Durham School Board member Jackie Wagstaff is stirring things up in the local public school system.
In the midst of a highly publicized power struggle with county school administrators, Wagstaff—along with Minnie Brown, a fellow parent and activist—came to Duke Thursday to voice her side of the story.
Students in Associate Professor of Education Joseph Di Bona’s Contemporary Issues in Education class listened to Wagstaff’s hour-long talk about the controversy and her complaints with the Durham school system.
In the latest chapter of her story in Durham public service, Wagstaff has been banned from returning to James E. Shepard International Baccalaureate Middle Years Magnet School in Durham after an unannounced visit Jan. 14. Wagstaff visited Shepard along with Brown—the parent of a student there—and was asked to leave by Principal Julia Fairley. Brown was arrested and charged with trespassing after refusing to leave, but Wagstaff left school grounds without a citation.
Fairley subsequently banned the women from returning to the campus in the future, citing two Durham school system policies.
The first allows principals to prohibit from campus anyone who “disrupts school operations, is disorderly, damages school property, threatens students or staff or otherwise poses a risk to safe and orderly operations.”
The other says that school board members should relay criticisms and complaints about employees directly to the superintendent for review. A Durham advocacy group called Concerned Black Citizens, of which Wagstaff is a member, has been lobbying to remove Fairley from her role as principal.
Wagstaff said Thursday that she came to the school unannounced so that school officials wouldn’t “roll out the red carpet” to impress a member of the school board. She said that unannounced visits are essential in revitalizing Durham’s struggling schools, which she says she is passionate about fixing.
“If I had been [a product of Durham Public Schools] I wouldn’t be up here talking to you,” she said.
Wagstaff believes that as a school board member, she should be allowed to visit any school to assess its progress. According to The Voice, the Concerned Black Citizens’ newsletter, Brown “declares that these acts of intimidation will not stop her in her determination to support her children in The Durham Public School System.”
Referring to the incident at Shepard, Wagstaff thinks that administrators took policies out of context and used them against her. “The policies are so broad. They interpret them to fit their agenda,” she said.
She also suggested a revision of existing policies. “They need to go through all 7,000 policies and review them,” she said, complaining that there are many “old policies that don’t fit today’s environment.”
She attributes most of Durham public schools’ problems to the 1992 merger of county and city schools, blending what Wagstaff dubbed better funded county schools with struggling city schools. Gerrymandering benefitted the white population, which secured a 4 to 3 majority vote on the seven-member school board, Wagstaff said. “You’d think that the controversy started when Jackie Wagstaff joined the Board,” she said of herself. “It really started when they merged the systems.”
Although Brown did not speak to the class, she has complaints of her own. She filed a civil rights lawsuit against Durham Public Schools because she claims her son was illegally searched at a Durham school in 2003.
Wagstaff also told the class about her “battle of personalities” with Durham Public Schools Superintendent Ann Denlinger. “She and I don’t see eye-to-eye on mainly anything,” she said. She also expressed suspicions of Denlinger purposefully trying to make her look bad in front of her constituency.
Audrey Boykin, a retired principal who spent 40 years working for the Durham Public Schools, spoke candidly on behalf of her colleague Fairley. “Still after all of this, there are only two to three parents that are carrying all of this on,” she said. “[Fairley] wants to focus on educating the students at Shepard and responding to the needs of the parents.”
Kyle Walotsky, a sophomore in Di Bona’s class said that she thought Wagstaff has been portrayed incorrectly by the media.
She enjoyed the speech even though she had doubts beforehand. “I didn’t think I was going to like what she was going to say,” she said.
Looking to the future, Wagstaff said, “Right now there is a powder keg in Durham. I won’t say it’ll get physical, but it’ll get worse.”
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