The Issues

Increased Pay and Benefits for
ALL
School Employees

Great schools depend on great people, and right now we are losing them. UCPS has to be competitive with surrounding districts for all school employees: teachers, teaching assistants, bus drivers, cafeteria staff, EC support, and everyone who keeps schools running. High turnover is expensive, destabilizing, and ultimately costs taxpayers more than retention. Stability matters for students, for families, and for the people doing the work every day.

Teachers and staff have described living month-to-month, absorbing insurance increases, and feeling sustained pressure to “do more with less.” That kind of instability directly affects retention and classroom continuity. Competitive compensation is the foundation for retention, stability, and student success, and we’ll measure success by whether we actually fill positions and keep talented and hardworking people.

I strongly believe that any compensation strategy adopted by the board must be paired with retention data and vacancy tracking so we can see whether it’s actually working. When experienced staff leave, districts spend more on recruitment, substitutes, and training. This is money that could have gone into classrooms.

Facts:

UCPS ranks #1 in EOC and EOG proficiency in the state, yet our teachers are 37th in pay.
From teachers to bus drivers, every single person ensuring our children are educated in a safe and caring environment deserve to be paid a living wage. Currently, the district does not publish salary schedules online for positions other than employees paid on the certified teacher scale. This shows their lack of transparency and accountability for the low pay they are offering employees.
Currently, teachers are not eligible for Master’s level pay unless they completed part of their course work prior to August 1, 2013. This leaves little incentive for teachers to further their education and skills. Why go into debt for a Master's Degree when you’re already not making enough to support your family? Our students deserve highly qualified teachers who continue building their skills and knowledge by earning advanced degrees without going into debt they cannot pay back. I plan to advocate for master’s level pay at both the district and state level.

School Safety

Right now, too many classrooms are losing instructional time to repeated disruptions and behavior crises, and too often teachers don’t get timely backup. This leads to lost instructional time and predictable classroom failure.

We need a district-wide behavior and safety plan that restores order to classrooms and provides real support to teachers: clear expectations, quick response when a classroom is in crisis, meaningful consequences for serious behavior, counselors and behavior specialists so problems don’t escalate.

School safety requires a layered approach that includes prevention, staffing, clear expectations, and fast response when something serious happens. We need a district-wide approach that restores order and protects learning time, while still providing appropriate supports for students who need them.

That means:

Clear, consistent behavior expectations across the county
Immediate response capacity when a classroom is in crisis
Consequences that make sense
Strong mental-health and behavior supports so problems don’t escalate

SROs are an important part of a layered safety plan in schools with documented serious safety threats, but they are not a substitute for counselors and behavior teams, and they should not be used for routine discipline. The goal should be safe classrooms where teachers can teach and students can learn.

Facts:

UCPS currently does not have a dedicated resource officer for every school. Ensuring each school has a dedicated officer should be the bare minimum and both UCPS and local law enforcement should be making this a top priority.
Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, WONDER Online Database, Provisional Mortality Statistics, Multiple Cause of Death, Injury Mechanism & All Other Leading Causes (accessed September 1, 2024). In 2025 there were at least 141 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 44 deaths and 129 injuries nationally. 12 of those incidents were in North Carolina, the highest number in a single state. (Everytown for Gun Safety and the K-12 School Shooting Database). Increasing collaboration with local law enforcement and community mental health resources will be a top priority for me to ensure supports are in place to prevent incidences of gun violence on campuses throughout the county.
There are options available for items such as bulletproof doors and Crisis Alert systems that are less costly to purchase and maintain than metal detectors and can eliminate the negative impression that metal detectors could bring to schools. I plan to work with district leadership to identify the best solution for our district in terms of safety, price, and research grant and funding opportunities to bring upgraded safety and security to our schools.

Health in Schools

School meals provide students with nutritious food to ensure that their dietary needs are met to set a solid foundation for success in school. This year, the district has chosen to not allow students to charge their lunch accounts above $19.25. Students are given an alternative meal, however, this may cause undue harm to a student’s mental health as the alternative meal calls attention to the student not being able to charge a meal. The new UCPS policy states “If a parent regularly fails to provide meal money and does not qualify for free meal benefits, the child nutrition director shall inform the principal, who shall determine the next course of action, which may include notifying the Department of Social Services of suspected child neglect and/or taking legal steps to recover the unpaid meal charges.” (Read About it Here). The board of education is threatening to sue and report parents who cannot afford meals for their student while we are living in a country where grocery prices have gone up 29% in the last 5 years alone (Read More Here) and public assistance is unreliable due to cuts to government programs. Families who do not qualify for free or reduced lunch due to their income are still struggling due to record inflation rates and budget cuts across all industries. I plan to work with district leaders to leverage state and federal resources to formulate a plan to assist with school lunch debt and provide free lunches to any student who needs it, not just those who meet an arbitrary federal income guideline. No child should be singled out or stigmatized during the school day because of family finances.
School counselors ensure student’s social-emotional needs are supported at school and promote equity and access for all students. Current counselor to student ratios in our district are much higher than the 250:1 ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association. I will work with the district to develop a plan to hire more counselors to help lower the student to counselor ratio so that we ensure all students have timely access to the support of a counselor.
Healthy students deserve to learn from healthy teachers. District support for teacher’s mental and physical health is lacking. My goal is to form an advisory committee made up of educators from around the county to assist in formulating programs to better support the health of staff members so they can bring their best selves to work each day.

Fix Follow-Through, Accountability, and Oversight

We need to make problems impossible to ignore. One of the biggest governance failures in large systems is that problems surface but don’t trigger action. The same issues come back year after year: behavior disruptions, workload, inconsistent leadership, broken processes. These issues continue to reappear because there’s no reliable system that forces follow-through.

My commitment is straightforward: problems shouldn’t be able to disappear. UCPS needs a culture of ownership and follow-through, where leaders show up, listen, and fix what’s broken, while maintaining focus on outcomes rather than appearances.

That means:

Leadership that is present and supportive, not “gotcha” micromanagement
Clear accountability for solving problems, not passing them down to classrooms
Transparency the public can actually use, so we can see priorities and results

We don’t need a system that is perfect, but we do need a system that takes staff and parent concerns seriously and actually responds to them.

Hire Trained Support Staff So Teachers Can Teach

Teachers should be able to teach. Instead, too many are being asked to manage major behavior crises, do endless clerical tasks, and sit through constant meetings, often while losing planning time and even lunch to coverage or meetings.

Many of us remember when classrooms commonly had a teacher and a teaching assistant. My priority is to bring back a second adult where it makes the biggest difference, especially in elementary grades and high-need classrooms, so learning can happen and teachers can focus on instruction.

This is not about adding staff indiscriminately. It’s about putting the right adults in the right places to reduce overload and prevent burnout. Any staffing changes should be targeted, phased, and evaluated, not layered on top of already overloaded systems.

This requires staffing schools with the people who actually reduce teacher workload:

Instructional support: teaching assistants, EC support, intervention staff
Student support: counselors, social workers, behavior specialists, de-escalation support
Operational support: coverage help, clerical support, and a stronger substitute pipeline

And it also means cutting the “slow bleed” of burnout: fewer unnecessary meetings, fewer redundant initiatives, and more respect for teacher time and professional judgment.

In middle and high school, the workload crisis is class size. When classes hit the mid-30s and teachers are responsible for 175–200 students, real feedback and real learning become impossible. My priority is to move toward a 25-student target over time, starting where overload is most severe and measurable.