Natalie, you've long been an outspoken proponent of public schools. You’ve served on the public Durham Public Schools’ Board of Education for more than a decade. Thinking back, how have you seen public education in Durham become more inclusive of early childhood education over time? 

I think the Whitted School was a fundamental turning point in Durham Public Schools and our thinking about early childhood education. For one, it put a marker in the ground about how important it is. But it [also] helped us in our planning with our operations staff to say that, fundamentally, we need early childhood classrooms in every elementary school in Durham. Our board had been saying that for years, and it took our planning staff a little time to catch up. We're still building that. 

This most recent bond will be supporting six elementary schools with expansions so that we have at least two, sometimes three, pre-k early childhood classrooms in every elementary school. That's our goal, and that's the way that we're building new schools. That’s already in place at Lyons Farm and will be in place at Murray-Massenburg. That's a standard in Durham now. 

That's also true for students with exceptional needs. Classrooms for EC students will be in every school in Durham, and we are working on the Growing Together plan to have pre-k and EC services regionalized so that families will have access close to their home and students have less time on transportation. It'll be much more community focused and family friendly. And student friendly, which is the goal. 

It's also a goal that when students enroll in Durham Public Schools as 4-year-olds, and eventually as 3-year-olds, that they will be part of their community school and hopefully will stay. So that model will be that your school is your school from when you're four until you graduate from fifth grade. So, you know the adults in that school, you know the library, you know the cafeteria, you know how things run, and there's less transition. 

I think the pieces that we're needing to work on are the wrap-care pieces - before school, after school, intercession breaks - so that we can truly take care of children while families are working. Those are system changes that we're still in process on. The staffing piece is not well understood, especially working with young children after a pandemic. A lot and people are really reevaluating their choices.

Those are certainly important topics for families in Durham. What do you feel is the importance of parent engagement in early childhood education in Durham, and how is the school district helping to create opportunities for parents to be involved? 

Parents are partners in education. We're still struggling post-COVID to have those conversations be in person as much as possible. I think we got over reliant on virtual meetings, which is great as a substitute but it's not the same as a face-to-face conversation where people can be at a table and hear each other and have a facilitator. Those are the ways we do conversations in Durham. 

We want and need to hear from families as we build and develop programs to make sure we're building what families need. Wrap care comes into that but also scheduling and timing and making sure that we're not creating something that doesn't meet community needs. I would say that we still have work to do in continuing and building those conversations. 

This comes with the notion of language justice and making sure we have interpretation in those conversations, that we're reaching into communities like the DHA housing communities and going there to talk with families. Over 35% of our school population now in Durham is Latino. It’s making sure that we have bilingual staff, not just for Spanish-speaking families, but for all the immigrant families in Durham that we support and love. Language justice is needed for families to be fully engaged. 

So, it’s meeting families where they are in more than one way. You have also mentioned how the pandemic has changed things, at least in terms of communication. How else has the pandemic affected progress with early childhood education planning? 

I've served on the board since 2010, so 13 years in this role. And I was so enthusiastic when the city, the county, and the school board signed the joint resolution committing to universal pre-k in Durham in 2015. I thought the task force that came together was extraordinary. They brought an equity lens to the work. They were deeply rooted in the Durham community, and we had an era where it felt like we were making some significant, slow, steady progress and reaching and serving more children. Then out of the blue, COVID hit every institution, every system, and disrupted everything. COVID brought to light so many systemic inequities across the board throughout our community. There were some great efforts during COVID to try to work on systems change.

Early childhood education still needs champions at every level within Durham to shout from the rooftops about it being the best community investment that we can make. I look forward to continuing in every space that I'm in to find allies and advocates so that we can join together in this chorus of champions for early childhood education.

I hear the passion in your voice when you speak about this. You say that early childhood is one of the best community investments that we can make. Can you say a little bit more about that? 

Sometimes in Durham, we think we need to do a study; we need to do more research; we need to see if we're getting evidence-based in our practices. That's just not true for early childhood education. Study after study after study from researchers indicate that every dollar invested in early childhood pays off between $7 and $11 down the road in other systemic areas that you don't have to pay for, whether it's the justice system, health care. The investment is profound and deep. It makes so much sense for communities. It's not a partisan issue. It is an investment in young people and families. 

That’s why it was unanimous in Durham that there wasn't a need to study this further. There was a need to do this deeper and invest in our children. Fundamentally, the state should be investing in these children, but in Durham, we're not waiting on the state to do what's right by children. We're trying to go ahead and build that support for our children locally. Eventually the state will see that the investment pays off. I fundamentally believe that we will get to universal early childhood education support statewide in North Carolina, but we're coming at it in a different way through local support. 

Durham does seem to be helping to lead the charge in that direction. 

And there has been some great work in Buncombe. There’s been some great work in Forsyth. We want to highlight other communities that are seeing the same things. But it's because the research is clear. There’s been decades and decades of research. It's clear. 

You’ve talked some about the school district's role in leading efforts to include early childhood education and described some of those efforts. What else should be involved in Durham Public Schools’ commitment to expanding preschool in Durham? 

One thing that I don't think I've touched on that I think is important is that [DPS is] probably the third or second largest employer in Durham. The way that we hire and treat our employees we believe is critical to justice work. We brought our custodians back in-house, and they all have state benefits, which are strong health care benefits and retirement benefits. It goes the same way in how we pay our teachers and our instructional assistants and make sure that we are using local funds to keep up with the labor market, because the labor market has shifted dramatically after the pandemic. 

The state is not keeping up. The state raised state employee pay minimums to $15 an hour about five years ago, but they excluded school employees and community college employees. So we worked with county commissioners to make sure that we brought everyone to $15 an hour. That took about five years of back and forth with the county, and we're there now, but the market has shifted well beyond that. The city and the county and Duke are now at $17 an hour. Our goal is to make sure we get all of our folks above $17 an hour. 

These are struggles that we're having as we're working to staff programming throughout the district. It’s frankly what keeps me awake at night. It’s not just bus driver vacancies and teacher vacancies and EC student teaching positions, it's staffing for the next decade without state funding committed to support these children. So the state upholding the recent Leandro ruling is going to be critical, because there is state funding available. The last time I talked to our delegation, it was over $9 billion in the fund balance at the state level. Those are taxpayer funds. Those are funds that should be actively invested in our communities and our young people, paying our employees better, because that is critical to retaining these amazing childcare workers and early childhood educators and their assistants. They need to be able to afford to live in the community where they work. Affordable housing and the investments that we've made locally are critical, but they're only a start. We have to do more. We've got affordable teacher housing plans that still need to be brought back to the front burner, as well. 

Can you say more about the affordable teacher housing plans? 

Probably in 2016 or so, we had a teacher housing plan with a non-profit named CASA that was going to be over on a site that we own near Lowe’s Grove. It was going to end up having 74 apartments that were at or below market rate, and we were going to make sure that not only were educators included but that our custodians, our cafeteria staff, all of our employees were able to live there. And we have other parcels of land that we hoped to replicate that with across the community. 

The county’s legal team decided that we needed a local bill run in the General Assembly, and Mary Ann Black was our representative and champion through one side of the General Assembly. I think it made it through the House, but then it never made it through the Senate. It got derailed, and the project got stalled. That was part of her legacy that we want to see come to fruition. We're working with city, county, and local nonprofits to see how we can reinvigorate that conversation. At the same time, the city and the county are doing similar projects for the community at large. 

There’s obviously some extraordinary growth that's happening in Durham right now. The market was active in 2016, and it’s likely more active now. Do you see both benefits and challenges in this environment to bringing these plans back into focus? 

It’s going to be the biggest challenge for the folks in Durham that have been here the longest and do entry level work and their families. As a community, it's an opportunity for us to come together and make sure that we hold ourselves as public employers accountable to how we take care of our employees, hold Duke accountable to how Duke takes care of their employees, throughout all the functions that happen there at the university. Same thing at [NC] Central, same thing at everything out in the [Research Triangle] Park, same for the tech companies that are coming. So we work with the Durham Chamber to share our values as a community and how everyone is important in a collaborative work environment. There is no one job that is more important than anyone else's, and everyone deserves to live work, learn, and play in Durham, not be pushed out into surrounding rural areas and commuting in. 

All the systems are connected. We have to invest in transit. And can we keep the bus routes free for families? We have a transit planner in Durham Public Schools now. We've never had that, and we're the only district in the State to have a transit planner. But can we bring more efficiencies to bear, have school bus ride times be shorter? Can we do things better in our community? 

We're looking at environmental sustainability as well. We've made some really significant progress sustainability-wise in Durham. We've got solar panels on the roof at Lyons Farm - our first elementary school to have gotten there. We are looking at electric vehicles. We're in the federal grant for some of that funding for electric school buses, hopefully in the next round. We built outdoor classrooms with a lot of the federal COVID money that will be on every DPS school campus. Outdoor learning is important. Outdoor learning is different than we used to build it. The play structures that we're building [include] more natural elements. I think it’s amazing for young learners. We're looking at the foods we serve children. Can we do scratch cooking and do a lot better for child nutrition, as well? All our systems are connected, but our vision locally has to be aspirational and progressive, because it speaks to the community we're building together and the justice of our community. 

This feels very true of Durham, speaking about equity and justice as both a part of and a product of education. 

Yes. Yes. I think coming to early childhood with an equity lens is so critical. We need to make sure that we remember the intersectionality of all the equity issues, including race, including gender, including LGBTQ status, including language justice and immigrant status. We are all connected, and we have to come with that humble lens. 

Durham County Government and Durham PreK have expressed a strong commitment to equity and placed it at the center of plans to build Durham’s future. What part does early childhood education play in building that equitable future?

It's important for us to think how connected we all are. Every family is working hard for their children to live their future dreams and to achieve their future goals. But we have to acknowledge the privilege that some communities in Durham have and that others still deserve. We have to be honest and transparent about the inequities within systems so that we can build systems that are more just and more reflective of the heart of Durham and the people that we are.

As we enter this new year 2023, if you could flash forward to 2033, how do you imagine the landscape of early childhood as part of public education in Durham could look different, and what do you hope to be most proud of in the fulfillment of that vision? 

My future vision would be that every family that wants a space has the space at a high quality, exceptionally staffed, joyful, inclusive, reflective, diverse, fun, early childhood setting, whether that is in Durham Public Schools or within the community at large. That educators reflect the diversity of our community. That the wrap services are available to meet family needs. That the food is healthy. That children are playing and learning outside and inside. That there are field trips to museums and farms, and children are learning about the environment and about sustainability. That they are taking those lessons about healthy foods that they're eating at school and sharing them with their families. That they are making friends that reflect the diversity of Durham and having playdates on weekends with friends from all over. And the families are building connections, because their children have built relationships in schools. 

It just sounds amazing, right? Let's do that. And let's make sure that it's free to anyone that needs it to be free. And how about let's make sure that North Carolina is investing like this statewide. Because that's how we get to a more just future for all.