From left: newly-elected Board of Education members Mike Sharp, Riza Jenkins and George Griffin pose together on Election Night. Photo courtesy of Ben Rappaport/Chapelboro.
Across the country, school boards have become points of local political conflict with controversies over mask policies and Critical Race Theory. In the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district, while the issues were less contentious, the Board of Education race was also widely-known, with media coverage centering on Meredith Pruitt’s well-funded campaign as the sole Republican.
Out of six candidates, George Griffin, Riza Jenkins and Mike Sharp ultimately won the three open seats in a nearly three-way tie. The ECHO sat down with the new electees to hear their motivations and plans for their upcoming terms on the Board.
Mike Sharp
For 19 years, Mike Sharp has taught at CHCCS schools, including McDougle Elementary School and Culbreth Middle School, and it’s that experience from inside the school system which inspired him to run for the board.
“It’s been something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, mostly because I feel like there weren’t a lot of opportunities for teachers to have a voice on the board,” Sharp said. “There were often people who worked not on the board but at Lincoln Center, who would make changes or bring up new policies and then they would leave in a couple of years and things that we had started working on would just get dropped. And there wasn’t really an opportunity for us to give feedback about things that were working or not.”
One of Sharp’s major aims is to address the district’s racial achievement and opportunity gap.
“When I started teaching here in 2002, I was told that there was a gap, but we were working on it. And I’ve been told that, you know, every couple of years for the last 20years, and nothing has really changed,” Sharp said. “I think we’ve got a lot of important things that we’re looking to get done. I’m saying ‘we’ because the other two candidates who got elected [Riza Jenkins and George Griffin] and I have been working pretty closely together, and I know that we all have very similar views.”
Priorities: Opportunity gap, policy continuity.
Riza Jenkins
Coming from a family of teachers, earning multiple degrees from NCCU and Howard University, and serving as president of multiple PTA organizations, Riza Jenkins is well-acquainted with education. She says she would bring unique perspectives to the school board, with her experience in corporate clean energy, community activism and as a single mother of color.
Jenkins says she initially moved to Chapel Hill because of its leading school district. However, as her kids began pre-Kindergarten, she directly felt the effects of the nationally-ranked achievement gap.
“I began asking questions on why students of color were not receiving the same educational experience as other students,” Jenkins said. “That’s where it really started my path towards where I am now running for school board, starting with serving on the policy council in the pre-K program. [Education] really opens a lot of doors for opportunities in life, so I want to make sure that all children have access to high quality education.”
Priorities: Diversity, equity and inclusion; accountability; fiscal responsibility.
George Griffin
Over the last 46 years, George Griffin has seen education from a lot of different perspectives. The Detroit native and Duke graduate has served as a special education teacher (at Phillips Middle School), a high school principal, a professor of educational leadership at NCCU, and a program director for the state. On top of that, his experience from working for a school accrediting agency for the past 10 years (until his retirement last winter) allowed Griffin to observe schools and boards in 25 states and 10 countries.
Griffin believes that experience allowed him to learn how boards can be most effective. He is also a father of two children who grew up going to CHCCS schools, including Chapel Hill High.
“I wanted a way to stay involved,” Griffin said. “I wanted to be able to do some service for our community that has been so good to us. This is a way of paying back, if you will, for everything that I’ve benefited from here in Chapel Hill.”
Priorities: High quality basic education; teaching materials; school building repairs; achievement gap.
