Chris Heagarty, candidate for Wake County Board of Education District 7
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Candidates for Wake County Board of Education District 7
Incumbent Chris Heagarty, Katie Thuy Long and Jacob Arthur are running for Wake County school board district 7.
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Name: Chris Heagarty
Political party: Democrat
Age as of Nov. 8, 2022: 52
Campaign website: heagarty4schools.org
Occupation: Executive Director, nonprofit foundation
Education: B.A., NC State University; J.D, NC Central University School of Law; Wake County Public Schools
Have you run for elected office before? NC House of Representatives (2009-2010), Wake County Board of Education (2018-present)
Please list highlights of your civic involvement: I am currently serving as the Vice Chair of the Wake County Board of Education. I have served four years on the Wake County Board of Education. I previously served in the NC House of Representatives in 2009-2010.
Why do you want to serve on the Wake County Board of Education?
As a WCPSS graduate and as a parent of two Wake County public schools students, I know that our schools make a critical difference in the lives of our students and we need to maintain the good programs that have made our schools great. We must stand strong against those who want to turn back this progress, restrict curriculum and ban books. I am running again to make sure all of our children are prepared to lead productive and fulfilling lives upon graduation from our schools.
What are the Wake County Public Schools doing well?
Our schools produce creative, collaborative, critical-thinking students who are in high demand by colleges and employers, as evidenced by the aggressive recruiting of our students by out-of-state colleges and universities and by employers hiring directly from high school. Similarly, our region continues to attract high-skill, high-wage jobs by employers who cite our great public schools as the reason they move their companies here.
What would be your three top priorities if elected? Choose one, and explain how you would address it.
I am running to continue our work accelerating academic recovery from time lost to the pandemic, recruiting and retaining great teachers, and protecting all children from intolerance and harassment. For accelerating academic recovery, we mobilized and are training hundreds of volunteers to offer “high dosage” tutoring to our youngest students who are just developing their literacy skills, who were the most impacted by virtual schools and remote learning during the pandemic.
What should the district do in response to calls to remove books from schools that some say are inappropriate for students?
No good has ever come from any society banning books. Books in school libraries are selected by highly trained professionals, but even so there is already a process for citizen review of books. I believe most of this movement is fed by social media. If activists think that students looking for sexual gratification today are going to walk into a school library, read through 400 pages of wood pulp pages just to find 16 dirty words or a poorly drawn cartoon, they are living in the wrong century.
How should schools discuss issues involving discrimination based on race, gender and other factors?
Schools should teach students to love their country, but should also teach the full history of America including the factual things that have happened related to race and racism. Schools should include books by diverse authors and lessons on a diverse array of historical figures. Schools should provide inclusive learning that makes each student feel valued, and facilitate open conversations for students to discuss their experiences and perspectives, but not in a judgmental or exclusionary way.
How would you go about making schools safer in the aftermath of school shootings such as in Uvalde, Texas?
We need to maintain our current school resource officer program and work with local law enforcement to encourage community police presence in the neighborhoods around our schools. Most lockdown situations affecting our elementary schools are not from any direct threat to the school but due to gun violence in the surrounding neighborhoods. Additional security improvements need to be made to restrict access and improve security in our school buildings. Sensible gun safety laws should be passed.
What would you do to try to address student learning loss that was exacerbated by the pandemic?
In order to accelerate academic recovery from time lost during the pandemic, we must focus efforts on those most deeply impacted by time out of school, our K-5 students who were still in the process of developing literacy skills during the temporary shift to virtual learning. We have mobilized and are training hundreds of volunteers to offer “high dosage” tutoring in our schools for these students through our Wake Together program.
What’s the appropriate level of funding that should be provided to Wake County schools?
The best way to determine appropriate funding is to determine the costs for addressing the unmet needs in our schools. For example, our schools have far fewer school counselors, special education teachers and other professionals than is recommend because of insufficient state funding. We are also losing many teachers to other professions that earn more because we can’t offer competitive salaries. We can look at spending in similar communities to see that we spend too little on our schools.
This story was originally published October 23, 2022 at 4:39 PM.
