Politics
Orange County School Board candidate Diana Moore faced parent and colleague complaints, suspensions as teacher
Longtime Orange County teacher and School Board candidate Diana Moore’s confrontational personality has made both children and her fellow teachers cry at school, according to records obtained by Florida Politics.
“As a mother, it is hard to stomach the thought of someone like her working with children,” a testing coordinator wrote in a March 2025 statement.
Moore’s personnel file contains a litany of complaints from her fellow educators, parents and her bosses dating back years although she has not been seriously disciplined for the allegations, according to a review of records obtained through a public records request of Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) files.
“The amount of time and energy expelled on this one combative and aggressive individual, Ms. Moore, is interfering with the operation of the school,” Moore’s principal, Kathleen Phillips, at Sand Lake Elementary wrote in a March 2025 statement.
Moore insists she is a good teacher.
Moore, 66, points to her educator’s certificate, which has not been suspended or revoked despite the numerous district investigations into her conduct. She has often been rated effective or highly effective as a teacher in her long career, the records show.
Moore, who is running for Orange County School Board’s District 3 in a November runoff, says she is not afraid to challenge authority and scrutinize how OCPS is spending money, especially for administrators.
“OCPS does not want me sitting on the Board because I ask questions they don’t want asked and answered,” Moore wrote in an email to Florida Politics this week in response to her personnel file. “No matter the outcome of this election, I will continue to speak up for children, and teachers because I believe in what a public education represents.”
Moore previously made headlines when the American Federation of Teachers removed her as local teacher union President in 2015, accusing her of running a dysfunctional operation and stifling members’ rights.
“There is a need to restore transparency, restore order, restore democracy for the members,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told the Orlando Sentinel in 2015 as the federal teacher’s union took control of the local teacher’s union amid the turmoil.
AFT did not respond to a request for comment on Moore’s candidacy for School Board.
Not all the feedback was bad in Moore’s personnel file. In fact, some was highly complementary.
“Ms. Moore has great knowledge of her subject matter, and she inspires her students,” said her review in 1991-1992 when she was a middle school teacher for gifted students.
A 2006-07 evaluation said Moore “promotes effective classroom management by working with students on mutual respect,” and “works with her her team” and “continues to build rapport with colleagues.”
Moore even reportedly won one of the first Disney Teacheriffic Awards.
But a growing chorus of co-workers have called Moore combative, confrontational and insulting.
Moore, who started teaching at OCPS in 1986, has taught at least eight schools and faced numerous complaints and investigations from several incidents in her career.
Moore’s Sand Lake Elementary principal wrote in March 2025, “I entered my office this morning around 7:20 a.m. and sat down to more emails from Ms. Moore, a now daily occurrence of being met with complaints. Step 1 grievance meeting requests, emails telling me how to do my job, rude emails to colleagues and the list goes on.”
To her critics, Moore responded that “my tone is one of confidence and experience. I don’t argue with colleagues because I know group decisions are optional. I have the right to teach and implement the standards as I see fit for my students based on academic freedom, my experience and my data.”
From an arrest to bad report cards
The personnel file showed Moore had disclosed to the district she was arrested in 2003 following a contentious Southport Homeowners Association meeting after neighbors filed a petition to throw her and three others off the Board. “When I tried to explain (to) the officer I had a legal right as a homeowner to be present, I was handcuffed,” Moore wrote in a letter.
She spent the night in jail and notified her employer she would miss teaching her first grade class because she was behind bars. Moore was charged with disorderly conduct and other charges that the state attorney’s office later dropped. The arrest records from the incident are so old, they have since been destroyed, the state attorney’s office and the Orange County Clerk of Courts both confirmed to Florida Politics.
Moore was also known for giving low grades at one point in her career, which concerned her boss.
In December 1992, about 62% of her middle school students were receiving D’s or F’s, prompting the Robert E. Lee Middle School principal to write her a memo.
Taking action, the principal ordered Moore to submit her lesson plans weekly for review and for her classes to be observed several times a week.
Moore complained those steps were “extraordinary and somewhat excessive” as she argued she was grading students on their performance.
“To give them passing grades just for the sake of passing alone is contrary to the convictions of any teacher who is committed to the principles of learning,” she wrote her principal back.
That school year, her teacher’s review urged Moore to avoid “power struggles with both students and parents” and stop using “sarcasm and ‘put-down’ statements,” which escalated the problems in her classroom. Her “extremely high failure rate” also needed to improve, her school said.
Moore took issue with her review in a six-page rebuttal to the assistant principal.
“I strongly objected to this term power struggle since it has a psychological implication requiring credentials in a specialized field which are not in evidence in this environment,” she wrote. “I agree my reaction is one of authority because I have a responsibility to the other students in the classroom who are there to learn and my job is to teach.”
Moore went on leave, citing burnout as a teacher.
In 1996, Moore received a complaint in her personnel file after a child was left behind on a school Epcot field trip with another parent. The child’s parent, looking for the missing child back at Lake Como Elementary, called Moore “uncaring” and “unprofessional.”
In 2000, Moore’s second-grade students were unsupervised on the playground when students began wrestling and yelling, so the principal intervened.
In 2005, a parent who had been going back and forth with Moore complained that Moore made her third-grader clean up feces on the toilet seat without any gloves or cleaning material. The parent questioned why a janitor wasn’t called for the mess.
The situation arose because another student who needed to use the facilities in Moore’s portable classroom reported back the bathroom was “wet.” Moore ordered the boy, the last one to use it, to clean it up even though he denied being responsible. Moore, who had been in the middle of teaching a lesson, said she was not aware of the condition of the bathroom.
It seemed to be a boiling point for the boy’s parent who wrote the school that “there have been ongoing problems throughout the entire school year” and accused Moore of singling out her son. The parent wrote her son’s “spirit has been broken and he does not want to go to school.”
Moore called the parent hostile and said they were making unfounded claims. Moore looked up the child’s previous behavior complaints dating back several years which Moore argued only proved her case, Moore wrote in a letter to her school administration.
Moore received a written reprimand for the incident but later successfully won in arbitration to get the reprimand expunged.
In 2007, one school employee administering a reading test suspected Moore had coached her students ahead of the assessment and let them read a passage beforehand. The employee described Moore’s students as “robotic” and speeding through the material, although the claim was listed as “unconfirmed” in Moore’s personnel file.
Then in April 2026, Moore’s students had to be retested because of “widespread and consistent errors, including incorrect administration” of the test, which the school said contained “miscalculations, incomplete sections and violations of timing and discontinue rules,” according to an investigative summary in Moore’s personnel file.
Moore had been 15 minutes late to the teachers’ test training and missed information on how to do the assessment, said the testing coordinator who raised concerns about the accuracy of the students’ tests in Moore’s class.
Moore defended herself, saying she was teaching a classroom where the majority of students were not native English speakers and were in school for the first time since they did not go to voluntary pre-kindergarten.
On Picture Day in 2018, Moore posed with her Sand Lake Elementary first-grade students wearing a shirt with a political cartoon that depicted teachers being bullied by a long list of offenders: the Department of Education, politicians, school board, administrators, reformers and taxpayers.
One parent emailed the principal upset about spending money for a school picture that was “inappropriate and offensive.”
“This is not a memory that any parent would appreciate of a first grade class,” the parent wrote.
Moore denied that she was making a political statement and claimed she didn’t know it was Picture Day since she wore her outfit for the upcoming School Board meeting that night. Moore also said her six-year-old students didn’t know how to read her shirt, according to a district investigation.
“Guess what, I was able to read it,” the parent wrote in an email to the school. “We do not agree with her personal/political agenda being promoted in a first grade picture or classroom to say the least.”
Again, Moore received a written reprimand which was later ruled invalid after the teacher’s union got involved.
The problems escalated in the past few years at Sand Lake Elementary when Moore’s students were at one point removed and dispatched to other teachers, the records show.
“My students and their parents were told in a letter from (principal) Kathleen Phillips that I was taking an ‘unanticipated leave of absence’ and all they know is I never returned after the last meeting downtown on Feb. 13, 2025,” Moore wrote in an letter. “This is traumatic for 5-year-olds to be moved from their teacher and classroom after 6 1/2 months and not given a reason for her disappearance.”
Some of the personality conflicts with Moore and other staff originally stemmed from what seemed like mundane issues, like permission slips or printer ink. Other times, staff were critical of Moore for yelling at girls and making them cry in the cafeteria or not supervising her students on the playground. Some employees accused Moore of scolding them and telling them how to do their jobs.
At least two employees reported breaking down into tears because of Moore.
The principal wrote in an email to district officials that “Every one of her current team members has expressed wanting to possibly look for another school or another team because of her. These are great teachers who need protecting.”
One teacher who had been feuding with Moore said that Moore snapped photographs of her classroom decorations which made the teacher feel uncomfortable and under scrutiny.
Meanwhile, concerns were raised about the safety of Moore’s own cluttered room after a failed fire inspection, according to a district’s investigative summary report in November 2025.
Amid the problems, the district wanted to suspend her twice in the 2025-26 school year, although it appears Moore took the issues to arbitration to fight the punishment as she continued to deny wrongdoing.
Moore wrote her questions were unfairly labeled by others as “argumentative” and her dissent as “combative.”
“Someone stating that my tone is sarcastic, dismissive or aggressive is more opinion statements and not based on facts,” Moore said in a letter from Jan. 31, 2026. “I have been teaching for 40 years and know my rights, the contract fairly well, so I rarely participate unless called on to vote after the bullying and retaliation of my team claiming ‘code of civility’ when I offer suggestions.”
Moore had a history of filing grievances and even went as far as to sue OCPS in 2019. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2023, court records show.
Now, Moore is running for School Board at a pivotal time; the district will be searching for a new Superintendent while also dealing with a financial crisis.
Moore was the second highest vote-getter in the August Primary Election, with 30% of the vote in a three-way race. That means Moore and Susanne Peña both advanced to a November runoff for the open seat occupied by outgoing School Board Member Alicia Farrant. District 3 covers Boone, Cypress Creek, Freedom and Lake Buena Vista high schools.
“I won’t speculate about allegations or personnel matters I wasn’t involved in. I do believe that anyone entrusted with public leadership should be held to high standards of professionalism, accountability, and respectful treatment of employees. Those are the standards I would bring to the School Board,” Peña said when in a statement.
When asked her priorities, Moore listed in the Orlando Sentinel voter guide that she was focused on “improving the Office of Professional Standards practices and procedures,” the department that has been investigating her.
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