Debates over resources and school safety in District 6 of the Wake County school board

Democrat Christine Kushner, who has held the position since 2011, isn’t running for reelection. The district, recently redrawn by the board using 2020 Census figures, has about 40.8% unaffiliated voters, 38.4% Democratic voters, 19.9% Republican voters and less than 1% voters registered with other parties.

Term length: Two years, reelection in 2024

Where: Central Raleigh and parts of Raleigh north of the Interstate 440 Beltline.

Chad Stall, 43, enrolled his son in private school last year after starting him in the school district. He is a business manager for a dental office and former dance studio owner. He’s endorsed by the Wake County Republican Party.

Stall wants to increase the school system’s workforce education across all high schools, change budget priorities to more classroom staff and supplies and potentially freeze administrative salaries or hiring to pay for that.

He’d like to involve some high school students in the learning loss recovery process for other or younger students, by assisting teachers or tutoring.

On school safety, Stall supports improved safety infrastructure and school resource officers and said he doesn’t want a school system-based law enforcement agency.

He believes a focus on academics, arts and athletics will engage students and prevent many students from having anger or distress.

Who's running for Wake County school board?

Stall’s interest in the school board began last fall when he tried to get his son — then enrolled in the school system — a mask exemption. After being denied the exemption, Stall enrolled his son in private school. At the time, Stall said he wished for the school system to have a reduced footprint in Wake County.

But Stall said his opinion on public schools has changed, and faulting the school system heaped too much blame on too many people. He believes public schools are necessary and private schools could never replace them.

His son still attends private school, and Stall says he won’t change that so long as his son is happy there. He calls for taxpayers to see themselves as investors and owners of public institutions who can be more involved.

“It is a fault of society for us to start viewing all of our government systems as toxic and negative,” Stall said.

Sam Hershey, 45, has a son in the school district and is a startup co-founder. He’s endorsed by the Wake County Democratic Party.

He wants the school district to have more teachers and instructional assistants and considers reversing the affects of pandemic-caused learning loss to be a top priority. To do that, he wants to push for more one-on-one, intensive tutoring (The Wake County Public School System has expanded partnerships recently with North Carolina Education Corps, the YMCA and the HELPS Education Fund for this kind of tutoring). Hershey also wants the school system to have more nurses and to attract them to work in schools by raising the pay for nurses.

Hershey wants to be responsive to parent concerns, push to curb bullying in schools, ensure arts and extracurricular activities are supported and continue to support magnet schools.

On school safety, Hershey supports the school board’s current work responding to its safety audit, including a district-wide visitor management system and infrastructural security upgrades.

In the end, Hershey says the districts’ schools are good, even if he still wants to make them better.

“Businesses and families move here because of our school system, and we need to keep them as assets to our communities,” Hershey said.

Patrice Nealon, 66, teaches marketing at the college level. Nealon’s children graduated from private schools after spending two years in the public school system in the 1990s. Nealon is endorsed by the NC Values Coalition.

Nealon wants the school system to change its math curriculum. She favors rote memorization and opposes the collaborative nature of MVP Math, which the school system uses to teach math.

MVP Math involves group-based learning, in which students are asked to work in groups to solve a math problem they haven’t necessarily been taught to solve yet.

“There is huge frustration in the community, with students with parents, and many teachers, that this instruction of teaching math does not work,” Nealon said.

She is glad the state — and thus the Wake County Public School System — is using a new, phonics-driven approach to teaching reading and believes that will benefit students.

She thinks school board members should be more vocal directly to lawmakers about needing more money to fund schools.

On school safety, Nealon supports the board’s work responding to the safety audit. She believes every school should have a trained school resource officer. She also believes in more safety training for students and employees, as well as “grade-appropriate instruction” for students on the effects of bullying and cyberbullying.

She believes the school system should increase its partnerships with “law enforcement, mental health professionals and youth serving community agencies.”

Dajma Livingston, 28, is a teacher at a Durham charter school, former language teacher in China and Mexico and a graduate of the Wake County Public School System.

Livingston thinks children need to be more engaged and enthusiastic about their education and believes showing them how education can prepare them for careers is critical toward piquing students’ interest in school.

Livingston wants to ensure more students are career-ready and exposed to careers, ideally influencing more employers to move to the area. That includes rigorous testing and requiring students to be prepared for certain things after high school.

She wants to encourage more parent engagement, through volunteering or class observation.

Livingston also wants to ensure ethnicity is a part of any conversation about equity in the district, arguing ethnicity and race are often conflated but are demonstrably different and need to be addressed separately.

Livingston also supports advocating for the General Assembly to fund the comprehensive remedial plan approved in the long running education adequacy lawsuit known as Leandro. Implementation of that plan has been opposed by legislative leadership and is before the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has yet to release its opinion.

“We really need to take education way more seriously in this nation,” Livingston said.

Mary-Lewis Freeman appears on the ballot but is no longer running for the seat.