If you’ve been in Nordonia a while, you might be familiar with the Friends of Nordonia PAC. According to their Facebook page, their purpose is to “assist in the passage of levy and bond issues”. You might be thinking, “we just had a levy, where have they been? Why didn’t they campaign?” You also might have noticed some very vocal, anti-public school Tim Ellis supporters who used to hate FON, suddenly liking and sharing their posts. Well, we’ve been collecting a lot of bits and pieces over the last few months, and we’re ready to share our findings in this series of blogs.
It all began on January 15th, 2024, when we received the following e-mail from one of our school board members:
We didn’t think much of it, as we get e-mails like this from time-to-time. What we didn’t know about, was Friends of Nordonia’s involvement in this, and what it would lead up to.
We decided to take this opportunity to make an offer. We would delete our page, if they would delete theirs. (We would like to reiterate that all claims made on our page have been backed up by evidence, documentation and facts- something the Smith/Ellis team can’t say). The division could never truly end unless the original cause of division was gone. We replied to the board member with the following e-mail:
At this point, we sent another e-mail to the board member asking for an e-mail address for Tim Ellis so we could reach out directly to see which page he would like removed from our website first as an act of good faith. We wanted him to know we were serious.
The board member replied with Ellis’ e-mail address, and noted that Ellis gave him permission to share, then said the following:
Now, anyone who has been following along knows that this is a complete lie on Tim Ellis’ part. It’s been proven many times that not only are he and Smith friends, but Ellis has both given Smith content to post on his page, and has successfully asked him to remove content in the past. We also know that Ellis has a group chat and is close with some of the main offenders of the “negative posts” and “posts that are personal attacks, defamatory, etc.”
We sent the following e-mail back to the board member:
Things were quiet for a few days after that, until we noticed some posts that fit the criteria of what Ellis wanted brought to his attention. We were hoping he really did want to heal the community and would take action like he promised. We sent him the following two e-mails, and CC’d the board member:
At this point, we still couldn’t have even imagined that Friends of Nordonia had any involvement with this. We weren’t very surprised that Ellis was lying and not willing to take any responsibility for his involvement with “The Nordonia News”, but we remained optimistic that he’d at least take action about his friends sowing division like he had promised.
We never did hear back from Tim Ellis. Two days later, on January 24th, we received an e-mail with this screenshot attached from the board member. The recipients were us, Tim Ellis, and… Friends of Nordonia??
The rest of the e-mail from the board member said the following:
After reading the e-mail, we can only assume that the Paul mentioned in Tim’s text message is in fact Paul Destino from the Friends of Nordonia PAC, since they were included and mentioned in the e-mail from the board member. Paul “runs” Friends of Nordonia, alongside Shawna Polimene and Julie Moran.
So the question is, why would Friends of Nordonia have any involvement with Tim Ellis, someone who has fought, and continues to fight so hard against them for the last few years? What is “this process” that the school board member references at the end of his e-mail? Who is having meetings, and why? Things sounded pretty weird, and we had a lot of questions. We began digging.
From what we could tell at this point, there was a meeting between Ellis, the board member, and Friends of Nordonia. From the board member’s last e-mail, it looks like Ellis requested that the board member take a lot of steps to begin “healing” the community, and the board member followed through with those steps. Ellis on the other hand, did not follow through with anything.
Almost immediately after the last e-mail from the board member, on January 29th, the Tim Ellis supporters went completely off the rails on social media. Sabrina Pines (Sabrina Sabrina) came out of “retirement” after a couple years of social media silence. She and Julie Daniel, another member of Tim’s group chat, began relentlessly commenting on all of the board members’ social media posts, calling him a liar, etc. Dana DiPenti – Schmauder commented on every anti-levy post she could find to talk badly about the district alongside Sabrina and Julie. It almost seemed like Tim didn’t get his way, so he unleashed his dogs.
This is just the beginning of a very long story that we’ve been following and researching heavily for several months. We have had an overwhelming amount of community members contact us in regards to this. In the next few blogs, we will be covering everything we’ve learned about the growing relationship between Ellis, his anti-public school supporters, and Friends of Nordonia. We’ll discuss how Friends of Nordonia did not campaign for this last levy (did Tim Ellis have something to do with that?), as well as lots of other juicy little details. Remember, our DMs are always open and we protect our sources. Please share any relevant information you might have. Talk to you all soon!
—TRN Volunteers