School Board Candidate Marty Griffin Promises Stability amidst Calls for Change
Griffin, a long-time employee of the district and the only incumbent in the race for Transylvania County School Board, says he will run on his record of fighting for school funding and safety.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a planned series of profiles of Transylvania County School Board and County Commission candidates.
BREVARD — In a year when School Board elections have emerged as national battlegrounds over cultural and political change, Marty Griffin pledges to mostly do what he’s done for decades.
Griffin, 70, , the only incumbent and one of two Democrats in the four-way race for two open seats on the Transylvania County School Board, worked as a teacher, coach or athletic director at Transylvania County Schools for 31 years. During that time and during his two terms as a Board member he’s adhered to the same basic approach.
“I stand on my record and my record deals with safety, with feeding kids and educating them,” said Griffin, one of two Democrats in the race, “and if you do those things everything will work out.”
Unlike his Republican opponents and the local chapter of a national education advocacy group, Moms for Liberty of Transylvania County, he doesn’t worry that teachers are trying to spread ideology into the classroom.
During the heated discussions at the start of last school year, he favored mask mandates, which he saw as necessary to protect the health of teachers and students. He sees education as he has always seen it, as an essential public function that needs to be adequately funded by the state and the county.
And the main reason he’s running for a third term, which he never expected to do, is to see the completion of the project that has dominated discussion during his time on the Board — the voter-approved $68-million renovation of Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle schools.
“I wasn’t taught by my parents, my teachers or my coaches to quit,” he said. “I want to finish the job.”
Curriculum
National publications have reported on a Republican push for School Board races — long the “sleepy backwaters of local government,” according to the New York Times — to serve as vehicles for boosting voter turnout and recruiting conservative political candidates.
Liberal groups have responded with outrage over real or imagined threats to ban books. And though the local chapter of Moms for Liberty and the two Republican candidates all say that is not their goal, they express concern over potential liberal indoctrination, including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).
Griffin's response matches that of all the educators in the district interviewed: Instructional standards in North Carolina are set by the state rather than by counties or individual teachers, and do not include CTR.
There is no mention of that term, for example, in the state Department of Public Instruction’s curriculum for American History 1 or American History 2, which cover the decades from the French and Indian War to the most recent presidential election.
All those lessons will be concentrated into a one-semester class under a new schedule adopted for this school year, said longtime Brevard High history teacher John Hogan. So, he said, even if teachers were inclined to inculcate students on the continuing social impacts of racism through a range of American institutions, they wouldn’t have the time.
Besides, he said, such instruction is nuanced and complicated and better suited for university graduate students than high schoolers.
“It’s a bit esoteric,” Hogan said of CRT.
New teachers are also instructed to avoid bringing their personal political views into the classroom, said Missy Ellenberger, the district’s director of high school curriculum, student services and safe schools.
“That’s a big piece of what (Assistant Superintendent Brian) Weaver does at our new-educator orientation,” she said.
Does it happen anyway? Maybe, Griffin said.
“Sometimes in classrooms your personal viewpoints may come out. I don’t deny that,” he said.
But that does not mean teachers should avoid teaching the hard lessons of topics such as slavery and the Civil Rights Movement.
“We must teach U.S. history and we must teach the truth,” he said.
The Bond
The sharpest divide between Griffin and his Republican opponents, Tanya Dalton and Chris Wiener, emerges in their plans for the school-renovation project.
A 2019 interlocal agreement gave the School Board the power to set the plans for the renovation of the Brevard and Rosman campuses. But last year it learned that Covid-19-fueled construction cost increases had left it $18 million short of funds needed to complete the originally slated upgrades, and in January the Board approved a dramatically scaled-back plan.
The County Commission, which must fund the project, reluctantly agreed months later to approve contracts needed to move forward with this work. In August, the Board voted to do so, even as the project’s architect said that continuing cost increases will require more, hopefully minor, cuts to the project.
All the changes are significant enough, both Wiener and Dalton said, that at the very least current plans should go back to the public for assurance that people still want to proceed.
“Are the School Board and the County Commission combined, delivering on what the citizens said ‘yes’ to?” Wiener asked.
Griffin said the public was fully informed of the work starting shortly after he was first elected in 2014 and, in the face of still-rising building costs, he stands with a majority of Board members who say further delays will only lead to further cuts.
“We spent four years preparing the community” before the 2018 referendum on the bond issue, which passed by nearly a 20 percent margin, he said.
“The members of the community knew what they were voting on. They saw the plans. It passed 60 to 40. And now we’ve gone four years without even a hint of passing the bond,” he said.
The backlog of capital needs across the district — set at $35 million in a letter the Board sent to the Commission in June — is also a result of the Commission’s longstanding failure to pay for needed repairs, he said.
The most recent example of this trend, Griffin said, was the Commission’s decision last week to table a Board plan to pay for roof repairs at Rosman High and Middle schools.
Several commissioners have said the county has not received adequate documentation required for this and other capital work. The Commission also agreed to include discussion of the roof fixes at a capital needs workshop scheduled for later this month.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Griffin said of the Commission’s decision to table the plan. “I knew that would happen and I cannot figure out why it happened. All (the commissioners) want to complain about why aren’t we fixing the roofs. Well, it takes money to fix the roofs.”
Both Wiener and Dalton say the numbers tell a different story. Transylvania County ranked fourth in local per-student funding according to a recent report from the nonprofit Public School Forum of North Carolina. Wiener’s main issue, he said, is ensuring that performance of schools in the county — generally above average but not excellent — match its elite funding level.
Griffin echoed the message of Schools Superintendent Jeff McDaris, who in an earlier interview attributed the high per-student spending partly to the wide range of extra-curricular activities the district offers students.
“Ask Chris which programs he wants to cut,” Griffin said, referring to Wiener.
One of the frequently mentioned ideas for cutting expenses, consolidating the high schools, would mean millions in added costs, he said. And some of the high per-student expenditures can be chalked up to accounting practices.
For example, Griffin said, school resource officers, who are sworn sheriff’s deputies, are calculated as part of the Schools’ budget in Transylvania, which is not the case in some other counties.
Guns
These officers, stationed at each school, are excellent at their jobs, Griffin said, and ensure safety without the need, as other candidates have suggested, for allowing teachers with concealed carry permits and additional training to bring weapons on campus.
“Things that you see happening across the country wouldn’t happen in Transylvania,” Griffin said. Nobody can guarantee the county will never see a school shooting, but unlike during the May rampage in Texas, he added, “nobody would be standing around for an hour and a half.”
One of his daughters teaches math at Brevard Middle School, he said, while another serves as principal of Pisgah Forest Elementary School. That gives him a personal stake in the safety of educators, he said, and their pay.
The Forum report also found Transylvania’s average local supplement for teacher’s wages is the second highest in Western North Carolina after Buncombe County.
Griffiin pointed out that that report was based on old information — from the 2019-20 school year, according to the report. Henderson County now pays slightly more (a 8.75 percent supplement for starting teachers, compared to 8.5 percent in Transylvania, according to the two districts’ websites) and has successfully lured several teachers away from Transylvania, Griffin said.
And regardless of whether the state or county is to blame for the inadequate pay of teachers, he said, there’s no doubt it’s a reality.
During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, members of the public rushed to thank teachers for their continued work.
“It’s easy to say thank you, thank you 100 times, but it’s better to put your money where your mouth is and pay those teachers,” he said.
“You cannot put gas in your car, put food on the table and go to the doctor with a thank you.”
The Candidate:
Marty Griffin, 70
Website: facebook page pending
Education: in 1974 received a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a minor in history and physical education, Mars Hill University (then Mars Hill College)
Career: Teacher, coach and athletic director at Transylvania County Schools
Public Service: lay leader of St. Timothy’s United Methodist Church, board member of Transylvania Heritage Museum
Personal: Married, two adult children
Brevard Connection: Resident for 69 years
The Job:
School Board members are elected in partisan races, serve four-year terms and receive an annual salary of $2,400.
Just another woke DemokRAT lib obscuring his agenda. Save our schools and defeat him and C R T!
Marty Griffin is not only a wise, experienced public school teacher and principal and a seasoned voice of reason and honesty on the school board. He's also a kind, intelligent, and excellent person.