Honoring a Legacy of Deceit

Each time The O’Neal School faces public scrutiny, a familiar pattern unfolds. Negative reviews appear, and then, as if by design, a sudden wave of glowing five-star testimonials floods in to bury them. The timing is no coincidence. It’s the product of a deliberate campaign to shape perception, erase criticism, and maintain the illusion that all is well.

Following the release of our last article, several new posts surfaced almost immediately. One even promoted the school’s open house — a detail that makes sense coming from an employee, not a parent. Soon after, a review appeared on Niche.com confirming exactly what many had suspected:

“As a former employee DO NOT believe any of the positive reviews. Before I left at the end of last year, the school’s operations head (Kathy Taylor) sent an email to all faculty and staff. The email was titled ‘Positive Reviews Needed.’ In the email was a list of school review websites, and she asked all the faculty and staff to go onto these websites and leave ‘positive reviews’ as the school needed to turn the public image around. So yes, the positive reviews are mostly from staff members trying to save their jobs. The negative reviews are the true ones.” – Posted September 14, 2025

That review has since been removed. Its disappearance is the clearest confirmation yet that this manipulation continues.

At the center of the deception is Kathy Taylor, O’Neal’s Director of Communications and Facilities, and the architect of the school’s public image. On LinkedIn, she calls herself a “Digital Marketing Management, SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Brand Strategist,” claiming expertise in “managing the integrity and value of the brand.” But her own words reveal a different kind of strategy — one built on manufacturing perception and burying truth.

Internal correspondence shows that she has been directing staff to coordinate favorable posts and silence criticism since at least 2016. The earliest known instance dates back to that year, in an email titled “Negative Review on Niche.” 

Taylor wrote:

“I am handling Niche by asking our faculty members who are parents and who have another email address than O’Neal’s to fill out a review… I’ve also noticed that you can ‘report’ the negative comments… I wonder if people report on the negative comments enough will they be pulled?”

Hours later, she followed up with an update:

“We want to know who the student/reviewer is too… I don’t know if it was my ‘reporting’ or the other reviews that were submitted this morning, but only a few of the negative comments remain.”

When a colleague asked whether any of the criticism might be valid, Taylor dismissed it with a laugh:

“Ha ha – no! – But it is being discussed with division heads in about 4 minutes. Perception IS reality!”

That line — Perception IS reality — says everything.

Within months, her tactics expanded into what she called a “Rally the Troops” effort. Community members were urged to “report the bad reviews” on GreatSchools.org and “get more reviews up there to swamp it out.” She later celebrated the outcome, writing:

“I reported as a parent with a home email address — completely unaffiliated with the school. Today, I logged in as the administrator and also reported it, using a completely different language. I also asked the admin team if they could do the same… It looks like the bad review that I reported from July 9th — and probably many others reported as well — is now gone… thank goodness!”

Her control didn’t stop at review sites. When a new Facebook account appeared that Taylor suspected might post criticism, she wrote:

“There has not been any bad comments or anything else from this account. Shall I block the account from the page? I guess that can stop a bad review, but I’d prefer to shut down the whole page.”

Taylor’s directives violated the rules of the very platforms the school was exploiting. Facebook’s guidelines state that “Community Feedback must not be used to misrepresent, deceive, defraud, or exploit others for a financial or personal benefit.” GreatSchools explicitly notes that “we allow one review per person, per school” and “we do not remove reviews because they are critical or because a school asks us to do so.” Niche’s standards prohibit “coerced” or “coached” reviews and apply when “there is clear evidence that their review content and star rating were influenced by another party.” Encouraging staff to file submissions under different email addresses to disguise their origin and suppress unfavorable comments is a direct violation of those policies.

Niche’s own polling data exposes the disconnect between O’Neal’s image and reality. The school holds an average rating above four stars, yet only 62 percent of students say they feel safe, the same number say they feel happy, 75 percent believe teachers care, and just 67 percent think classrooms are well managed. In any honest environment, those figures would raise alarms, not praise.

Even distorting school rankings and reported test scores appears to be fair game:

“The reviews help to ‘grade’ the school and the new ‘grades’ will go out in August. At this point our grade is an A- and everyone around us is lower. Currently, I’m having Upper School gather a good handful of Upper School students to complete the student side of the review as well. On the student side, they ask for their SAT scores, etc – therefore, we’re handpicking the high scorers. For instance, if you see the ‘educational outcomes’ section – our average SAT score is 1800 and ACT score is 28 – this is based on the answers a few students gave in filling out the review. Hence why this site is ‘the devil’. I don’t have much respect for it, but we can’t ignore it.” – Kathy Taylor, Director of Communications

For over ten years, this has been the pattern of The O’Neal School’s administration: when challenged, they don’t respond — they retaliate. When criticized, they don’t reflect — they erase. And when the truth surfaces, they attempt to rewrite it.  That’s The O’Neal School way.