Wake school board picks Raleigh volunteer manager as newest member
All candidates who interviewed Thursday successfully proved their District 4 residence, Board Chairwoman Lindsay Mahaffey said.
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Tara Waters will be sworn in to fill the empty District 4 seat before the board’s next meeting March 15.
School board members did not discuss the candidates before casting confidential ballots Thursday afternoon.
Waters was selected with five votes, while applicants Tama R. Bouncer and Michael T. Williams received two votes and one vote, respectively.
Becky Lew-Hobbs and Daniel Grant-King also applied for the position.
Waters was the first candidate interviewed Friday and listed detailed plans for community engagement and improving the school district’s job application process. She also promoted analyzing personal bias, magnet schools, promoting what each school has to offer and having clear and open communication with the community during decision-making.
Board members asked each candidate the same set of 10 questions in a. Strict question-and-answer format that did not include follow-up questions or responses.
All candidates had 45 minutes for an interview Thursday, though Williams declined his interview, having completed an interview in January.
Board Chairwoman Lindsay Mahaffey told WRAL News the board was looking for an applicant who appeared to already connect well with their district and who appeared ready to step into the role. An appointed candidate doesn’t have the time to build relationships in the community the way a person who has been campaigning and who has a full two-year term does.
School board members represent more than 100,000 Wake County residents each, including at least 10,000 students each.
“It’s a heavy decision,” Mahaffey said. “You’re looking for someone who is going to be a point person” for those thousands of people.
Mahaffey voted for Waters and said only that she believed Waters best fit those criteria.
Appointed board members are eligible to run for election.
Appointed board members sometimes do get elected later on. Keith Sutton, who resigned from District 4 at the end of 2021, was appointed in 2009, and then elected several times after. Chris Heagarty was appointed in 2018, following the death of a board member. He was elected to the seat in 2020.
EARLIER:
Five people will interview Thursday to be the newest member of the Wake County Board of Education.
The interviews begin at 1 p.m. at the Wake County Public School System’s Cary headquarters and will be live-streamed.
The school board, currently only eight members, will ask each candidate the same set of questions and then vote on a candidate. Whoever gets five votes will get the seat, and the board will vote until one candidate gets at least five votes.
That’s the process for filling a board seat outside of the general election.
The selected board member will serve until the November election, though the member will also be eligible to run for the position.
Two of the candidates have applied before. The five who will interview are:
- Tara Waters: Waters is a volunteer services unit manager at the City of Raleigh and former human resources supervisor. Waters’ top initiatives are to improve community engagement through a formal toolkit, train employees on seeing their hidden biases toward others, and audit the district’s hiring process to better understand job candidates’ experiences.
- Tama R. Bouncer: Former teacher and former president and Vice President of the North Carolina Association of Educators chapter in Wake County. Bouncer’s top priorities are expanding pre-kindergarten, starting a teacher preparation program targeting students in partnership with the North Carolina Foundation for Public School Children, and increasing employee pay. Increasing pre-kindergarten often depends on county commissioner investment. The district has a student-focused teacher preparation program, called Future Teachers, operated separate from that foundation.
- Becky Lew-Hobbs: Lew-Hobbs is a business operations manager for Daedong USA. Lew-Hobbs’ top priorities are engaging parents, improving educational outcomes, discouraging teachers from taking their political opinions in class, and increasing transparency through efforts such as having teachers post lesson plans online. Those things, Lew-Hobbs argues, would help the district be more desirable for more parents, who are often opting for charter schools and home schools instead.
- Daniel Grant-King: Grant-King is an instructional assistant working for the school district. Grant-King’s top priorities are creating a more collaborative environment among school employees, supporting innovative educational approaches, and integrating digital resources and technology into learning. School district employees, if selected or elected as board members, must resign their positions.
- Michael T. Williams: Williams is an educational consultant at the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and co-founder of a firm offering professional development for educators. Williams’ top priorities are ensuring students of all incomes have access to the resources they need, communicating that students are safe emotional and physically at school and that they will receive a high-quality education anywhere in the district, and holding community engagement activities that include community meetings, supply drives and discussions with parent and student groups.
Grant-King and Williams applied to fill the board seat in January but were not selected.
Each candidate had to submit proof of residence and voter registration.
That’s slightly more than what is required now of people who run for board seats during formal elections.
The board voted without opposition in February to require proof of residence after the board did not catch that the board member they appointed to the District 4 seat — Craston Artis II — did not live there at the time.
The board is appointing the District 4 member in lieu of an election because former District 4 representative Keith Sutton resigned in December upon his hire as Warren County Schools superintendent.
In recent years, the district has faced COVID-19 learning disruptions and disputes over protection measures, difficulties hiring, declining market share of school-age children in the county and overcrowded schools in high-growth parts of the county.
The school board has removed mask mandates by March 7, raised pay in an attempt to attract more job candidates, touted magnet schools and discussed ways to reduce enrollment caps and improve outcomes for students across demographics. The district's graduation rate has risen, along with the state's, and remains higher than the state average.
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