High competition, high stakes in crowded field of Wake school board candidates

This year’s Wake County Board of Education elections feature the most candidates in at least 30 years, as most current school board members aren’t seeking reelection.

Who's running for Wake County school board?

It’s a sign of board member fatigue and increased interest among newcomers to take a seat at the table.

“The school board elections in Wake County are so different than they were a decade ago,” said David McLennan, political science professor at Meredith College. “A decade ago, most of the people that were running were running as public servants first, and they might be in a particular political party, but that was secondary. And since the beginning of the pandemic, in particular, we have seen K-12 education in the state of North Carolina and elsewhere become very polarized and politicized.”

That started with frustration over restrictions on in-person learning and mask-wearing and has now morphed into discussion about how much race, sexual orientation or gender identity is mentioned in school, McLennan said. Parent groups, such as the conservative Moms for Liberty or the more liberal Red, Wine and Blue, have organized nationwide with many of the same talking points. And higher-level politicians nationwide are now taking the time to endorse school board candidates.

“So the races now look more like legislative races,” McLennan said. “Highly partisan, highly polarized, big dollar races. Whereas a decade or two ago, these were low budget, low interest kinds of elections.”

The nine-member school board is nonpartisan, but the school board has flipped persuasions before. In 2009, a group of largely Republican-backed candidates who wanted to curb school reassignments and expand school choice took over a board that hadn’t been inclined to do so in the same way. After that board’s new school choice plan fell apart, persuasion changed again in 2011, when candidates backed by the Wake County Democratic Party took back the reins.

But this year feels different, observers say. While the majority of the school board has the potential to change politically, just like in 2009 and 2011, the issues put forth feature more of a mix of national politics and local issues. Individual candidates have reported raising as much as $50,000 — once unheard for a school board election. Even as recently as 2020, some candidates who won election fell below the $10,000 in combined contributions, expenditures or loans that necessitates even filing campaign finance reports.

Board Chairwoman Lindsay Mahaffey, a Democrat, faces another challenge from Steve Bergstrom, a Republican, in an Apex district that’s nearly half unaffiliated voters and otherwise about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.

The race to represent most of Cary features two polar opposites: a young former teacher endorsed by the Wake County Democratic Party, the North Carolina Association of Educators and the district’s current school board member; and a mom of five homeschooled children endorsed by the Wake County Republican Party and Moms for Liberty who has faced criticism for wanting to separate special education children for math and reading and for conspiratorial social media posts.

At least two people have filed to run in every race.

No matter what happens, the next school board — which takes office in December — will feature mostly people who haven’t served on a school board before and whose ideas and priorities could differ from the current board’s.

It’s unclear how the partisanship of the board could change, though observers think a liberal majority is likely to stay. McLennan said both that he believed a liberal majority would stay but also that it’s conceivable they wouldn’t. “I think this election generally is more chaotic than usual,” he said.

Because the board is officially nonpartisan, parties don’t appear next to candidates’ names on the ballot. But parties endorse candidates and use party assistance to file and campaign. The current board’s makeup is seven registered Democrats, one registered Republican and one unaffiliated candidate who has taken only Republican ballots in primary elections, records show.

Of those board members, just four of the Democrats filed to run for reelection. In total, 13 Democrats, 13 Republicans and three unaffiliated candidates have filed to run.

A plurality of Wake County voters are unaffiliated, and most of the rest are Democrats. Democrats outnumber Republicans in all nine districts, though the margin is by far the most narrow in District 8, where Mahaffey and Bergstrom are running.

“Turnout is just going to be everything on this,” said Robert Luebke, senior fellow for effective education at the conservative John Locke Foundation, noting that unaffiliated voters comprise the biggest number of voters in Wake County.

Luebke said many issues frustrating parents that seem national are local on a fundamental level, such as parents wanting to know what their children are being taught.

Kevyn Creech, chairwoman of the Wake County Democratic Party, sees some consistency nationally in the tone of how people talk about school issues.

When the school board flipped in 2009 and 2011, disagreements between school board members of different parties were strong but they were focused more on the issues themselves, Creech said.

“There would be questions about, well, ‘Why was this a good idea?’ ‘This is no longer a good idea.’ It was about ideas,” Creech said. “Now, though, it is about the people personally. It questions people's humanity. It questions people's character. And words like ‘grooming’ and ‘pedophile’ are thrown around as if they were just like everyday words.”

Creech is worried candidates who say they want a return to “the basics” of math, reading and writing might favor eliminating supports for students who need them, such as behavioral supports.

She said she’s concerned for “exceptional students, especially those with diverse needs, behavioral, mental, emotional learning needs.”

“I'm afraid that they will get left behind,” she said. “They will somehow get segregated and not be fostered in growing to their full potential because there's a lot of commentary… [that] they take too much time in the classroom. They require too many resources.”

The office started in 2014 and cost about $1.5 million per year, of the district’s more than $2.1 billion budget.

Opponents say the office has yet to produce any results in standardized tests scores, while proponents – including the board’s two conservative members – say the office is helping guide long-term strategies to reduce disparities in academic outcomes, disciplinary actions and other outcomes among students of different races, sex, disability status, socioeconomic status and other demographics.

The school board could change even if Democrats retain a majority of seats, McLennan said. They’ll likely lose some of their advantage, he said.

“I suspect that some of the seats that don't have an incumbent will be replaced by some conservative candidates, and some will be replaced by moderate candidates,” McLennan said. “I don't necessarily see Wake County having this huge red tidal wave hitting the school boards, school board seats, but it's definitely a possibility.”

McLennan thinks more than two board members will be conservative come December, just probably not five. But a minority can still shape policy, he said, and they can prevent consensus votes that are commonplace now.

“So I suspect that at minimum we'll see more contentious school board meetings, more divided votes going forward,” he said.

WRAL News interviewed 22 of the 29 candidates for school board. Six of the seven who weren’t interviewed didn’t respond to interview requests. One cited scheduling conflicts.

Their top issues were teacher pay and support, academics and school safety. But opinions varied about what to do about those things.

Nearly every candidate favored pay increases for teachers, improved academic support and improved school safety. Some disagreed about how to fund those pay increases, what needs to change academically, and what school safety measures need to be taken.

Currently, the school board and Wake County Public School System are working on implementing new school safety measures following a third party’s school safety audit. That includes a new visitor management system. Auditors have also suggested infrastructure improvements, though the school system is financially limited in the types of improvements it can make without conducting major renovations.

No school board candidate interviewed by WRAL News favored reducing school resource officers, and several more conservative candidates favor placing a security officer of some kind at every school. Currently, only elementary schools do not have a school resource officer, which are largely funded by towns. Four elementary schools do have one.

In the past year, the school board has raised the local salary supplement for educators and minimum wage for other workers using tens of millions of dollars in local funds.

Liberal candidates want to lobby state lawmakers to approve more school funding and see what funding increases are possible locally. Conservative candidates don’t necessarily support an increased budget and some even argue for cuts to the existing budget in an effort to raise employee pay, though they didn’t have a list of what would be needed to cut to do that.

Some conservative candidates suggested eliminating a $1.5 million per year Office of Equity Affairs and reducing some central office administrator pay that tops six figures.

The school system has roughly 11,000 teachers, who are among roughly 19,000 employees who are not school-level administrators or central office administrators. A $500 raise for teachers would cost about $5.5 million and a $500 raise for all non-administrators would cost $9.5 million. Costs would double for a $1,000 raise.

Candidates didn’t pose dollar figures for how much they’d want to raise pay for teachers or other employees.

While the biggest issues in the Wake County Public School System are academic in nature, observers point to many national “culture war” issues as being drivers of interest in the school board.

All candidates said they wanted to improve academics, though they had differing ideas for how to do that.

Current school board members and prospective left-leaning members said they supported the district’s high-dosage tutoring for young children in reading and math, intended to make up for learning lost when children were kept physically out of schools during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More conservative-learning candidates say they want to get rid of MVP Math, which is the math program that has students team up to solve math problems together, rather than individually.

Several conservative candidates stressed they want schools to go “back to the basics” of teaching reading, writing and math, chiefly because many students are still not proficient in those subject areas, based on standardized test scores.

Other candidates reject the idea that schools don’t focus on the basics already and noted the district’s test scores are higher than the state average test scores. Some argue schools have for decades had to do more than “the basics” because so many students come to school needing more help than that, such as students who need food or clean clothes. More than that, schools have been required to provide therapeutic and other services for children with disabilities since the 1970s.