Following three tied votes, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools school board voted Feb. 18 to fill its vacant seat by a digital “coin flip.”
With the coin coming up tails, special needs advocate and PTA member Lisa Kaylie, a white woman, was selected as the newest member of the board, narrowly beating out Carmen Huerta-Bapat, a Latina professor of global studies at UNC. The spot was left vacant after Amy Fowler was elected to the Orange County Board of Commissioners.
At the board’s meeting March 4, Kaylie was sworn in as its newest member. Had Huerta-Bapat assumed the position, she would have been the only Latinx member on the board.
Many CHCCS students responded critically to this decision, seeing it as a mistake in terms of promoting representation and equity in a district with a 16 percent Hispanic student population.
Forty written comments expressing this sentiment were submitted prior to Kaylie’s confirmation at the school board meeting, most signed by students. In explaining their decision to write such comments, students cited a number of reasons they disagreed with the school board’s methods.
Many pointed out the apparent hypocrisy of a district claiming to prioritize “equity and inclusion” while seemingly ignoring concerns of representation in appointing a new member.
“Why would you even try to get another white female, when you already have three, but you don’t even have one Mexican, Latino or Latinx representative?” said Carrboro High School sophomore Myles Jackson.
Many of the written comments echoed this idea, repeating the phrase, “If you won’t stand up for our Latinx community, we will. Si no nos representan, lo haremos nosotros.”
East senior Ethan Taylor said in an email to the ECHO, “It makes me sad that my Latinx peers have never been represented on the school board. This decision would’ve literally made history.”
Some felt that the use of the coin flip only added to the absurdity of the situation.
“I was stunned when I heard that they were making decisions using coin flips,” said Keti Alemayehu, a sophomore at Carrboro High School, in an email to the ECHO. “That’s a thing I remember using whenever trying to make silly decisions amongst friends or with siblings.”
Like many of the student commenters, Alemayehu heard about the board’s decision through her involvement with the Carrboro Black & Brown Student Coalition, a student activist group with the stated goal of fostering change through “solidarity, communication and accountability.”
Others, like Chapel Hill junior NaTasja Jeter, became involved through their classmates.
“I started talking to my Latino peers, my friends, hearing how they feel that they deserve to be represented… and how it makes them feel to know that the board didn’t think it was important enough—or they weren’t important enough—to have representation,” Jeter said.
Despite the influx of comments criticizing Kaylie’s appointment, the school board has shown no signs of shifting its position. Some members of the student pushback felt discouraged by this.
“We don’t know what their stance is and we haven’t heard anything back from them,” Jeter said. “So, we don’t know if they’re going to do anything, or if they care. We don’t know anything.”
Others still feel optimistic that the decision might be reversed. Taylor is among them, but also worries that without representation, the concerns of Latinx students may be ignored.
“It would be a shame for our district leaders to sweep us under the carpet, because everything they do should be for the benefit of us as learning and growing students,” Taylor said.
Even if the school board doesn’t reverse their decision on this issue, many involved in the movement say they don’t intend for their efforts to promote representation to stop here.
“I don’t know how much we’re going to continue to push on this specific incident,” Jeter said. “But we are going to continue to make sure we keep tabs on [the school board] and hold them accountable for future decisions, to make sure that they’re holding true to their word of creating a community that is about equity, representation and diversity.”
Image by Hammond Cole Sherouse/The ECHO
