Tanya Dalton: For Arming Teachers; against CTR, SEL and Current Renovation Plans

Dalton, a candidate backed by a conservative parents' group, worries about critical race theory and social and emotional learning, and is dead set against the existing plan to upgrade schools.

Republican School Board candidate Tanya Dalton

BREVARD — One Transylvania County School Board member, Kimsey Jackson, already favors rethinking the planned school renovations to be paid for with voter-approved bonds.

Tanya Dalton, if elected, would join him.

“I am currently not in favor of the bond in any form,” she wrote in an emailed response to a NewsBeat questionnaire.

The work at Brevard High School and Rosman Middle and High schools that voters backed in 2018 was scaled back dramatically last year in the face of rising construction costs blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic. Last month, the Board voted to proceed with the project after hearing from its architect that at least some further cuts would be needed.

In light of such events, Dalton wrote, “There needs to be transparency so the public knows that only a portion of what was voted on in 2018 will be able to be completed at this point . . . I believe we need to restructure the plans so we get the most benefit for our students with the available monies allotted.”

Dalton, 53, is one of four candidates running for two open School Board seats. Her skepticism about the bond project puts her in line with the all-Republican County Commission, of which her husband, Jake, is vice chairman.

Tanya Dalton also criticized the Board, not the Commission, for the accumulation of about $35 million in district capital needs not covered by the bonds.

And, along with the other Republican candidate in the race, Chris Wiener, she has the backing of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national organization seeking a greater parental voice in education, and Dalton shares its concerns about the potential influence of critical race theory (CRT) and social and emotional learning (SEL).

She favors allowing teachers with concealed carry permits — and additional training — to bring weapons to school. She staunchly opposed mandatory masking and blamed school lockdowns early in the pandemic for fueling the youth mental health crisis.

The closures isolated students from friends and deprived them of sporting events, extracurricular activities and landmark events such as proms and graduation, she wrote. “And now we wonder why they are struggling.”

Teaching Porn in Transylvania?

Moms for Liberty was founded in Florida in 2021 to fight mandatory masking, according to a story posted on the website of U.S. News and World Report, and has since expanded its concerns to what it sees as a broad trend in public schools to sexualize students and indoctrinate them with liberal ideals.

Jami Reese, the vice-chair and spokeswoman for the local group, Moms for Liberty of Transylvania County, introduced Dalton and Wiener as its favored candidates at a group event on Aug. 16.

The group then showed a film, Whose Children Are They?, depicting a national education system guided by a Communist-influenced teachers’ union and rife with practices such as teaching students pornographic acts and critical race theory (CRT), which, it said, casts white students as oppressors and black children as victims.

“Those are legitimate concerns that I would share,” said Schools Superintendent Jeff McDaris, when told of the film’s content, “but we’re not teaching that.”

The district is bound by state educational standards, he said, and North Carolina’s curriculum for American History 1 and 2 makes no mention of critical race theory. The state Department of Public Education’s vision for social and emotional learning, another target of Moms for Liberty, includes creating “safe, productive, restorative, and enjoyable learning communities.”

That plays out in the classroom as an emphasis on sharing, cooperation, emotional awareness and “being a kind person,” said Missy Ellenberger, the district’s director of high school curriculum, student services and Safe Schools.

Sex education, now called “reproductive and safety education,” is guided by a 2009 state law. Nurses instruct 7th graders about sexually transmitted diseases and eighth graders about contraception. Much of the main class, taught in ninth grade, focuses on abstinence. Parents are informed of the curriculum and, if they object to any of its elements, can ask that their children receive alternative assignments.

Reese, mother of four children who have attended Transylvania County Schools and a self-described “mama bear,” acknowledged she has seen few of the most alarming trends the movie describes in local schools.

“The showing of the movie was to bring awareness of what is happening at a national level,” she said. “It was not intended to show what is happening at Transylvania schools.”

She pushed back on what she said is a common misrepresentation — that the group seeks to ban books, including classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird. “Heavens no,” she said.

Dalton, who alone among the candidates declined to sit for an interview, wrote that she has only attended two of the meetings of the group, “and I’ve never heard them discuss banning anything.”

She advocates teaching even the most unpleasant chapters of American History, “the good, the bad and the ugly,” she wrote. 

But she also wrote that “no child should ever be taught they are a victim or an oppressor,” and “the addition of CRT/SEL to the curriculum is a harmful tool being used to divide our children. It looks great on the surface but if you dig deeper, it’s not so great.”

Roofs and Bathrooms

Dalton’s position on the bond project mirrors the simmering opposition on the Commission, though the most vocal opponents have been commissioners Teresa McCall and Larry Chapman, not Jake Dalton.

Nothing in state law prevents a spouse of a Commissioner from running for School Board, said county Elections Director Jeff Storey, and none of her opponents have raised it as an issue. Dalton said her husband never talks to her about information from closed Commission meetings, and “the same will go for me.”

But, if elected, she and Wiener — who has also called for a reevaluation of the project — would create a Board majority that favors backing away from the current plans.

Paying for other capital needs has also been a long-standing point of contention between the two bodies. Earlier this year, Board Vice Chairman Ron Kiviniemi produced a document showing that the Commission’s funding for such work has been near the minimum allowed by state law for more than 15 years, derived solely (except in one fiscal year) from mandated percentages of local sales taxes.

Schools could have kept up with needed repairs, he argued, if the County had provided the additional $11.6 million the Board had requested since 2005.

“We would have been able to keep the roofs repaired and the bathrooms remodeled,” he said at the time.

But Dalton said that the Board has only recently mobilized to address such issues.

“I’m afraid that a lot of the repairs needed have been ignored with the hopes that the renovations from the bond would take care of them,” she wrote. “Why weren’t these needs addressed as they came up? Why wait until inflation is at record highs to decide that NOW the repairs are urgent?”

She echoed McCall and Chapman on another point, that Transylvania provides the fourth-highest per-student funding for operations among more than 100 districts in the state.

“That shows our students and schools are a top priority to our leaders and our citizens,” she wrote.

School Safety, Student Wellness

A key goal of the renovation project is to create “a reduced number of entry points to increase student and staff safety,” according to the district website, and this planned improvement is one reason veteran Brevard High history teacher John Hogan says Board members should push on with the work.

“I would advocate, rather than teachers having to be concerned about carrying weapons and defending their students, that (county leaders) make some improvements physically to the school to make it safer,” he said.

Schools have also recently received approval to bolster the ranks of its school resource officers (SROs), creating a position for a dedicated supervisor who would also be able to fill in for absent officers.

Dalton says she has a keen interest in school safety as the mother of four adult children and “four beautiful grandbabies.” Two are too young to attend school, she said; one is home schooled and the other attends a Christian school.

Dalton praised the officers as “some of the greatest people in our county.” But one armed staffer in a school is not enough, she said.

She is aware of the heavy burden that teachers already shoulder, she wrote, and any teacher seeking to bring weapons to school should submit to additional training and agree to place guns in a “secure, accessible location.”

 But “I believe that there are many teachers already licensed to carry and that those teachers should be allowed to do so,” she wrote. “You can’t expect a teacher to defend twenty children with a dry erase marker.”

She also expressed deep concern over signs of declining youth mental health, including three suicides of high school students in Transylvania last year.

“The mental health of our students must be a priority,” she said.

Gov. Roy Cooper first ordered the public-school lockdown as part of a larger ban on mass gatherings in March of 2020, to help “protect the health and safety of the residents of North Carolina and slow the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic,” his executive order stated.

But besides isolating students, Dalton argued, such actions and statements placed an unnecessary emotional burden on students.

“We told them they were responsible for all our health and to not obey the 'rules' would kill their grandmas,” she wrote.

She did not raise objections to the school’s actions to address the crisis, including adding counselors, but also cited the need for the school and community outreach effort that has been emphasized by a local group, TC Strong, formed in the wake of the suicides.

“I support school counselors 100 percent,” she wrote. “But we also need to consider the students who won’t visit the counselor . . . We need to find them where they are so they know they aren’t the only ones who are having a hard time.”

The Candidate:

Tanya Dalton, 53

Online: campaign facebook page

Education: 1987 Rosman High School graduate, received cosmetology license from Blue Ridge Community College.

Career: Co-owner, with husband, of two local businesses, 15-year substitute teacher

Public Service: active member North Toxaway Baptist Church, formerly parent teacher organization president at TC Henderson Elementary and Rosman Middle schools

Personal: Married, four adult children, four grandchildren

Community Connection: Lifelong 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.

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com