Dashew won't seek re-election to CMS school board
Board Chair Elyse Dashew says she needs a rest after 8 years on the school board; says she feels 'very optimistic' about the current board
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Elyse Dashew won’t seek a third term in CMS at-large seat, saying she’s ‘due for a sabbatical’
Elyse Dashew has served on the CMS school board since 2015 and has been the board’s chair since 2019.
by Cristina Bolling
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board chair Elyse Dashew won’t seek a third term in this November’s at-large school board race, saying she is “ready for a sabbatical” as she wraps up her eighth year on the board.
“I really poured myself into this work for 8 years, but the last 4 years have been especially intense. I have a lot more to give, but I want to be at 100% capacity, and I think I’m due for a sabbatical,” Dashew told The Ledger by phone Wednesday.
The news was first reported Wednesday morning by the Charlotte Observer.
The board’s three at-large seats are up for election on Nov. 8. So far, seven candidates have filed to fill the three seats, including one incumbent, Lenora Shipp. Another incumbent, Jennifer De La Jara, has said she is not running.
Newcomers who have filed to run for the at-large seats include Bill Fountain, Juanrique Pallamente Hall, Omar Harris, Shamaiye Haynes, Brian Kasher and Liz Monterrey. The filing period ends Friday at noon. School board races are non-partisan.
The CMS board has faced a multitude of high-impact and emotionally charged issues while Dashew has been in office, most recently including decisions about school closures during Covid, the firing of former superintendent Earnest Winston, the hiring of new superintendent Crystal Hill and how to address learning loss due to Covid.
Prepping the baton: Dashew said that during the past year, she’s worked to share tasks and decisions with vice chair Stephanie Sneed or board committee chairs, “letting them kind of learn on the job, to get up to speed faster than they might otherwise.”
She said she feels “very strong about this board, together with the new superintendent, together with the tools that they have at their disposal, and with the way that we are doing governance now, that I feel at peace about handing off the baton. … If I didn’t, I would probably try to talk myself into another four years.”
Some have wondered if recent split board votes on key issues signal division or drama within the current 9-member board, which gained five new members in December. For example, the board voted 6-3 in May to hire interim superintendent Crystal Hill as the district’s new superintendent — a move that was somewhat unusual for a CMS board, as typically boards come to agreements behind closed doors during big personnel hires and vote in unity on contracts.
Dashew, a 53-year-old mom of two CMS graduates, said she is “very optimistic” about the board, despite the fact that she had issues with the 6-3 vote.
“I think the best practice with something like that is you have to have a unified voice no matter what. And there have been other key decisions where I disagreed, but I voted in a unified way. And so maybe I think that’s the sort of thing where board members are still finding their rhythm, and finding that delicate balance between what may be best in the short term, versus what’s best for the big picture,” Dashew said.
“I would say that this board has, with what they’ve accomplished in six months, they have a lot of miles on the car already. They’ve learned a lot on the job.”
Covid pressure: Dashew’s second term was marked by intense pressure over decisions regarding the closing and reopening of schools due to Covid, and helping students recover from learning loss due to the pandemic.
School board members became household names, and tens of thousands of citizens logged in to school board meetings, coming down hard on both sides of wanting schools open and wanting them closed.
“I can’t even describe the pressure,” Dashew said.
“The stakes were so high, and the information kept changing. We were just doing our best with guidance that was shifting one way and then the next way,” she said. “And the closest place — the place where citizens and residents interacted with government and felt that the most keenly was in their schools, that we took the brunt of all the angst.”
She continued:
“A lot of the constituents who live in South Charlotte … experienced the pandemic one way, because they had access to health care. … Everyone's mental health was strained, and obviously, work-from-home was incredibly hard. And so the calculation for parents in south Charlotte was, this is a horrible, horrible thing for our kids, it’s better to open the schools faster, why aren't you doing it?” Dashew said.
“But the vast majority of our constituents were saying something different, because we have a lot of constituents who live in multigenerational households who don't have access to health care, and a case of Covid would just be absolutely potentially catastrophic. And it’s a different calculation. And so they were saying, ‘Please, please, please, don't, don't open too early.’ And even when we did open, it was tough to get all the kids to come back to school. And so that was the dilemma. And everybody thought that they had science on their side.”
Future plans – and a hope: Dashew said she has “a couple of ideas” of things she wants to pursue after she rolls off the board, but will likely take a few months to figure out her next step.
“I have another friend who finished up her time in elected office a year ahead of me, and her advice was: don't make any commitments right away. So that's where I’m at right now,” she said.
Dashew said a parting wish she has for the district is that teachers are heard and rewarded in ways that make more people want to pursue jobs in the classroom.
“I hope that as a district, we can get better at rallying around our teachers. … I think there's some ways that we can improve working conditions to help teachers feel heard, or listened to, and rally the community around some very substantive ways of showing teachers support,” she said. “Of course, teachers are going to say, well, we'll believe it when we see it. And I think they're going to see it pretty soon. So, I feel good about that. That is my hope for the teachers, because fewer and fewer people are going into the teaching profession.”
Cristina Bolling is managing editor of The Ledger: cristina@cltledger.com
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Staff writer: Lindsey Banks; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory; Contributing photographer/videographer: Kevin Young, The 5 and 2 Project