Public School Strong: A Multiracial Movement Championing a New Era in Public School Advocacy
Summer 2024 Public School Strong orientation session in Wilson County, North Carolina
In a perfect world, school boards would function as the ultimate voice of the community. This powerful tool would carefully and thoughtfully be used to enhance the experiences of the students that it serves. This romantic view also relies on the idea that school boards accurately reflect the demographics of the communities that they serve. Unfortunately, North Carolina’s school boards are far from ideal. While students of color make up 56% of the state’s public school enrollment, only 27% of school board members are people of color. The origins of this disparity and the dire need for representation that it has created can be traced as far back as the state’s inception.
The creation of North Carolina’s Constitution in 1776 represented an immediate threat to the education of the state’s people of color by prohibiting anyone who was not white from receiving an education. 1839 represented a slight improvement for the state’s minority citizens, as they were able to obtain an education, albeit one that aligned with the nation’s infamous practice of segregation. Though segregated schooling was still alive and well in the 1860s, a crucial shift began. North Carolina’s black communities started to create their own schools, which churches and community groups managed. This rise of “Black-led schools” led to an essential era of economic and social development for students of color. The creation of groups such as the NC Freedmen’s Bureau and the NC Teachers Association in 1865 and 1877, respectively, ensured that Black children would have improved access to educational programs and would be advocated for by their educators.
1954 marked a new period of public school education. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation and initiated the arduous process of desegregating schools nationwide. Unfortunately, the desegregation of schools led to the integration of the nation’s higher-funded white schools and the destruction of Black led schools. The loss of these schools not only meant that tens of thousands of Black teachers and principals lost their jobs; it also meant that the voices of minority communities were suddenly diminished, as churches or community groups no longer managed the schools that their children attended, but instead by pre-established White school boards.
The introduction of charter schools in 1996 through the Charter School Act began North Carolina’s school choice movement. While Leandro v. NC and its ruling that the state must provide students with a “sound, basic education” represented a step towards ensuring that this new movement did not lead to less equitable educational outcomes in North Carolina, the NC Foundation for Individual Rights lawsuit and its resulting destruction of the diversity requirements for the state’s charter schools did precisely that. It opened the door for less diverse private and charter schools to compete with North Carolina’s public schools for state funding. This would eventually lead to the second Leandro ruling, which concluded that the state had failed to provide a “sound and basic education” to all of its students and could not transfer educational responsibility to local areas.
The second Leandro ruling highlighted the state’s shortcomings in public education. It also emphasized the need for a new wave of diverse public education advocates that would help school boards gain awareness of issues and educational needs that they might not ever have been exposed to, something that was lost during the desegregation of American schools. This new wave of advocates has come in the form of Public School Strong (PSS), an initiative of HEAL Together NC. The main goal of PSS is to get parents, students, teachers, and community members involved at school board meetings in all 100 of North Carolina’s counties to ensure all children in North Carolina have access to honest, accurate, safe, and fully funded public education. While the original aim of PSS was to recruit and train public school advocates across the state of North Carolina, the countrywide need for equitable funding for schools has elevated the group to a national stage as more and more states have begun to join the movement.
August 2024 Public School Strong Organizer Bootcamp
Part of Public School Strong’s growing footprint in the U.S. is that it represents a simple commitment: Attend a PSS training session (in-person or virtual) and then pledge to advocate for your community’s public school students at your school district’s board meetings. PSS members also receive Public School Strong shirts to show solidarity and further bolster the PSS movement. While the amount of effort that joining PSS requires is minimal, the impact that the group hopes to bring to public school communities in North Carolina and areas beyond is anything but. PSS trainings allow members to become fully fledged public school activists armed with tools to help combat threats to their communities’ schools. These tools include learning how to form a PSS team in your county, knowing what to look for in your school district’s board meetings, knowing how to support well-resourced and inclusive public schools, and becoming knowledgeable on how to both make sure that your county is represented in the efforts of PSS and how to help their statewide and movement.
One of PSS’s most critical missions in 2024 is mobilizing its members to polls in November to elect officials who share their pride and belief in public schools and communities. The group is working to keep its members and communities across North Carolina informed on the essential offices and candidates up for election and how to leverage their collective resources, voices, and power to achieve their political goals. Public School Strong members are invested in this mission to elect public officials that have education equity at their forefront by taking the group’s voting pledge, which is made up of six vital parts: Support Leandro, oppose privatization, promote funding efforts, advocate for honest and accurate curricula, prioritize equity, and collaborate with communities.
Ultimately, Public School Strong’s goal is to create a robust multiracial movement that will fight to address American public education shortcomings by raising an army of public school champions. If you are interested in joining this new wave movement, register at https://www.mobilize.us/nea/event/596321/
Isaiah Anderson is from Groton, Connecticut, where he attended multiple schools within the Groton Public School System. He is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pursuing a major in political science and a minor in urban studies. He gained experience with education policy as an undergraduate research assistant with the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) and as a summer intern with the Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED).
