- On this special edition, we explore the state of public education in North Carolina.

This is State Lines.

- [Narrator] Quality Public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[uplifting music] ♪ - Hello, I'm Kelly McCullen, and welcome to this very special edition of State Lines where we're focusing on public education in North Carolina.

I am a guest here in Guilford County at the Guilford County schools, where we will meet teachers, principals, and the superintendent to discuss the impact of policies and procedures here at the local level.

Of course, we've left COVID-19 behind, but that has resurrected some old challenges that are still being resolved and some new issues have arisen that we'll explore.

But before we can talk to the statewide leaders, we must begin in the classroom where we were invited into the first grade classroom of Shanelle Napoleon.

- I won't say, "Mm-mm."

- Oh.

- [Kelly] Shanelle Napoleon teaches first grade at Greensboro's Washington Montessori School.

She says she sees a lot of herself in each of her students.

- So Ms. Napoleon heard a lot of different ideas about whether Daniel Boone will make it across the Appalachian Mountains.

I still wanna create hope for them.

I still want to create what I needed when I was a kid in them.

So I'm going to always be dedicated to them.

And it's hard, I'm not gonna pretend like it's not, there are a lot of struggles, but as long as I'm staying in it and I'm enduring, I'm teaching them that same skill; to endure when times get hard.

- [Kelly] Everyone complains about the pay.

- Yeah.

- And you started to complain about the benefits.

I mean, that's just the way it goes.

So for someone who's thinking about, "I would like to be an educator," why would you go through with it?

- It's the passion.

It's the love.

I love my kids.

And it's just building hope and having hope for myself.

Like you did speak on the pay, and that is something that we are not too fond of, and we do hope for one day where we can be paid for what we do.

- [Kelly] Washington Montessori leaders say many of their students come from low income families.

Ms. Napoleon knows that, so she literally invests in her students if needs arise.

- I'm gonna buy them pencils if they need pencils.

I'm gonna buy them what they need.

If we're having a party and I need to celebrate my students' growth, I'm going to buy what they need.

So a lot is coming out of my pocket when I'm not getting paid what I feel like I should.

- You're taking cash out of your pocket to help some of these kids with supplies- - Clothes.

- Clothes?

- Yeah, whatever they need.

When there's a need, teachers step up and they feel that need and you have to do what you have to do because they come first.

Whatever you think is perfectly fine.

- It was great to be in Ms. Napoleon's classroom, but now I'm joined by five educators in the Guilford County School.

Leah Carper: North Guilford High teacher, English, 15 years in Guilford County, Teacher of the Year 2022.

Thank you for sharing some insight with this.

Marcus Williams, you teach at Southern Guilford Middle.

Juana Rhili, a 14-year teaching veteran at Guilford Elementary.

Zaynah Brooks, not quite 14 years, but you're getting started in your career over at Wiley Elementary School.

And Jericho Carillo teaches music at Southern Guilford.

Thank you so much; I know it's not easy to come sit on a panel discussion.

We'll start with the extrovert.

Hey, first year feels normal and I'm just a parent on the outside looking in.

Is it normal now?

Are things normal?

- Things are never going to be normal in education ever again since the pandemic.

That's how it feels as educators.

We feel like everything is so different.

So yes, we changed the way that we teach, but this year, even though we're not wearing masks and we're not virtual, something still feels different, and I don't know where to put my finger on it.

- Well, we'll set you up, Marcus, with that question.

What's different for you?

The kids seem to be doing better I think statistics are showing.

We still got some struggles, but we're making some headway.

- Yeah, I'd have to agree that the students are doing much better.

Because of that gap, we lost like, in my opinion, a year and a half worth of work for most students.

So they're definitely doing better, and the test scores are showing that as well.

So I'm sure we can all attest to that for sure.

- Juana, you're in elementary grades and they say the children that had to log in for a couple of years lost a lot.

Not for me to say that, but from your experience, what did you trade off teaching online during the pandemic versus this year having those children back in your classroom under your care?

- Well, having the children back in my classroom this year has been different because without the masks, I'm actually able to hear proper letter sounds and teach them how to correctly shape their mouth when they're learning letter sounds, and that has made a big improvement.

Try teaching letter sounds and reading words over Zoom: with all the delay and the drag in the internet, it's not as efficient as we want it to be.

So we are very happy to be back in the classroom and teaching without masks this year.

- Was it fair for parents to be frustrated with their public school because the Zoom-based learning didn't seem to work as well for many families the way they thought it should work?

- I think it was fair for families to be frustrated.

It was frustrating for us as teachers because we were also having the same issues.

We were planning these wonderful lessons that we had spent hours learning new technology to prepare and sometimes they didn't go as well with the internet lag and those kind types of connection issues.

But I think everyone had a right to be upset during that period, but we survived.

- Zaynah, you started your career at the end of this COVID pandemic, and I would have to ask you with, seeing what was going on in this world back then and you're in college, why did you go through with this and become a teacher?

- Well, I actually was in childcare and they placed me in the room with all the school-aged children that was doing virtual learning.

So imagine everyone trying to get onto their classes on Zoom at the same time.

Many students didn't have headphones.

They were arguing about whose iPad was louder than the other.

So I was able to experience it a little tad bit.

I love being able to step up and help tutor and do many lessons in the classroom because you could tell that a lot of the students were also frustrated and needed a lot of help.

So that kind of inspired me to want to go inside of the school system.

- Honestly, do you think it gets easier from here as long as we don't slide back into a pandemic and require those shutdown policies?

Do you think you've seen about as bad as it can get in terms of trying to help these kids get up on top of their academics?

- It won't be perfect, but it will improve every year; I will say that.

- I will say, Jericho, you teach music and you have to feel some sympathy for physical education teachers and music teachers who taught via Zoom, at least partially part... You're new as well.

Give me your assessment of second year in, first year mask-free, you can play with the musicians in the room and give 'em their lessons.

You're feeling good about 2022, '23 school year?

- Yeah for sure.

So a lot of band programs suffered when it came to the pandemic.

A lot of students found that doing it online wasn't for them, and then it slowly just slid off.

But now that we're finally in the classroom mask-free, we can all get together one band, one sound.

It's been so great.

It's been phenomenal.

We had our last concert just yesterday and the kids absolutely killed it, the community loved it, and we're finally getting back to it.

- Leah, with a 15-year career that you have in the 14 years, do you find that that experience is coming in handy in a post-pandemic world 'cause so many new teachers came on board at a really weird time.

Did they get off to a good start or do teachers need to catch up too?

- Oh, we are constantly trying to catch up, and I'm so proud of the resiliency of our beginning teachers.

They're asking the veteran teachers what to do, and we are honestly saying, "We've never done this before either."

And so they've had to help us and we've had to help them, and together I feel like we've made great things happen for our kids.

But the thing that gives me the most hope is that our teachers want to do what's best for kids at all times, and we will stay up in the middle of the night preparing lessons, et cetera, to do things to help our students be successful.

And I see that in North Carolina classrooms every day.

- Marcus, what job's ahead of you in middle school?

That's just that sweet age where you're trying to figure out who you are as a human being.

And much less, the academics get a lot harder, the testing gets a lot harder.

What are you seeing some challenges that your students are facing?

- I think most of their challenges are just what you said, just figuring out who they are as people, all the while trying to make sure that their grades are good and that their parents are off their backs and the girlfriend issues and the hormones and all these things.

They play a huge part in their education and how well the kids focus as well.

So occasionally, I have to make a couple phone calls home, let 'em know, "Hey, your son or daughter's doing this," because it may affect how they actually do their work.

So I think that plays a huge part.

- How in that elementary grade, third grade is where you need to, I think they really put it to the student to say, "Can you read," but you got K, first, and second.

Are children still behind?

Have teachers like yourself been able to make up more than a year's loss in one year?

- I think that you will find that a lot of students are still behind.

But with the intensive interventions that we have in place and learning new intensive programs to use in the classroom to help our students get to where they need to be have really helped students be successful with reading.

- Zaynah, in your dealings with parents, the ones that engage with you, are you finding that they're being positive or are they holding you fully accountable and expecting you to double down on what they might perceive as a slower time or a learning loss or a lost opportunity?

- I feel like parents are frustrated as well, and the number one topic would probably be math.

And when they see the homework that comes home with the new math strategies, they are just as confused as the students sometimes.

So I can see where that frustration might come in.

I do get some parental support; I think it just starts with communication.

And when we have open houses and math curriculum nights, they're able to come in, see how we teach it, ask questions, and they're able to get involved.

So I think the more that parents get involved, the more easier the feeling might become.

- Jerico in the liberal arts, you have to practice your instruments; it takes a lot of work at home and on the downtime.

How important are parents right now coming out of the pandemic to set the children up for a well-rounded education at K through 12?

- Yeah, it's super important to have parents behind our back, and especially where we are.

We have all these late night rehearsals going for either concert band, jazz band, marching band, pep band, all these things.

We're constantly needing practice and constantly needing parent support.

And thankfully, a lot of the parents have been really great about bringing this back and making sure it's better than ever.

- Leah, I wanna shift a little bit.

We're not gonna get political here, but there's a lot of articles and news reports and things coming out recently and the Republicans and Democrats going at it.

How does that affect you coming home from work every night, you turn on the news and they're talking about education after the experience you've had in the classroom, which is certainly different than a partisan political environment, I would imagine.

- It is very hard as a teacher to come home and to turn on the news and to see that people are deciding, "Hey, let's defund public education today."

Let's take away jobs when we need more people in these buildings.

We have so many things going on in our schools; we need more supports.

Our students are our biggest investment and education is the largest budget item.

And we have legislators who think that it's okay to defund education or to take money away from it.

Every school needs more mental health leaders.

Every school needs more resources when it comes to students who have AIG needs, who have special needs.

We need more safety supports in our schools.

And to hear that there are people who want to take the funding away from schools and not pour more into public schools, it is very difficult on teachers' mental health as well as our wellbeing.

- Well, there'll be a lot of people in Raleigh who disagree with that opinion.

They say that they are funding maybe differently than what you would like.

You say you have entree, you get to meet with the state board as Teacher of the Year.

Do you put it in those straight terms like that, because you sound like a politician if you do that.

- I speak to politicians all the time about it.

They'll call me on the phone and say, "Hey, Teacher of the Year, what do you think about this?"

and I'm very honest, and the way that I talk to them is I tell them a story.

I have a friend named Jericho.

He's using instruments that are very old in his classroom.

It's very difficult to teach using very old instruments.

And I tell them the stories of students who go to school every day for fear that they are physically unsafe or students who have mental health needs that need to be taken care of.

And when I talk to them about that, honestly, many of them say, "Yes, I agree with you.

"It just feels so big."

A lot of them have told me that: the issues feel so big that they don't know where to start.

- Are any of you in this career for better or worse, or if it gets more worse or it should get better, but is there a point when some of you would have an exit strategy and go do something else with your degree?

- For me, I'm here for the long run.

I always tell my students my whole purpose of being in education is to give back what was given to me.

I had an educator that I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for them, and so I want to give my students that same opportunity.

And just like Leah said, beginning teachers, we need all the support.

When I was calling over the summer when I very first got this job, they were like, "Oh, it's a revolving door over there," for my position because there was no support.

And it's really important that we support these beginning teachers.

- Zaynah, what is your take as you get your career started?

Are you still energetic about teaching?

Do you see some things that go, "Hey, this is a job after all."

- It is more difficult than I thought, but not enough to break me down.

I have noticed that mental health has been talked about way more, and especially when you go on social media like TikTok, a lot of teachers are quitting like some after their first year.

And it can become discouraging because I do have thoughts where it's like, "Okay, what is making everybody quit?"

But you get a little sense of it when you see that sometimes you could teach your heart out, but because there might still be some learning gaps, they just might not be able to understand it at the pace that you want.

But I will say it's not enough for me to just quit.

- Ms. Rhili, what do you say to the veteran teachers out there?

You're into a career now.

It's not easy to switch gears.

The younger teachers can certainly walk out.

Some are at this point.

Is it fair to the students no matter how much you don't like your classroom job for a teacher to go, "I'm leaving in April," as opposed to letting the year end?

Is that fair?

- I don't think it's fair.

I don't think it's fair to anyone in that situation.

It's not fair to the teacher who has spent so much time and energy into the whole year in teaching and molding her kids to just have to leave like that.

It's not fair for the students who in the long run are gonna be the ones who suffer the most because they've been with the teacher for so many months.

And for them to just up and leave and to have to be in a classroom with someone new at that point in the year, because at this point a lot of our students are just struggling with social, emotional needs and food insecurities and those kind of things who are preventing them from actually learning how we want them to in the classroom.

So it's not fair for the teacher, for the parents, and most importantly for the student, if the teacher were to leave at that point in the year.

- And it's not fair for the teacher to feel like they're the one who's responsible to take care of all of those needs and that's why they're leaving.

It's because it's too much on teachers because they often feel like they're wearing all of those hats.

When it boils down to it, the person who's most in charge of that student is the teacher.

And so teachers all over North Carolina, they tell me this every day, if I could just focus on curriculum and instruction, then I can keep my job.

But instead, I'm a food provider and a mother and a counselor and a mental health specialist and a security officer.

I have to be all of those things and it's too much.

- Marcus, let's lift this story a bit.

Next year will be here before we know it, next school year will.

What are you looking forward to?

- Honestly, I think I'm looking forward to the new level, if you will, like the change in the students.

I think every year, in my experience, students change and especially every three or four or five years too; but every year the students are different.

So I'm looking forward to seeing, especially me being an eighth grade English teacher, seventh grade is normally that grade where they think the kids are crazy.

So when they come to eighth grade, sometimes they can mature up over the summer a little bit and some of 'em don't.

So it's kind of fun to kind of see, it's like getting a hand that you don't see; you kind of flip 'em over in August and see what you got.

So I'm anxious for that.

- Well, Leah, Marcus, Juana, Zaynah, Jericho, thank you so much for your time and for your candor.

I mean, you're talking to a statewide audience here, so I'm sure people will join your choir and some will say, "I disagree with that," but thank you for the bravery to come on television and talk about this.

We were also invited to Washington Montessori School in Greensboro.

While we were there meeting the first grade teacher, Mrs. Napoleon, we learned that the principal there, Paul Travers, was quite a special guy, in fact, the principal of the year.

So we caught up with him for just a couple of minutes to see what he's doing to make his campus tick.

- Oh, so that's what you had to read.

Okay, now it's my turn, huh?

- [Kelly] While visiting Washington Montessori in Greensboro, we learned that its principal, Paul Travers, was Guilford County School's Principal of the Year.

- In North Carolina, I think we're in the fight, we're in the doll fight.

We're in the fight to make sure that we are providing effective, adequate public education for our students.

I don't think it's not breaking news that North Carolina's got a lot of work to do.

But I do think you have got people that are thinking about the right things in order to make sure that students are receiving exactly what they need.

- Of our kitchen table.

- I love it.

Keep it up, okay?

- [Kelly] Principal Travers says his school is still recovering from the operational scalebacks caused by COVID-19, and things these days are quite different.

The school survived online learning, but children missed out on being around their colleagues.

- You don't pick up where you left off, right?

You don't just, "Oh, you know what, "you missed this, I'm gonna pick right up," because there's social skills that were lost during that time.

There were social skills that were developmentally appropriate for the student at that time that they did not have.

- And there's the business side of managing a school.

Traditional public schools are facing competition from other public school campuses, charter schools, and the rise of publicly funded private school tuition vouchers.

How does the competition with private schools and with opportunity scholarships, charter schools, what does it do that iron-on-iron face off between different types of campuses?

- Yeah, we do see a impact of private homeschooling and charter schools that come into play in our competition for what we do in the building.

But I will say one thing is true: if you have really good relationships with students, you're meaningful and you're loving on students and you're well-prepared, then families love that and families see that.

- It was a real pleasure to be invited to Washington Montessori to meet Mr. Travers, and I can see the leadership there in him.

What makes him special, Principal of the Year, in fact?

- He is.

I mean, he knows every student's name.

He clearly has relationships with parents and staff and students in the community.

He does innovative things to engage students.

He goes around in different areas of the community and does morning announcements from a different place every day.

He started that during the pandemic just to keep a connection with kids.

You can just walk in the building and feel that there's a strong leader there and he's an exceptional principal.

We have 126 exceptional principals here in GCS.

- The statistics here are really impressive.

You're a Top 3 school district, Top 50 nationally, tens of thousands of students over a hundred schools.

What does it take to make this entire apparatus run, and how do you find those leaders?

You need 126 of these type of leaders to run all these campuses.

- Sure, and that doesn't even count our assistant principals.

And so I think our people are what matter the most.

It's why we've been focusing on how do we recruit and retain and reward top talent here in the school district; and we have to have great teachers, we have to have great leaders, We need our community to rally behind public education.

So that's really what we've been focused on here.

- How do you find that talent?

Mr. Travers did say, whether on or off camera, he says, "We've been to job fairs."

It's different than it was pre-COVID.

- It's different than it was pre-COVID, but it's not a new problem.

I think for a long, long time, North Carolina has been far behind the national average in teacher compensation.

And while compensation is just one piece of it, school culture, school leadership is also a part of it.

We need to pay teachers more and we're facing that across the nation.

But here in North Carolina, it's something that we've been talking about for a long time.

But until we do that, we can't really expect anything to be much different than it currently is.

Ed prep programs across the country are closing, there's a smaller pipeline than there has been in years past, and so we're gonna have to be innovative and bold to address the issue.

- As a superintendent, how do you keep the campus level leaders and educators or classroom leaders, how do you keep 'em motivated?

And with all the politics going on, I don't wanna get into politics because it gets so rabid, but you have to keep morale up.

How?

- You have to remember your why.

I mean, no one went into education for the pay to begin with, but we also have to think about how we treat this as a profession.

There wouldn't be any other job if there weren't teachers if you think about it.

We've talked recently about how you don't go out and find the cheapest scientist to fly to the moon or the cheapest doctor to do the surgery.

We need to make sure that we're taking care of our teachers.

We also have to work in collaboration with our county and our community to make sure that people understand that public education takes all students and that it belongs to all of us.

It's the responsibility of our entire community.

- How do rural school systems work with more urban and suburban, or as they say, high-well school districts as you presumably have been called?

Is there a relationship there that the smaller school districts look up in a way to those with higher populations, and what do you bring down to keep this discussion statewide?

- So there's different regions within the state that meet regularly, and those can cross over between larger districts and smaller districts.

Guilford County, though by itself, is nearly 650 square miles.

And we have schools that are rural, schools that are urban, we have schools that are suburban, we have all just in our district.

But superintendents and principals work collaboratively to talk about how to solve issues.

I remember when we were trying to get devices to kids and trying to get broadband connectivity to kids that we were all on the phone, all on Zoom meetings trying to solve the same problems.

But there are collaborative structures set up: for example, the Piedmont Triad region.

Superintendents meet very regularly; there's a meeting tomorrow.

So I think we are all here to do what's best for kids, but we're at a point where we have to advocate, we really do.

We have to advocate for teacher compensation we have across our country.

We have buildings that are in horrible condition just because of decades of underfunding of public education.

So we have to educate people about that and advocate.

- Is there a balance in how you portray advocacy and what you say when you're out there in front of the media using the quote unquote bully pulpit?

Can you overdo it?

Can you certainly underdo it?

- I think the best thing we can do is to make sure people have actual information.

There's so much misinformation that's out there.

I don't think social media usually helps when you're trying to get the narrative accurate.

I don't think that you can overdue telling people the truth about the current conditions.

I think we're very proud of our schools.

We, again, have 126 schools, more than 66 choice programs.

We have more businesses moving here than we ever have before.

And so public education being able to feed into that workforce that's growing in the area is our whole collective responsibility, not something that just the school system can do or just the county can do.

It's a responsibility of all of us.

- I've noticed that the state level aligning K12 with what the, what they call workforce needs, but that could be military college or just employers' factories in town.

Do the public schools, and I'll say traditional public schools is what people label that, do they need to change in any way in the coming years to be better positioned for the higher tech jobs we're seeing coming in?

- Absolutely.

I think we have 66 choice programs here that are aligned with workforce needs.

But you have to continually look at what are businesses needing?

So we have liberal arts, cybersecurity, we have lots of pre-medical fields.

We have transportation, distribution, logistics so that students can leave high school with a certification and then choose.

Is it the two year or four year college program?

Is it straight into the workforce?

Entrepreneurship?

I mean, but if we don't have an eye on business industry, then we can't align our programs with the workforce development needs.

For example, we're exploring a partnership with Toyota.

We're gonna have a large electronic battery plant here.

We wanna make sure that our students here can be the pipeline of employees that make high wage, feed high-demand careers.

And so we have to have a constant eye on that.

It's not something you can touch and then touch it again 10 years later.

- How do you see the community colleges at this level, or even universities that are in Guilford County playing that role to plug in between a high school graduate and that nice job at Toyota that pays a good wage?

- I mean, I think it has to be a continuum, right?

And it depends on what credential a student is earning.

Sometimes they can finish it before they finish their high school career.

Sometimes they finish the high school career and have done a concentration and a pathway and then go straight to a two year program and leave with a credential to go into the workforce.

We were fortunate here to partner with our chambers in High Point in Greensboro and talk directly to business leaders about what they need.

And they talked about soft skills.

They also talked about preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist.

When we think about the jobs that will be automated in 10 years and 15 years.

There's all of this new artificial intelligence platform that's rising.

And so I think it's ever-evolving.

We're seeing it pop up at universities like North Carolina A&T, the eSports program at UNCG.

The world is changing and we have to have the students who are ready to step into those roles.

- Dr. Oakley, I want to thank you so much for inviting us into your school system and onto these campuses.

It's not easy to go on camera and talk about such an issue of public education right now.

So we are eternally grateful to you.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

[uplifting music] ♪ - [Announcer] Quality public television has made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.