The Durham Public Schools (DPS) board of education is getting a major shakeup this year.
Four of the board’s seven seats are up for election in Durham’s March 3 election, and only one incumbent is running to keep her seat—that leaves three wide open seats with no shortage of candidates seeking to win voter approval to fill them.
Public service is certainly a beautiful and noble calling. But it’s not exactly hard to imagine why three board members are stepping away.
Since these seats were last up for election in 2022, the district (while still recovering from the academic impact of COVID) has dealt with a pay crisis, a transit crisis, and an enrollment crisis (the newcomers to the election are in a prime position to argue that those crises were, for the most part, avoidable).
It’s also not exactly a glamorous gig. Board members usually have full-time jobs of their own and are expected to make time for evening meetings as well as morning or afternoon committee sessions and joint meetings with other government bodies.
Board members receive a monthly stipend of $1,667. That would be a generous amount if board members only went to the two meetings a month. In reality, board meetings often stretch late into the night and members are generally expected to attend additional sessions like meet and confer, policy committee, and other relevant events.
Durham has high expectations for its school board members, and the public is not afraid of showing up to meetings to berate the board over its failings, whether real or imagined. As the majority-member union Durham Association of Educators has flexed its political muscles in recent years, board members have tried to navigate how to keep their educators happy without micromanaging or burning their relationship with their sole employee—the district’s executive, the superintendent.
And short of divine intervention, there is no help for DPS coming from above. The state government recently received an “F” grade from the Education Law Center, coming in second to last for overall public schools funding and the legislature continues to pump dollars away from public schools and towards charter and private schools. Trump’s federal government has worked to dismantle the department of education while providing little clarity as to who or what will carry out its former functions.
The March school board election, although it is on the same ballot as statewide and federal primaries (including the hot-button NC-04 congressional race), is a non-partisan general election. The top vote-getter in each district will be sworn in over the summer and will get to work for the new school year in August.
Voters in each district can select one candidate for their respective board seat only.
The best way to check your district, and your registration status, is through the state board of elections website. And the best way to keep up to date on the election is by reading INDY, as we will have candidate questionnaires, interviews, and campaign coverage starting in January.
Here are the candidates for the DPS board of education.
District 1
Dilcy Burton, Natalie Kitaif, and Davit Melikian will compete for the seat being vacated by Emily Chávez, who is not pursuing reelection after one term. In the conversations and votes over the DAE’s meet and confer policy, Chávez was notably one of the board members most aligned with the DAE. Chávez also served on the board’s policy committee, helping to prioritize and wordsmith policy before it reached the full board.
Burton has been an assistant attorney general for North Carolina’s Department of Justice since 2023. Prior to that, she worked for the Alabama Department of Labor, the NC Department of Commerce, and ran her own practice in Durham. She holds degrees from NC Central, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Liberty University in Virginia, and has had multiple roles for Delta Sigma Theta Sorority INC. She previously ran for Durham County Commission in 2012 and is the only candidate with an extremely catchy jingle (or any jingle!) on her website.
Melikian is the first vice chair of the Durham Democratic party and describes himself as a “proud product of Durham Public Schools” and the child of two public school educators. He studied operations management and finance at UNC Wilmington before working at Credit Suisse in prime brokerage. He started Durham’s first raw juice delivery business and now runs a custom home building company.
Kitaif appears to be a public health professional who formerly worked in research and consulting. She is a current PTA member, and recently appeared in The Guardian for her work in helping with food donations for immigrant families who were afraid to leave their homes during the recent federal immigration enforcement background. She does not appear to have a campaign website and as of publishing she had not responded to INDY’s request for more information.
District 2
Nadeen Bir is challenging incumbent Bettina Umstead for the district 2 seat.
Bir is the director of finance and human resources at Press On, a media collective. Per INDY’s previous coverage, she is also the co-founder of Mothers for Ceasefire, which organized protests and demonstrations to call for an end to the war in Gaza. She does not appear to have a campaign website and as of publishing had not yet responded to a request for more information.
Umstead is finishing her second full term on the board and is the current chair. She previously served as chair from 2020-2024. Umstead previously worked at education nonprofit Student U and The Equity Collaborative, and was recently appointed to the governor’s advisory council on student safety and wellbeing. As an incumbent, she is in a position to argue that she has fought for the largest-ever budget allocations from the county, bringing in vital dollars despite the ongoing crises. She also has some other incumbent advantages—including $2,000 in the bank and probably a storage space already full of campaign signs.
Rachel Waltz, per LinkedIn, is a program manager currently working with Community Solutions. She previously worked at Orange County Housing and Community Development. She does not appear to have a website and, at the time of publishing, she had not yet responded to a request for more information.
District 3
Peter Crawford, Lauren Sartain, and Gabby Rivero are competing for the seat vacated by Jessica Carda-Auten, who won a 2023 election to fill an unfinished term. Carda-Auten, who currently chairs the policy committee, is not seeking reelection.
Crawford is a co-founder and head of operations at real estate startup Acre. He has three children currently in DPS schools, and has worked as PTA treasurer and served in special operations in the army. “We will get to good schools via disagreement, discussion, compromise, accountability—these are the hallmarks of a functioning local polity,” he wrote in an INDY op-ed regarding recent DPS dysfunction. He has also shown up at board meetings to advocate for higher standards for DPS.
Sartain is a professor of K-12 education policy at UNC Chapel Hill. She is also an E.K. Powe parent and the former PTA president of that school. Last year, Sartain became a public-comment and email regular, frequently arguing for a zero-based budgeting approach. In her past work in Chicago, she studied Chicago Public Schools and argues that DPS should be learning from the successes and mistakes of other districts
Gabby Rivero is the founder of a therapeutic dance company. She currently serves on the city’s recreation advisory committee. She does not appear to have a campaign website and at the time of publishing she had not yet responded to a request from INDY for more information.
District 4
Xavier Cason, Kristy Moore, and Jerome Leathers are vying for the seat held by outgoing four-termer Natalie Beyer. From the dais, Beyer has rarely minced her words when it comes to blaming the state for its unfriendly treatment of public schools. Especially in the second Trump administration, Beyer has taken a more cautious approach to policy compared to some of her more activist peers, which did not win her any friends in the DAE—members at one point chanted her name at a rally while calling for her to flip her vote.
Cason is a former school board member who served one term from 2016 to 2020, and left the board shortly after winning a second term to oversee wellness support initiatives for students at the nonprofit Durham Public Schools Foundation. He has worked in education for four decades, starting as a music teacher in Whiteville before working in DPS since 1997. He also has board experience for the Durham homeless service advisory committee and the Durham Pre-K advisory board, among others. He does not appear to have a website.
Beyer, who was on the board during Cason’s term, “enthusiastically” endorsed Cason as a brilliant, reflective thinker, who cared deeply for students” in a message to INDY.
Leathers is a former principal at Southern High School of Environment and Sustainability and Jordan High School. As of publishing, Leathers did not appear to have a campaign website and did not respond to INDY’s requests for more information.
Moore is a former DPS teacher, former DAE president, and former vice president of the North Carolina Association of Educators. She also worked in Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools as staffing coordinator. She currently serves as the program manager of national programs at the Hunt Institute where she plans large-scale events and builds partnerships. She was appointed to the state’s DRIVE task force to help increase teacher diversity in North Carolina public schools. She does not appear to have a website.
Early voting starts on February 12 and ends with Election Day on March 3.
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