All 12 candidates for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board participated in an Oct. 19th debate sponsored by WFAE and the education group, MeckED. You can read and listen to our report on the debate by WFAE's Lisa Miller. The following are excerpts from a portion of the debate in which candidates were allowed to make a statement on anything they wanted. We've also provided raw audio from that portion of the debate. If you want more, you can watch the debate here. Ericka Ellis Stewart (Click here for audio) Ellis noted her experience in working for The National Conference for Community and Justice. "We did work around diversity, inclusion and making sure that students and their parents and people in the community could talk about isues and putting them on the table and really come to some type of understanding. "My background lends itself to being a good school board member. I care about this community. I've been extremely engaged as a professional, a CMS parent and a community volunteer." Jeff Wise (Click here for audio) Wise was critical of End-of-Grade testing and suggested an alternative for a student. "Rather than give her an EOG, why don't we instead give her a movie camera and say, "Hey, I want you to do a 10-minute movie. Tell me why Alexander Hamilton wanted to create the federal bank back in the 1790s. What were his issues politically, economically, socially?'" He says this would allow the student to apply the skills she's learned and provide a "much better way to see how our students are doing rather than bubbling tests." Keith Hurley (Click here for audio) Hurley says he repeatedly sees examples of parents taking their kids out of CMS. "I see this repeatedly. I see due to overtesting, specifically, people that live across the street from schools take their children out, have them tested psychologically, have them medicated. We're medicating kids because of testing. Ridiculous" "Kids immediately go to a private school, learning absolutely fine above grade-level, A-minus kids. The children are off the drugs." He says "we're not supporting the teachers. We're overtesting the kids." Larry Bumgarner (Click here for audio) "I don't want to teach your kids how to use technology. That's the last thing I want to do. I want to teach them how to create technology, because my wife and I have traveled. We have seen where kids go out of school (and) they know how to do swarm technology. If you don't know what swarm technology is, go home and ask your kids. If they know what it's about, then I don't need to be on the school board. "If they can't speak two languages, I don't need to be on the school board because they're competing with jobs all across the world now, folks. People are coming here taking the jobs we used to have." Ken Nelson (Click here for audio) Nelson says some classes are being dropped because they're not the subject of standardized tests. "We need to get serious about what our problems are at CMS. We don't need to be sending three times as much money over to the West Side when private schools are doing the same job for a whole lot less money than what we're spending per-pupil over on the West Side, and those private schools have the resources. "It's not an issue of resources, it's an issue of priorities. And I want to get on the school board to investigate the budget and see what's going on in CMS." Mary McCray (Click here for audio) McCray addressed Nelson's comment regarding additional per-pupil spending for West Side schools, and recalled her own experience in receiving inadequate education resources. "I did not get the education that other students that did not look like me were getting. As far as those students on the West Side, CMS is paying for the neglect of certain schools that we've done and incorporated here in this district for many years. They didn't get the teachers that they needed. They didn't have the resources they needed to educate the children. So, thank God we're not back 50 years ago." Lloyd Scher (Click here for audio) "I want to look at the main issue here, which is changing the process for budgeting. We are elected officials... We have to go hat-in-hand to the county commission and say, 'Give us money to run the schools.' Then they've got to go to the state. "We need to change how this is done. We need to say to the state, 'Give us a school budget by April 1st, the county commission, give us a school budget by April 15th,' and by May 1st the school board could give a budget and not fire teachers only to rehire them at less money. We can't do that. That is unfair, improper, and that's why we have a morale problem." Aaron Pomis (Click here for audio) Pomis, a teacher, mentioned a student named George Wise. "He made a list of all the things he wanted to accomplish. He said, 'I want to go to UNC, I want to become a dentist, and I want to be a great dad.' "And when we talk about changing the cyclical nature of poverty and making sure kids get a chance to transform their future, this campaign is not about Aaron Pomis for school board. This is about George Wise for dentist." Hans Plotseneder (Click here for audio) "Three things set me apart from the other candidates. No. 1, more relevant education, including a master's in school administration from UNCC five years ago. "Secondly, the experience. I'm the only candidate who has both extensive experience in business- with IBM and Bank of America - and I've also been for 11 years a teacher at CMS in CMS classrooms. I know what needs to be fixed to get better. "Thirdly, I'm the only one who has published 14 specific strategies. I can do this because I'm not managed by any other group like other candidates." Elsye Dashew (Click here for audio) "We definitely face some huge challenges in CMS right now, and we can only meet those challenges by working together and by including all voices in the process, and we have to collaborate to solve these problems because our community's well-being is at stake. Our economic prosperity is tied to the strength of our schools, and that depends upon raising our graduate rate, narrowing our achievement gap. We're all in this together. And I have the skills, the commitment and the real-world experience to bring this about, to bring people around the table, around solutions for our schools. Tim Morgan (Click here for audio) Morgan said CMS has made improvements in closing the achievement gap and improving the graduation rate. It's 74 percent, but Morgan says it was 60 percent when he graduated from Independence High School in the 1980s. "Do we need a higher graduation rate? Absolutely... The question for the community, is do we want to continue our forward progress, or do we want to go backwards? That's the question. A lot of people up here have said 'I wouldn't have voted for this, I wouldn't have voted for that,' but I haven't heard many people offer alternatives for how to keep us moving forward, and that's the key for this race." Darrin Rankin (Click here for audio) Rankin says CMS needs a school board that's willing to listen to the community. "I think most of you would agree when I say CMS, we're involved in a war. And that war is on quality education. Now we have won a number of battles during this war. The question is, how do we push forward and win this entire war? And winning that war is educating all of our children throughout Mecklenburg County. Our children are on the battlefield, and I'm sure none of you that have children in the system want any of your kids to be casualties."
CMS Board Candidate Profiles
