Challenger disputes incumbent’s literacy record in Chatham County schools

This story was updated on May, 3, 2026, at 5:54 p.m. to add endorsements for Moss by Democratic state Sen. Derek Mallow of Savannah, as well as Savannah City Council Alderwoman Linda Wilder-Bryan (District 3) and Alderman Nick Palumbo (District 4).

Say this for candidate Roger Moss: In his bid for a second, four-year term as president of the Savannah-Chatham County school board, he is not ducking the tough issues.

Moss has made his bid for a second, four-year term as a referendum on his — and the school system’s — progress in improving the dismal state of literacy in the county’s public schools.

That is not an easy sell.

When he took office in January 2023, more than two-thirds of all 3rd graders in Chatham public schools — 70.2% — were reading at or below grade level, according to data collected by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement.

More than three years later, that figure has dropped just 3.1% — to 67.1%. In other words, more than two-thirds of all Chatham County 3rd graders still read at or below grade level.

The 69-year-old Moss, who first gained local prominence as founder of the Savannah Children’s Choir then as co-founder of the Savannah Classical Academy, remains undaunted.

“I want to be remembered as ‘the literacy president,’ Moss proclaimed at a candidate forum on Savannah’s south side earlier this month alongside his opponent in the race, Dionne Hoskins-Brown.

“I want to be remembered as the person who said, ‘Yes, Savannah, we can’.”

‘Incremental’

Moss acknowledges that headway in improving literacy and fixing poorly performing schools in Chatham County has been underwhelming during his tenure as school board president.

“Have we made a lot of progress? No. But we’re also undoing 15 years of bad teaching, and you don’t do that in three years,” Moss told The Current. “If this persists over the next four years, we’ve got problems, he said. “But we’re beginning to see progress. It’s incremental.”

But he insists the school system with its 57 schools and 38,490 students is on the “right path.” “We have hired some amazing people who have experience turning around school districts,” Moss told a candidate forum in downtown Savannah this week. “We have a [strategic] plan. Let’s move on with that plan.”

‘Exactly the same’

Hoskins-Brown, a marine biologist who represented District 2 on the school board for 14 years, does not differ with Moss over the focus the school system has decided to put on improving reading levels.

She supports what she calls the system’s “robust” plan to improve literacy.

At the same time, she rejects suggestions by Moss that serious attempts to tackle the literacy crisis started only when Moss took over as school board president in January 2023 and only after Denise Watts became the new school superintendent seven months later.

Indeed, Hoskins-Brown says Moss slowed efforts to tackle the school system’s literacy problem.

According to her account, by centering his successful 2022 campaign on getting rid of Watts’ predecessor, M. Anne Levett, and those seen as her allies, Moss “politicized” the response to the literacy problem.

Upon taking office, Moss then set about opposing many of the people and programs related to her tenure — a move she says cost the school system valuable time, resources, and community partners in the struggle to improve literacy.

In 2022, Levett had formed a task force to address the literacy problem, she noted in an interview with The Current. That task force published its recommendations on March 22, 2023 — less than three months after Moss took over as board president, and more than three months before Levett stepped down as superintendent and Watts succeeded her.

The literacy plan eventually embraced by Moss and Watts is “exactly the same as what previous approaches had been,” Hoskins-Brown said.

‘Coin flip’

Which of the two candidates is poised to win the May 19 election and is far from clear. Longtime observers of Chatham school board races describe the contest between Moss and Hoskins-Brown for the $35,000-a-year, part-time job as a “coin flip.”

With both contestants largely in agreement over the school system’s need to focus resources on the problem of literacy in the months and years ahead, there are no gaping policy differences between them.

Instead, the contest, officially a nonpartisan race, is being fought along one of the many faultlines that shape politics in Savannah and Chatham County.

Hoskins-Brown, director of programs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at Savannah University, is supported by neighborhood groups and the county’s traditional Democratic constituencies. They are dismayed about the siphoning of resources away from public schools in a county where 16% of all K-12 students attend private schools, compared to 8% statewide.

Moss, meanwhile, is backed by a bipartisan coalition that includes the same well-to-do area business figures and moderate and conservative Republicans that propelled him to the board presidency in a three-way race in 2022 and made him the first Black man or woman in Chatham’s history ever to hold the post.

Boosted by endorsements from Democratic state Sen. Derek Mallow of Savannah, as well as Savannah City Council Alderwoman Linda Wilder-Bryan and Alderman Nick Palumbo (District 4), that coalition has rallied behind Moss again.

At a campaign fundraiser at a downtown Savannah restaurant last August, one of Moss’ key supporters, Greg Parker, founder and Executive Chairman of Parker’s Kitchen, praised the incumbent for recruiting and hiring Watts as the new school superintendent, his emphasis on reading at grade level, and his championing of charter schools.

“All of us have got to work together to keep this ship going in the direction that it is,” Parker told the three-dozen attendees, praising Moss as a “badass.”

And introducing Moss at a GOP candidate forum at the Savannah Country Club in March, Chatham County Republican Committee chair Brittany Brown urged fellow Republicans to cast their ballots for him, saying a victory by his opponent “could be a disaster for our school system.”

Moss’ campaign also has received backing from an independent political action committee called American Values First has entered the fray in the final weeks of the campaign, with a mass mailing to homes in Savannah this week urging voters to reject Hoskins-Brown without mentioning Moss’ name.

The same group appears to be behind a recent barrage of automatic text messages to county residents. Like the mailer, the text message calls on voters to reject Hoskins-Brown, accusing her of having nothing to “show for it” but collapsing literacy, skyrocketing spending, and exploding bureaucracy.

‘Not born here’

Asked in an interview with The Current to name the main challenges to his re-election, Moss ticked off three: He was not born here and unlike Hoskins-Brown, he did not attend Savannah State University and did not belong to the Delta Sigma Theta sorority — two institutions whose alumni and members wield significant influence in local politics and Election Day.

To the naysayers and critics who say to him that his birth in Chattanooga, not Savannah, means he “really doesn’t understand” his adopted home, Moss, who has lived in Savannah more than two decades, said he replies: “I chose you.”

“I chose Savannah and my commitment to the children of Savannah is substantial and has been since I moved here.”