For three decades, Diana Moore, an Orange County elementary school teacher and candidate for school board, has faced a litany of complaints about her hostile and demeaning behavior to colleagues and even parents, according to an employment file that includes her principal branding her as “combative and aggressive” just last year.
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So extreme was Moore’s behavior, the principal at Sand Lake elementary said in a written complaint in 2025, that the veteran teacher’s behavior was “interfering with the operation of the school” and had driven at least three of her colleagues to tears.
Moore’s personnel record, a 1,500-page document dating back to when she started in Orange County Public Schools in 1986, outlines a pattern of toxic workplace behavior, insubordination and parent alienation. She has been investigated repeatedly but frequently fought the accusations of wrongdoing. She has been suspended and reprimanded but also sometimes got her punishments rescinded.
The details of her employment file were first reported by Florida Politics. The file was subsequently obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.
Moore, 66, is the former president of the Orange teachers union but was forcibly removed from that position in 2015 when the national union determined she “defied the rules” and temporarily took over the local one.
“There is a need to restore transparency, restore order, restore democracy for the members,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, at the time.
Moore faces Susanne Peña in November in the race for the District 3 seat on the Orange County School Board. The two were the top finishers in the three-candidate August primary, with Peña getting about 47% and Moore about 29% of the vote.
Moore declined an interview to discuss her employment file but said in an email that the most recent complaints from colleagues were in retaliation for her filing a complaint against a teacher.
In the email, she said she was a good teacher with “over 75 cards and letters from parents and students” in support and yearly evaluations that showed she was a “Highly Effective” instructor.
“My reputation as a good teacher is being tainted because I speak up,” she wrote.
Moore has taught at six schools since she was hired.
Both she and Peña, a former OCPS teacher, say finding ways to pay teachers more is a key goal if they are elected. Peña said in a statement that she found the complaints in Moore’s file “deeply concerning” and said anyone seeking public office “must be held to high standards of professionalism, accountability, and respectful treatment of employees.”
The complaints, according to Moore’s email, date back to 1992. The most recent complaints were filed in the spring of 2025 as part of a months-long district investigation into Moore’s behavior at Sand Lake Elementary.
Kathleen Phillips, Sand Lake’s principal, said in a March 2025 statement that she gets daily emails from Moore telling her how to do her job and complaining about colleagues. Other teachers would also forward Phillips copies of rude emails sent by Moore.
“The amount of time and energy expelled on this one combative and aggressive individual, Ms. Moore, is interfering with the operation of the school,” Phillips wrote.
Phillips said Moore made it difficult for the school’s testing coordinator to pull students from her class for required assessments.
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“The effect she has had on the tone and climate of our campus is indescribably negative,” the testing coordinator wrote in her complaint.
Katie Schwartz, an assistant principal at Sand Lake, said in her March 2025 statement that Moore challenged her authority and argued with her in front of students.
The school’s media specialist described Moore as “argumentative, confrontational and disrespectful” to colleagues. A kindergarten teacher wrote that Moore derailed several planning meetings with unprofessional behavior, asserting that “we did not know what we are doing.”
One Sand Lake teacher wrote in a complaint that while she was on maternity leave Moore texted her personal cell phone several times about classroom issues, making her feel “extremely stressed and helpless.”
In her defense, Moore wrote to the district that she stood up for her beliefs. “My tone is one of confidence and experience,” she said.
The first complaint in the file is from 1996, though in her email Moore indicated the first was in 1992, when a principal gave her a “directive” because she was repeatedly tardy. She blamed that, and many of the subsequent ones, as retaliation for her work with the local teachers union.
In 1996, a Lake Como Elementary School parent filed a complaint against Moore for leaving his child with another parent at Epcot after a school field trip. The parent said Moore’s attitude toward him was “uncaring” and “very unprofessional.”
In 2000, Lake Como Principal Bonita Glester wrote a message to Moore outlining a situation where Moore left students unsupervised on a playground. Glester said two of Moore’s students were wrestling while she had left the area and was “well out of sight.”
In 2005, a parent filed a complaint against Moore because she forced her son to clean fecal matter off of a classroom toilet. The parent questioned why Moore didn’t call a janitor, and claimed she harassed her son “to the point where his spirit has been broken and he does not want to go to school.”
Moore claimed she was not aware of the toilet’s condition when she made him clean it, and called the parent “hostile.” In her written response sent to the district, she outlined the student’s past behavioral issues as proof she wasn’t targeting him.
Moore received a written reprimand that was later expunged after arbitration.
In 2018, Moore wore a shirt with a political cartoon during her first-grade class photo. The cartoon depicts a student being bullied as a teacher says “me too” while being bullied by “the department of education, politicians, the school board, administrators, reformers, and taxpayers.”
Some parents sent emails to the school’s principal about her shirt.
“This is not a memory that any parent would appreciate of a first grade class,” one parent wrote.
“There was no apology or remorse from her. Only the response that our child wouldn’t have been able to read it … guess what, I was able to read it,” another parent wrote.
Moore was given a written reprimand for the incident that was later ruled invalid after union arbitration.
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