The candidates’ responses are presented without edits (except for formatting).
Below are the responses from Republican candidate David Perry.
The legislature has recently moved to fund vouchers for private schools, which provide public money for private schools. Do you support this voucher system?
I believe this question is irrelevant to our local school board race. This is a statewide issue, and the New Hanover County Board of Education will not get to vote on eliminating or revising this voucher system. In theory, I support the Swedish model where the money follows the child, but I would like to see more academic accountability for schools that benefit from these dollars.
I realize that people have strong opinions on both sides of this issue. Anytime the General Assembly spends our tax dollars on something we think is wasteful then we get upset. These funds could have been allocated to our public schools. I personally believe the General Assembly is wasting a lot more of the taxpayers’ dollars on corporate welfare. Every year we spend billions to line the pockets of rich CEOs and pretend to create jobs. This just invites political corruption and takes away funds that could have been used for public education, or (God forbid) returned to the taxpayers. However, the fact is that I am not running for the General Assembly. I am not going to get a vote to change this. Members of our school board need to concentrate on issues that we are going to have the power to do something about.
How would you support the district’s diverse population, including minority, LGBTQ, and multi-language families?
My Christian faith informs my position on diversity. I believe that God has created every child as a unique and equal individual, and in his image. Therefore, true diversity is not achieved by lumping children together into artificially created identity groups, but by recognizing the diversity of the individual. As many corporations have found out, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs based on identity grouping, divide people, and create less diversity.
I will support efforts to respect the equal rights of each individual student and their parents. I will ensure that each child has an equal opportunity to succeed and given whatever supports they need to become the well-informed critical thinkers of tomorrow.
Do you believe teachers and staff are indoctrinating students with partisan ideologies? If so, are there any that currently concern you?
Although I’m unsure of the full extent of the problem, it is obvious that this type of indoctrination is occurring in our schools and must be eliminated. While not blatantly partisan (Republican vs Democrat), left-leaning ideologies like DEI, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Social Emotional Learning (SEL), and gender identity have indeed entered our classrooms. I think school administrators are mostly to blame for this and that most teachers just want to get back to being teachers, and not amateur social justice warriors, psychotherapists, and social workers.
While all these indoctrination efforts are bad and need to be eliminated, my biggest concern is over the gender identity ideology being taught to our very youngest and most impressionable students. Far too often K-3 students are being exposed to school library books and curriculum that teaches that gender is a spectrum and/or a choice. For the 99.99% of us who do not have a very rare genetic intersex condition, this is simply a lie. While Gender Normative Behavior is a social construct, Gender itself is biological and binary. Childhood gender dysphoria is a psychological condition that will usually resolve itself once the child completes puberty (See Steensma and follow-up studies). Therefore, efforts to transition the child to another gender (whether medical or psychological) is a form of child abuse. Our school board doesn’t have the authority to control what happens at a student’s home, but our school district must not be complicit in the long-term damage that gender transitioning wreaks on children.
Finally, some people will deny that gender identity indoctrination is occurring in our schools. They will claim they are simply teaching tolerance. But the numbers bely this assertion. In the last decade the rate of “trans kids” in the United States has gone up a whopping 1000%!
Do you support the banning of books in libraries or classrooms? If so, are there any that currently concern you?
I am a firm believer in the 1st Amendment and stand adamantly opposed to censorship. However, parents also have the right to supervise what books their children are exposed to. In order to resolve this conflict of rights, I believe it would be helpful to break up the question a bit.
I believe a public library should have no restrictions on the books and materials present in it. If parents have a problem with the materials their children are reading at the public library, then they should avail themselves of the opportunity to accompany their child to the library and supervise what they are reading. However, parents don’t have an opportunity to supervise what their kids are reading at a school library. While it might be possible to devise a system where parents could restrict what titles their children check out at the school library, there doesn’t appear to be a practical method for restricting what books their child decides to read at the library. Therefore, I believe its important to ensure that he selection of books at the school library is overwhelmingly considered age appropriate by the vast majority of the community. If parents want their child to read more mature materials, then they should avail themselves of the opportunity to send their child to the public library.
Finally, we need to consider the question of what books are used in our curriculum. I believe its important for students to be exposed to a variety of viewpoints from books that are age appropriate. Students should be taught the strengths and weaknesses of each viewpoint, as they learn how to formulate their own viewpoints. Being taught one viewpoint that is presented as “fact” amounts to indoctrination. Finally, parents need to receive notifications of all topic and books used in their children’s classes and be able to opt their child out of reading any material they object to.
How do you plan to support the district’s low-performing schools? Do you have broader concerns about or plans to address academic achievement?
I believe that our district’s schools are even more low-performing than what the public is led to believe. Academic standards are being lowered in an attempt to cover up how broken our schools really are. Way too many students are simply being given passing grades and moved up to the next grade level, even when its obvious that they are not anywhere near grade-level proficient in reading, math, and the other core subjects. Instead of demanding excellence, we seemingly can’t even demand proficiency.
As I mentioned before, we need to get back to focusing on providing a high-quality education and stop diverting our attention from our primary mission. This means hiring and retaining more quality teachers and lowering class sizes. This means our school administration needs to stop dictating curriculum materials and methodologies that our teachers have said time and time again are not working. This means we need to stop the emphasis on vocational training when the student needs to learn core subjects. Finally, we need a uniform discipline policy that respects the rights of students, but also removes continually disruptive students who are impeding the learning of others. A robust In-School-Suspension program is needed.
When and how would you like to start reviewing the district’s budget? What are your priorities in terms of positions, curriculum, and/or programs?
I believe our current school board only has a very high-level understanding of how the district is spending the money allotted to it. The devil is in the details. Once elected, I would like to have an intense audit of the budget begin immediately, either by contacting the State Auditor or hiring a private firm to perform that audit. Once we do, I firmly believe we will find that vast sums of money are being spent on “nice to haves” and on unnecessary “pet projects.”
Hiring and retaining more quality teachers is my #1 budgetary priority. They are the lifeblood of our schools. In addition to hiring more teachers, I would like to increase their salaries, and work with the New Hanover County Endowment Fund to set up a fair performance-based bonus system. Just behind teachers, is dealing with needed facilities repairs (especially New Hanover High School), and increased funding for security. If an expense doesn’t involve teachers, facilities, or security, then it should be a candidate for the “chopping block.”
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