While all of the candidates claim to have students’ best interests at heart, they each plan to take the School Board in a different direction.
Carlene Lucas
The Garner mother said she wanted to run for the School Board to help give each student an equal opportunity to succeed, which she said is the biggest issue facing the system today.
“Instead it is shuffling our children from school to school to mask overall school performance, when the direction of the School Board should be on improving both individual student achievement and diversity within our schools,” Lucas said.
She sees individual students’ performance levels as more important than the school’s numbers. However, classes offered at the schools are important, Lucas said.
“We need to move away from the mentality that one school model fits all,” she said. “Instead, every school should have unique programs and every school should offer specialized programs to attract students are parents across the community.”
Preparing students for the next step is another of Lucas’s priorities. She hopes to create more preschool programs for at-risk students.
“It costs more to retain a child one year than it does to provide services through a preschool program,” she said.
Lucas said the School Board must encourage students to stay in school from an early age. With the help of a drop out tracking program, Lucas said students would be followed from fourth grade to high school to look for signs that they might drop out.
Horace Tart
In the next term, Horace Tart would like to see the achievement gap narrowed and drop out rates lowered. He said he wants to continue promoting vocational programs in high schools and trying to connect students and parents to schools.
“The School Board is effective,” Tart said. “We are one of the better school systems in the state.”
He said the School Board has been doing more as budgets have been cut, often having to find money to pay for state or federally mandated programs that receive no funding at all outside the county.
The down economy is the biggest issue for the Board, Tart said. As construction on new schools has been put on hold, teachers and students have felt the budget crunch with larger class size and reduced resources.
“The pressing thing is to get back to achievement,” he said.
John Tedesco
Accountability – that is John Tedesco’s main focus if elected to the School Board. He wants to make the Board more accountable to students, parents and taxpayers.
“Leadership has forgotten that they take care of other people’s kids with other people’s money,” he said. “They need to fix both.”
With the community schools model, Tedesco believes schools should focus on innovation rather than transportation. He hopes to move the School Board’s direction to put schools in the center of community life, where the school would be a hub for businesses and community leaders to help teach students.
“We’ve gone too far in the big bureaucratic school model,” Tedesco said. “We need to fix the system – make it more responsive to parents.”
Cathy Truitt
Although she appreciates Tart’s efforts as a Board member, Cathy Truitt said she believes the current administration has done all it can do. It will take new ideas to get the School Board moving again.
The biggest problem she sees among the School Board is lack of vision.
“There is not a shared vision that people can build consensus,” Truitt said.
Awareness of what the School Board wants the system to look like is key before any activity is set in motion, according to Truitt.
With a vision for Wake County schools, Truitt said the Board could start moving in the right direction within six months or maybe even less.
She wants to overhaul students’ education as well, preparing them for the 21st century. Even with a vocational program, Truitt said, standards need to be higher. Students will have to attend a two-year college at least. She would like to see career clusters from the Department of Labor built into classroom learning to help students identify what they want to do as a career from an early age.
“Now, that’s what it will take to be competitive globally,” she said.
This part of Truitt’s plan could take five to 10 years for students to be competitive with China and India’s high standards.
Reassignment
Tedesco said the current School Board has neglected to listen to parents on reassignment. As students have gotten shuffled from one school to the next, the School Board has held open meetings with angry parents and students who don’t want to be forced to move. Tedesco said even with the meetings, the School Board continues to do as it pleases and leaves parents’ wishes out of the decision process.
“They didn’t listen; they just paid them lip service,” he said.
A community school model would offer parents choices on where their children would attend school, according to Tedesco.
Although Lucas agrees with parents choosing the school their children will attend, she said school choice isn’t enough to better a students’ education.
“School choice alone is not going to improve our schools,” she said. “We need to give every child an equal opportunity to receive a quality education. I believe every child can succeed if given a quality education.”
Truitt said forced busing is flawed and on the other side of the spectrum, Tedesco’s idea of student assignment would resegregate the schools. The two options, she said, are equally unhealthy for students.
“We’ve come too far,” she said.
Instead, Truitt would like to see students sent to community schools and magnet school programs expanded.
“It gives parents choices,” she said.
Magnet programs come closest to Truitt’s vision of community schools. She said the School Board would keep the magnet programs that are effective and revamp those that don’t work well.
Tart said the School Board’s current policy for reassigning schools has been effective. Smith Elementary was 129 percent overcrowded when Tart became a member of the Board four years ago. Now, the elementary school is not overcrowded.
Although not everyone is satisfied with the reassignment process, he said the School Board has taken parents’ suggestions and used them to change the policy. However, everyone has to be taken into account.
“Contrary to common belief,” Tart said, “we do listen to parents.”
Still Tart said the schools must be diverse and parents must remember that it is what’s at the end of the bus ride that matters.
“I’m for community schools. I’m for neighborhood schools,” Tart said, “but I’m for healthy schools.”
Early release Wednesdays
There are mixed reviews from teachers, administrators, parents and students on the effectiveness of the recently instated early release Wednesdays.
Tart said the idea was researched for two years with input from parents, teachers and students. Now, he is already seeing the fruits of the Board’s decision.
“They [principals] are telling me they are already seeing a difference in level of performance,” Tart said. “This is a very important time for teaching and learning.”
Afternoon childcare is available for those parents who can’t pick up their children from school. For about $45 per month, Tart said, students can stay at school until 6 p.m.
While Lucas said the time for teachers to collaborate is necessary, she believes the School Board needs to keep parents of low-income families in mind. She said after school programs should be set up at no extra cost to parents.
To Tedesco and Truitt, it seems early release Wednesdays are just one more excuse for parents to see the School Board as out of touch with parents’ and students’ needs.
Truitt said she spoke with a single parent who lost her job and is now taking classes at Wake Tech to help find a new career. The early release Wednesdays were just another hassle to deal with – having to decide whether to leave her children at home alone or risk failing her classes to take care of the children herself because she can’t afford childcare.
The future of Wake County schools
Parents are moving their children into private schools and out of Wake County because of School Board decisions where they feel their students have been failed by the system.
“Hold on tight,” Tedesco said. “Help is on the way.”
He said with his direction for the School Board, students would be prepared not only for the local economy, but also a global economy. He would like to usher in vocational programs where business associations have apprenticeships with high school students – not just classes to teach them about vocational opportunities. Neither classes nor apprenticeships have been pushed enough by the current District 2 representative, Tedesco said.
“He’s [Tart] been ineffective in making that a reality,” Tedesco said.
However, Tart said the number of students moving out of the system is comparable to the number of those moving back in.
Truitt would like parents to complete comprehensive surveys over the next three years to help the Board understand why they are dissatisfied with the way the system is working for their children.
“We should have satisfied customers,” she said.
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