Lauren will deliver actionable solutions for students, teachers and workers, and schools.
A district that works starts with operational excellence
DPS student enrollment has been stagnant or declining in recent years, while Durham County population has been growing. About 1 of every 4 students in Durham County is enrolled in a charter school compared to only 8 percent in Wake County and 12 percent in Guilford County. Families are opting out of DPS. It's clear that we need a district that works for students, schools, teachers, staff, and families.
The Board of Education is the lever that we can use to help turn DPS around. As a Board member, Lauren will collaborate to deliver constructive, practical policy solutions that can rebuild trust in DPS and get the district where we need to be.
Get dollars back into the classroom:
Put the budget under a microscope.
We know that federal and state funds for our public schools are not enough. The good news is that Durham is a generous community, and our local tax dollars fund about half of the DPS budget. That means we actually have local control over a lot of our resources.
Let’s take our power back here in Durham by making sure our financial resources are going back into classrooms.
We need to:
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Start from scratch. We can’t expect different results by doing the same thing year after year. Let’s open the books and make sure our budget decisions are aligned with student outcomes.
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Partner with the DAE and other groups to gather information from each school about what resources they need and what they don’t need.
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Have honest conversations with students who are the district’s number one constituent and who have proven to be very insightful about how schools can improve.
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Pause unnecessary service contracts. Let's limit non-mandated standardized tests, unmanaged technology contracts, and unneccessary additional curricula.
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Institutionalize external partnerships. We have an incredible community of experts and institutions in Durham. We need to partner with them to expand our capacity and services without expanding our budgets.
Treat teachers and staff like the professionals they are.
Investing in our educators is a must. Great teachers make all the difference in a child's schooling experience. As a professor of education policy, I know what the research says:
Of all the resources in a school building, classroom teachers are the most important for student learning.
And, when students have really effective teachers, they are more likely to enroll in and complete college and have more successful careers as young adults.
We need to:
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Develop clear and transparent pay scales. No more consultants; no more listening sessions. We need pay scales now.
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Modernize payroll. No more paycheck mistakes; flexibility over pay periods.
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Give educators their time back. Let teachers spend their workdays in their buildings with their colleagues.
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Be clear about resource allocation. Put district practices around resource and position allocations to schools in writing. Make these decisions transparent.
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Provide job security. Use local dollars to create stable teaching teams at schools when they experience temporary fluctuations in student enrollment from one year to the next.
Make the school day work for working families.
Families navigate many hoops to make DPS work for them. They navigate various confusing processes just to enroll in school, including a constellation of ever-changing school choices. There is limited access to affordable aftercare when elementary school releases at 2:15, and they face reduced bussing services.
Parents make the schooling choices that work best for their families. We have to stop blaming families who opt out of DPS and start putting policies into place to make DPS the best option for Durham.
We need to:
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Ensure that every single DPS school provides a high-quality education with consistent services for any student who walks in the door.
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Create clear and accessible student enrollment processes so that families know their options and can plan their lives around them.
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Expand aftercare access. Build community partnerships to expand aftercare programming off-site, while we work with DPS Community Education to expand availability on-site. Use aftercare to provide academic supports for students.
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Manage bus routes proactively. Generate realistic and reliable bus routes, and optimize those routes regularly during the school year. Partner with GoTriangle to augment routes that start at high schools when the school day ends.
Fix our school buildings.
DPS has presented to the board and the county commission some disheartening numbers: The district has nearly $1 billion in deferred maintenance and promised school construction costs.
You have experienced the leaking roofs, broken HVAC systems and water fountains, moldy classrooms, and off-limits equipment and athletic fields.
Durham County residents can also expect a big bond initiative in the coming years to address these issues. Those dollars must be used efficiently.
We need to:
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Shift building maintenance to Durham County. DPS has proven that it cannot manage its own bidding process and maintenance needs. Every dollar spent by the county on building maintenance will go further than one spent by DPS.
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Make public information about improvement and construction projects in a well-maintained database. This would allow the public to monitor their building’s maintenance needs understand district priorities, and monitor progress.
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Audit our construction contracts. DPS new construction has been fraught with budget overruns and planning oversights. Athletic fields at the new Northern High School were not built to the proper size, making them unusable for games. Lyons Farm Elementary is already in need of a new chiller. The new Durham School of the Arts is by far the most-expensive school to ever be built in North Carolina. We need to take a hard look at our processes for awarding and managing contracts, now.
Make the Board and central office work for schools.
School-based staff say that DPS central office is not effectively supporting their needs. And today, our Board is not leading the district to address the challenges we face.
Lauren will work with her Board colleagues and DPS administration to ensure that Board meetings are efficient and effective:
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Clear timelines for reviewing and voting on policy, including a calendar of the board's priorities for the year
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Regular district updates to the board on key district facts and figures to guide decision making (e.g., student enrollment, teacher and staff vacancies, outcomes data, evaluation of programs)
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District presentations to the board that have clear goals and a path from presentation to policy
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More oversight related to urgent issues in our schools and community