A Democrat's Fight to Win Countywide Office? It's Nothing Compared to Cancer, Cooper says
Democratic School Board candidate Paul Cooper's stances put him in line with the current, majority-Republican Board on the biggest issues it faces: school funding and planned renovations.
BREVARD — Paul Cooper, a little-known Democrat running for the Transylvania County School Board, knows about longshots.
“I’m a 14-year pancreatic cancer survivor,” said Cooper, 72, referring to one of the deadliest forms of the disease.
Democratic affiliation, likewise, may not be the grim political condition in School Board races that it is in other countywide elections.
Cooper’s fellow Democratic candidate Marty Griffin, for example, beat one Republican in 2018 and thinks voters this year will care less about his party than his work as a longtime teacher, coach and athletic director.
Then there’s the current majority-Republican Board, which tends to be defined less by traditional party values such as fiscal conservatism than by its fierce, ongoing battle with the majority-Republican County Commission over school funding.
And Cooper fits right in with most of the current members on the biggest challenge they face — moving ahead with plans for the voter-approved, $68-million renovation of Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle schools. Also, like most Board members, he blames chronic underfunding from the Commission for the accumulation of an estimated $35 million in district capital needs that are not part of the bond project.
He says the district should stick with the current policy that forbids even trained and permitted teachers to have access to firearms at schools, which Republican candidates Chris Wiener and Tanya Dalton favor. He thinks teachers — chronically underpaid teachers, he believes — have enough to worry about without being monitored by parents in the classroom, as Wiener advocates.
And the debate animating school board races locally and nationally — the threat of teachers pushing a liberal agenda — is actually a nonissue, Cooper said.
“I haven’t seen any evidence of that,” he said. “The idea that teachers get into the profession with the idea of indoctrinating students is just not accurate.”
All in on the Bond Project
Having lived as a retiree in Transylvania for 14 years, Cooper doesn’t have Griffin’s lifelong community connections, but thinks his job experiences could be equally valuable to the Board.
Shortly after attending (but not graduating from ) Louisiana State and Memphis State universities, he taught developmentally disabled elementary school students in Arkansas, where he also served as a residential counselor in a home for troubled teenagers.
Later, he worked as a financial advisor for companies including what is now Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co in Atlanta and as a partner in a regional software firm.
“All of these (jobs) allow me to bring a different perspective to the” Board, he wrote.
Echoing most current Board members, he blames soaring construction costs that forced the cuts to the renovation plan on the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. And most of the four-year delay in starting the work — delays that left the project vulnerable to these impacts — are the fault of the County Commission, which controls local school funding, he said.
The plans have changed so much, his Republican opponents say, local leaders should go back to the public to ensure it supports the altered proposal. And, if that support is lacking, the Board should find better ways to spend the tax proceeds the Commission has been setting aside to pay for the bonds, Dalton said.
“I believe we need to restructure the plans so we get the most benefit for our students with the available monies allotted,” she said.
But the people have already made their wishes known, Cooper said, pointing out that nearly 60 percent of voters favored the bond issue in a 2018 referendum. Backing away from upgrades now would allow the project they approved to “die on the vine,” he said.
Because of still-rising costs, any delays would ultimately mean less completed work, he said. That, in turn, means the Board should push for the project to be completed as soon as possible.
“There seems to be no other option,” he wrote.
There might, however, be other options when it comes to funding the estimated $35 million in unmet capital needs not covered by the bonds, and Transylvania County Schools should do more to look at them.
“I believe it is incumbent upon the Board to start aggressively and creatively looking for other revenue sources, especially ones that do not have to go through our Commission for approval,” he wrote.
Though he didn’t provide a detailed list of potential funding sources, he said he would be open to pursuing the kind of large private donations for school projects that long supported the formerly community-owned Transylvania Regional Hospital.
“We must start thinking outside the box,” he said.
The Liberal Agenda of Teachers — Or Not
At a gathering last month, a conservative education group that backs Wiener and Dalton, Moms for Liberty of Transylvania County, showed a movie depicting a national public education system dominated by Communist-influenced, unionized teachers who encourage students to explore gender fluidity and who promote ideas, such as critical race theory (CRT), that divide black and white students.
Even one of the group’s leaders, Jami Reese, said she’s seen little evidence that such trends have made their way to Transylvania.
Cooper sees none.
For one thing — though Reese said the North Carolina Teachers Association has taken an increasingly political role — there are no teacher’s unions in the county or in North Carolina, where collective bargaining by public employees is banned by state law, Cooper pointed out.
He’s not sure what critical race theory is, and is not sure many other people are either. “If you put 20 different people in a room, you’ll get 20 different definitions of critical race theory,” he said.
It is not mentioned in the state Department of Public Instruction’s American History curriculum, which local teachers are required to follow, and, unlike Wiener, Cooper doesn’t think teachers are inclined to insert liberal theory into lessons on other subjects.
“CRT is not being taught in our schools,” he said. “What is being taught is history. And racial history and critical race theory are two different things.”
Supporting Teachers
His stance on other individual issues follow a larger guiding belief that the Board needs to support teachers.
His Republican opponents say the district is already adequately funded, and a recent report from the Public School Forum of North Carolina shows that the district ranks fourth in the state in local per-student funding and that its supplement for teachers is among the highest in Western North Carolina.
Wiener’s main issue, he said, is ensuring that the district produces top-level educational results in line with this top-tier funding level.
That needs greater context, Cooper said, considering the state as a whole ranks near the bottom in per-student funding nationally. He said it is 41st; the non-profit Education Data Initiative puts North Carolina at 45th among the fifty states. And Cooper said he routinely hears about teachers paying for supplies out of their modest incomes and working long hours outside of class.
“Are we getting bang for the buck?” he asked rhetorically. “No, but mostly because we aren’t getting enough buck.”
Another of Wiener’s priorities: Parents should be able to sit in on their children’s classes as long as they have permission from the school and act only as observers.
District teachers and administrators pointed to avenues already available for parents to monitor subject matter such as accessing lessons and assignments on their children’s Google Classroom account, or emailing or calling teachers who are instructed by the district to be accessible to parents.
More access would not only interfere with instruction, Cooper said; it’s not needed.
“I think the idea that teachers and administrators are wanting to exclude parents from the process is just a very unfounded notion,” he said.
Also unnecessary, or worse, is allowing guns in schools. Transylvania County Schools has recently beefed up its ranks of school resource officers. More guns in school — even if teachers receive additional firearm training and lock up their weapons during class — will make schools more, not less, dangerous, Cooper said.
“I am against training and arming our teachers and, I believe, so are most teachers,” he said. “Guns in the classroom, parents in the classroom, worrying about teaching history and gender concerns are all additional burdens that teachers shouldn’t have to bear.”
The Candidate:
Paul Cooper, 72
Online: Facebook page
Education: attended Louisiana State and Memphis State universities (no degree)
Career: special education teacher, youth home counselor, financial advisor
Public Service: Member, Rotary Club of Pisgah Forest, docent at Southern Highlands Reserve in Lake Toxaway.
Personal: Married, two adult children
Community Connection: Fourteen-year resident of Transylvania County
The Job:
School Board members are elected in partisan races, serve four-year terms and receive an annual salary of $2,400.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that all Transylvania County Commissioners are Republicans. Commissioner David Guice is registered as unaffiliated.
Thank you for the excellent article , Dan . Paul Cooper sounds like a candidate for School Board who would work hard to support our teachers and assure the best education for our children .