School Board Candidate Chris Wiener: Extremist or Just "Right of Center?"
Wiener, a Republican candidate for the Transylvania County School Board, seeks to downplay his association with hard-right ideology and emphasize his nuanced conservative approach.
BREVARD — Chris Wiener can come off as a right-wing wild man.
At a historically contentious Transylvania County School Board meeting last August, Wiener, with his signature bushy beard and American flag T-shirt, portrayed mask mandates as a sign of encroaching communism.
His Facebook posts have slammed the teaching of LGBT issues in schools and supported not just gun rights but Kyle Rittenhouse, the assault-rifle-toting teen acquitted of murder in the 2020 killing of two men at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis.
The tattered flag Wiener flies in front of his Brevard home broadcasts his backing of the Three Percenters, labeled a domestic terrorism organization by the Canadian government and defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a sub-ideology or common belief that falls within the larger antigovernment militia movement.”
And at a recent meeting of a conservative education group, Moms for Liberty of Transylvania County, Wiener promised to fight for parents’ access to classrooms, where he said they should watch out for political indoctrination as they would for signs of sexual abuse.
“If you see something, say something,” he said.
When asked about such stances in an interview, he shrugged and said, “I am who I am.”
But that doesn’t mean he can’t be a constructive Board member, he said.
“I’m not an extremist by any means and certainly not a violent militant extremist, as I have been accused of being,” he said, before laying out what he said were more nuanced positions.
Though some Three Percenters advocate violence against the government, he said, he’s not one of them. He brought up a several concerns about how lessons are taught in schools, but said he’s never favored banning books. “I’m a knowledge-is-power guy.”
He listed the limits that should apply to parents in classrooms and for arming teachers, which he also favors.
His position on the school-renovation project slated for funding by a voter-approved bond issue — that it’s in serious need of a rethink — is tempered by an acknowledgment that the job’s problems have been largely outside the Board’s control.
And when citing the high level of local funding for Transylvania County Schools, his point is not that the Board should slash programs, but that it should raise the level of instruction to an equally high mark.
“My focus is going to be addressing this issue, which is the underperformance of our students,” he wrote in an email.
“One Big Package”
Wiener, 52, who earned a bachelor’s degree in history and religious studies from the University of North Carolina Charlotte, said his education and continued reading has prepared him to talk about curriculum.
His varied career, meanwhile, will help him address the district’s funding, construction and technical issues. His seven years in the North Carolina National Guard included time in the combat engineers. He’s worked for Microsoft and a large commercial real estate and retail company based in Dubai. He now serves as a project manager with a home builder based in Asheville.
The soaring cost of the voter-approved renovation of Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle schools can, as current Board members say, be blamed at least partly on market disruptions caused by Covid-19, he said.
“They’re in an impossible spot,” he said of Board members.
And he declined to weigh in on whether the Board or the County Commission is mostly to blame for the four-year delay that exposed the project to these impacts.
Backers of the plan say the renovations at Brevard must include replacing the school’s 63-year-old, dangerously deteriorated auxiliary gym and cafeteria. But Wiener agrees with County Commissioner Larry Chapman, who has argued that the current plans for the school, which also includes a new administrative wing, will do little to improve instruction.
“If we aren’t building new classrooms, we probably need to address that first,” Wiener said.
In any case, the cost increases have forced so many cuts at both campuses that the Board and Commission should make sure the project still has the support of the public.
If it doesn’t, he wrote in an email, “Then I think we need to go back to the drawing board and maybe back to the well.”
Specifically, he suggested county leaders could combine the bond work with the estimated $35 million in additional needed upgrades around the district and ask voters to approve a new bond measure likely to total well over $100 million.
“Lump it all together in one big package and get it done,” he said.
Raising Standards
When a Democratic opponent in the race, Marty Griffin, was told that Wiener had raised the issue of Transylvania’s per-student funding, which is among the highest in the state, Griffin said this money helps fund the broad range of extracurriculars the schools offer.
“Ask Chris which programs he wants to cut,” he said.
Actually none, Wiener said, adding that he recognizes the benefits received by one of his daughters, for example, from Brevard High’s performing arts program.
He does want Transylvania County Schools to look for potential savings and plans to check if administrative costs have grown as fast locally as they have across the country.
But mainly, he thinks the district’s academic performance should match its funding. Both Rosman and Brevard high schools received “B” ratings from the state Department of Public Instruction for the 2018-19 school year. And for several years before the pandemic, the district’s composite proficiency rate — based on career and college-readiness testing — averaged above 50 percent, which was slightly higher than statewide marks.
Testing was disrupted by the pandemic and the state won’t release new school report cards until November, a DPI spokeswoman said last month, but early test results from last school year show that proficiency rate plunged across the state to 34 percent and more dramatically in Transylvania, to 33 percent.
Schools Superintendent Jeff McDaris said the district is aware of the trend and has taken steps to reverse it. “I don’t think any of us would disagree with him making it a priority,” he said.
Wiener acknowledges he does not have a background in education and does not have specific ideas for raising standards here, but suggested the district copy methods of star schools in Atlanta, Chicago and Detroit.
“We can look at how those schools have gone from underperforming environments to being schools people are fighting to get into,” he said. “We really should be working on getting the most bang for the buck.”
Three Percenters
His positions on other issues raise the question: Are Wiener’s politics extreme or, as he says, just “right of center?”
Two men convicted this year in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were tied by prosecutors to the Three Percenters. So was Guy Reffitt, a Texan who received a sentence of more than seven years for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“Some Three Percenters are very militant,” Wiener acknowledged, but he also said it's not an organized group, but an ideology. He supports it as a statement of his adherence to the U.S. Constitution, which he swore an oath to as an enlistee in the military.
The name comes from the disputed claim that only three percent of residents of Americans fought against the British in the Revolutionary War, and Wiener sees, similarly, that a small core of believers drive the causes he backs.
“I can tell you, the three percent are the ones who make them work,” he said.
Seventy-five percent of teachers in the U.S. are against arming teachers in the classroom, according to recent polling — as is Meredith Licht, president of the Transylvania County Association of Educators.
Teachers “need to be armed with adequate classroom instructional supplies; supportive relationships with students, administrators, and guardians; and buildings that are up-to-date, safe (and) healthy,” she wrote in an email. “Educators do not need weapons.”
But polling also shows that more than a fringe of American adults, 45 percent, now believe arming teachers would make schools safer. Wiener and fellow Republican School Board candidate Tanya Dalton favor it with restrictions such as additional training for teachers who have already obtained concealed-carry permits.
Wiener likewise said parents should be allowed into the classroom only with permission from schools and only as observers.
If parents want to keep track of their children’s learning, Transylvania teachers and administrators said, they can read the state-required curriculum, log on to their children’s online classroom portals or just talk to their kids or their kids’ teachers.
Licht said outside observers could have a “chilling effect” on classroom discussion, and the idea that teachers can be trusted with guns but not with actual instruction, “is a notion rife with cognitive dissonance.”
Slippery Slopes
Wiener, whose five children all attend public schools in Transylvania, said he does keep up with their assignments and he doesn’t always like what he sees.
He hasn’t found controversial approaches such as critical race theory in the teaching of history — the state curriculum for which includes no mention of the term — but has found it subtly injected into other lessons.
He knows of a child who recently brought home a math problem “using slave ownership and slave manpower and doing an economic assessment of productivity, which in and of itself is fine. It’s the language and the context,” he said. “I think you can do the same mathematical formula without it being divisive.”
In an English class, he said, a teacher assigned the classic Franz Kafka novella, The Metamorphosis, about a character inexplicably transformed into a cockroach.
That, too, would be acceptable if students were provided enough context, he said. Without it, he said, the book could be used as “a tool to teach identity politics.”
Speaking of which, he said, he knows of a school that has honored students’ requests to be called by names not associated with the gender of their birth.
“That’s a parental decision,” he said.
These examples, he said, don’t add up to the rampant liberal indoctrination conservative groups have asserted takes place in schools elsewhere.
But it is a trend Wiener will keep an eye out for as a parent and, if elected, as a School Board member.
“I’m a firm believer in slippery slopes,” he said.
The Candidate:
Chris Wiener, 52
Online: Facebook page
Education: 1988 Graduate of Brevard High School; bachelor’s degree, history and religious studies, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Career: Seven years, North Carolina National Guard, 10 years at Microsoft followed by stint at Dubai-based Sharaf Group. Currently project manager of Asheville home builder.
Public Service: executive pastor, Brevard Community Church of the Nazarene
Personal: Married, five children in Transylvania County Schools
Community Connection: Resident during high school, returned to Brevard to start a software company in 2014 after a living several years in the Middle East
The Job:
School Board members are elected in partisan races, serve four-year terms and receive an annual salary of $2,400.
As one of my friends indicated Dan is a treasure to Transylvania County. We learn so much from his reporting!
Patty Stark
Love your articles…clear and concise without bias….thank you