggrandizing behavior," and an allegation of increased support for athletics at the expense of academics.

“He has said one thing and done another so many times that faculty have no confidence in their job security,” a faculty member said, according to the minutes.

A proposed solution to problems at the school was to hold a vote of no confidence for Flores, but no action took place because a quorum of faculty was no longer present, according to the minutes.

Disciplinary actions documentation sought

Documentation of disciplinary actions taken against faculty is among records being sought by The News and Independent Mail through the state's Freedom of Information Act.

Flores said it is his understanding that "the significant majority of teachers in attendance were disappointed in this approach" of a no-confidence vote "and only a very few showed any interest in pursuing it."

In unrelated action, faculty members at the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville took a vote of no-confidence in their school president, Cedric Adderley, last month following the termination of the school’s vice president of finance and administration.

In Hartsville, where about 145 students from across South Carolina are admitted each year, school administrators knew about the Faculty Senate meeting beforehand and supported it, Shannon said. While they recused themselves from attending, according to Shannon, they asked that notes be taken listing the concerns.

“Those notes still exist for people to look at, but we just didn’t think that publishing them openly in an email conference was the way to do that,” he said.

Smith, the attorney for the South Carolina Press Association, said the actions taken by school administrators should raise public concern.

“While republication of allegedly defamatory material could create liability, it doesn’t appear to be the kind of defamatory material here that would rise to the level of actionable,” Smith said.

Censorship of meeting minutes, Smith said, "hurts their credibility to the public, and the public is funding the school."

RELATED:South Carolina Governor's School faculty votes no-confidence in President Cedric Adderley