CRYSTAL COAST TEA PARTY PATRIOTS
MEETING MINUTES OF
3 JULY 2012
Meeting was held at Golden Corral Restaurant, Morehead City, NC
Meeting called to order at 6:05 pm by Chairman BOB CAVANAUGH
Pledge of Allegiance was led by John Tedesco
Invocation by STEVEN BEST
Attendance – 35
Discussed ERIC BROYLES’ idea of a TEA Party Mission Statement handout. Need to discuss suggested idea a little more. Do not want to use in parade…with Pocket Constitution and July 17th Runoff Election voter list suggestion, do not want to include too much or it will all end of being thrown away. Asked ERIC to bring up again later.
Group discussion on last week’s Supreme Court Decision by Justice Roberts whether good or bad decision. Some interesting comments made.
BOB introduced our Guest Speaker tonight — John Tedesco, candidate for NC Superintendent of Public Instruction. Once again BOB told the group about how excited he had been when he heard Mr. Tedesco speak a couple of weeks ago…that he felt he was the most dynamic speaker he had ever heard and tonight was our turn to listen to him.
Mr. Tedesco started off with “Good evening everybody. I am honored to be here with all of you today. Can everybody hear me OK? I tend to be a bit loud. My wife, Jenny, teases me sometimes…she says I have a southern heart and a Yankee mouth. So, I talk a little loud and a little fast, so, bear with me sometimes. I count that as a blessing in my life. I always consider the two best decisions I ever made in my life was accepting the Lord as my savior and marrying a southern girl. They both keep me grounded, (Applause) Let me take a minute and tell you a little bit about myself. Some of what I see as challenges in education across America and here in North Carolina and tell you a little of what I think we can do together to move forward to change our course right now. Again, I am John Tedesco and I do thank you for your time. I grew up in the Pittsburg area….a steel working kind of guy….my dad worked in some of those mills for 20 something years. I was the oldest of 6 kids and I worked in some of those mills myself to save money to put myself through college and have a different future for myself. I was one of these free lunch kids you hear about. We bounced around a lot. The money he made in the mill was not enough to keep us out of poverty and we lived in low income housing. We were challenged. It was a struggle. I was blessed. I had a pastor get involved in my life when I was a child who showed me a different path in life. And I always knew then, I wanted to rise up out of poverty and help other kids who were like me. Interestingly enough, I have had a whole career and we will talk briefly about that in a moment, but I have had a whole career dedicated to the service of others, particularly, vulnerable children in our country. And a lot of folks have told me all of the time, John, you are such an incredible, passionate person who cares about children and helping in children’s charities and programs and you work with the kids we always hear about…..How come you are not a Democrat? (laughter) I scratch my head and have to think for a second and I remind myself and say you know what I remember when I was a young boy living in some of those projects in the western side of Pittsburg, I remember when the Democrats used to come into the projects and say ‘Don’t vote for the Republicans. They are going to take away your food stamps. They are going to take away your projects and I thought to myself, even as a child, I want to take away my food stamps. I want out. I want to have the opportunity to use my GOD given talents for individual accountability and responsibility to rise up and teach others to do the same. And that is when I made a choice to dedicate my life to the service of others. So, when I got out of college, I had an opportunity to work for an Educational Foundation, traveling the country, speaking at colleges and universities to first generation college kids and teaching them how they could go through it. I did so well at that I was asked to go to New York City and work for one of those universities in Manhattan, a place called Pace University Down Town and be in charge of raising scholarships for first generation kids. I raised over 100 million dollars to put together a program for private sector resources to get kids into colleges. I was very blessed in doing that and they gave me the opportunity to teach. Non-profit and public sector management at NYU (New York University in Manhattan). Here I was, a young guy, and I am raising 100’s of millions of dollars…I’m in the big old city….and I ended up getting a little place across the river in a little town, much like this…a beach community…a place called Highlands, New Jersey. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the Jersey area much, but I was involved in my Republican party and getting my community together and they said ‘John, we’d love to have you and your talent and your vision…come in and be our city manager’. I was very surprised and shocked. I was a young man and had this opportunity, but it was a blessing. In that I learned how to craft and cultivate budgets and communities and needs and we did all that. We trimmed budgets, created surpluses, and I tackled the big unions up there in Jersey, the labor unions and we won. Imagine that, we were able to beat back the unions in New Jersey, and those are some strong unions, if you guys are not familiar with it. It was during that time when 9-11 occurred. We were right across the river from lower Manhattan. We were a ferry boat community where hundreds of thousands of people used our boats to get to lower Manhattan. And all of a sudden our little community town, that was a tourist town, much like this area, was now the most central point of relief and recovery. They closed all the roads and bridges in New York that day because they didn’t know what was going to get hit next and we evacuated everybody through these ferry boats in this little town that I was now left to manage. For the next 6 months we became a relief and recovery station where we were sending over supplies. Sections of our whole town was covered with tractors and trailers coving the streets. One with search gear, one with bottled water, one with different supplies and we would do double duty, all of us, whether it was the police, the firemen, the garbage workers,…do your town job for part of the day and the other part of the day help remove the rubble across the river. It was a different world. It was a challenging time in my life. When that year expired and we moved on and we did the first memorial, I had the opportunity to move on and I said to some of my friends in the state, I said I really need a chance to regroup my head around things I care about. And they said, John, we have this program and it is called Harbor House. Harbor House helps 8,000 kids a year who are abused, abandoned, or homeless and we need someone to direct that program. Bring in private dollars. It can’t be, or can not always be sustained by the government. Help us build new shelters for these kids, and get programs in place for these kids. I did that for 4 years and we did amazing work. I was very honored and proud of that, and with that work I had the opportunity to get called from the National Children’s Charity (Big Brothers and Big Sisters) that mentors a quarter of a million children across America. And they said, John, we have explosive growth happening in North Carolina. And we would love to have you come down and be our chief development officer.
God works in mysterious ways. It just all happened to be coincidental. My dad had retired from the mill. My mother had passed away. I am the oldest of six, as I mentioned, and the younger three had a 20 year gap almost (19 with the last one). So I said this is a good opportunity. I can move down with my dad and help with the three youngest, going to Garner Middle School at the time. Garner is just south of the Raleigh area. So I got to sort of raise them in the schools. You know my dad is older. He is deaf and sick and so I had to be the one that went and did all the IMP meetings with the school. My two sisters are deaf. I had to do all the football programs, the wrestling moms, with my brother and do all that stuff and help them out. And they have all just graduated over the last three years and now they are in community college. So I had an opportunity to see the schools from the inside perspective on one level. By the same token my wife, Jenny and I, we talk about what we want for our son, Gabriel, and we are seeing how the schools sort of operate, trigger and how they work. It is different and people understand it. But by the same token, side by side, for three years I was building a program across North Carolina called Mentoring children of Prisoners and we have 13,000 kids in NC who have a parent who is incarcerated and 72% of these kids will probably end up in prison themselves. And I put together resources, private technology, community partnerships, government relations with juvenile justice and the department of corrections to get these kids role models in their lives, so they could rise up and out as well. There I learned what I thought was a startling fact…and I understand macro-systems and government systems…and I said you know what? I don’t understand how this is working and they said well our department of corrections…we are actually projecting and building prisons ten to twenty years in advance looking at third grade data. And I was hurt, I was one of these kids and you are condemning them before they ever have a shot. I said I got to get involved in the front end not the back end. So I said I am going to go and get involved in our schools and try and reform our schools worth. So I ran for Wake County School Board in Raleigh…it is the largest school system in the state. I know some of you watched that fight over the last few years or heard about our battles over the last few years. But the parents said we have had enough, John, it is crazy what is going on around here. For those of you who don’t know it is a 1.5 Billion dollar operation. Four times the size of NC’s Department of Instruction in one single county district. 18,000 employees, 165 schools and 151,000 kids this year. It is the 16th largest school district in America out of 14,000. It is a huge system. And like most government systems it became a bureaucracy unto itself. And they had their own goals, and their own agendas that weren’t in line with tax payers and the parents and families who were crying out for help. So they elected me to bring in some common sense. And I know who I am. I know where I come from and by GOD’s grace, I know where I am going. So I don’t waiver when I bring my values to the table. And I think these people, these big bureaucracies thought that was going to be the case. They thought they would get me up there and I’d drink the Kool Aid. I told them I don’t drink Kool Aid. I drink tea. I ended up going there and we ended up taking on all the biggest challenges of the day. The first challenge they had …they had a crazy
bussing for diversity quota system. They were bussing kids an hour and a half in some cases or an hour in most cases and it is not like it’s a rural community. I mean they would go past 20 schools in some cases just to try and balance out quotas every year. And when that wasn’t working they’d reshuffle the deck the next year and enroll more kids so they’d reshuffle the deck the next year and every year we had a culture in Wake County known as reassignment. It is a common culture up there. The year before I was elected, they reassigned 24,000 kids. You go to one school for second grade, another for 3rd grade, another for 4th and you were a pawn in this scheme trying to make the quotas balance out. All along we are not focusing on what is important….teaching the kids how to read. I know it’s a crazy idea. So the next thing I did, we focused on getting rid of that. Took on the NAACP crowd and we met them head on and we kicked them out of Wake County and ended that whole program. And it brought a lot of controversy. And people said, Oh, aren’t you ashamed of all the controversy. What do you feel about the fact about you bringing us into the national spotlight on CNN, Fox News, and they even had me on Comedy Central with Steven Cobert. Making a joke out of me and the TEA Party Tedesco coming to re-segregate the south. Aren’t you ashamed about doing that. I said I will never be ashamed about who I am or my values because I know I know I am doing this because I promised the people and this is why they elected me. This is what they want, not what you and your media want to spin. So we fought it and we ended up creating up all this buzz. Mr. Barbour and the NAACP crowd led 5,000 people through the streets of Raleigh protesting….hey, hey, oh, oh, John Tedesco’s gotta go….thinking I was going to waiver…and I didn’t. (applause) We took it a couple of steps further. Over that period of time we took 100 million dollars out of wasteful bureaucracy, cut it flat out, and in the last several years you hear across the state, people crying ‘we are losing teachers, we are losing money in the schools’. We cut 100 million dollars without touching a single teacher. We actually hired more teachers, gave teacher bonuses, put 32 million dollars more back into the class rooms and class room resources, and doubled our fund balance in a two year period of time without having to ask the County Commissioners for a single dollar more. (applause) We took 56 senior administrators and consolidated them into 8. We outsourced departments. We renegotiated contracts. We changed the way we do business. We had 5 buildings that were just central administration. We consolidated them into one. Put those other four buildings back on the public tax rolls and managed to save the taxpayers an additional 29 million dollars over the next ten years.
But that is thinking differently about how we attack education and how we manage the resources. They didn’t like that. The bureaucrats were saying, you are creating a model that can show what conservatives can do with education, so they brought down everybody and his brother to call me out again. Clinton came to Raleigh calling me out. President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan, the New York Times, Washington Post….TEA Party Tedesco is at it again. I didn’t waiver because I knew it was what our kids needed and I think our kids are worth fighting for.
So we went a step further, we had a chief bureaucrat that had been there 40 years, part of the educational establishment. They all know better than the rest of us. I value our teachers. Like I said, I protected all of them. We gave bonuses. But this guy here, he was out of line in terms of how they worked, so we removed him and replaced him with a general. Brought in Tony Cato(?) from the 82nd Airborne Division to manage the school system. And these people lost their minds. I had one of my liberal colleagues across the table….and interesting enough, Mr. Garner, it happened to be the lady you mentioned to me before….she looked at me across the table and said well, that is great Mr. Tedesco, he can shoot and kill, but can he teach? I shook my head and I scratched and said, you know what we have 18,000 great teachers. We don’t need a teacher, we need a leader. And that is the problem with NC’s education system today. We need a leader. (applause) We’ve had 100 years, over 100 years of Democrat control of the General Assembly…right?….We’ve had countless education governors. If I hear one more education governor I might be nauseous. We have had countless education governors and the results are in….they failed our children….A quarter of our kids aren’t graduating every year…50% of minority kids can’t read on grade level….2/3’s of our kids who do graduate and go into our community colleges systems need remediation…we are fourth in the country in suspensions and it is no coincidence we are fourth in the country in percentage of our state budget being spent on incarceration. When you fail to be effective with the $8500.00 a year you spend to educate a child, you set yourself up to spend $35,000.00 a year to incarcerate a man. We have the system backwards. But I am convinced some of this is intentional, I think this is the groundwork to build an entitlement society. Abraham Lincoln told us that the education of this generation, will be the politics of the next generation. We are losing my friends the war to liberals, not because of the liberal media…not because of the abuse of the vote and the illegal people voting which are all problems, I agree. We are losing the hearts and minds of our children. We are running out of intellectual capital, moral fiber, and the understanding of what it means to be America faster than we are running out of Social Security, I promise you. These numbers are mounting on us and people don’t see it. We have 1.5 million children in our public schools in NC…. Millions, and half of them can’t read. What kind of society is going to be able to be here 20 years from now and be critical thinkers, know how to evaluate, know how to understand what is going on. We have to get involved in education. I fundamentally commit as well, one of the failures of the Republican Party….I am a proud Republican…but we have abdicated our position on education. The Democrats have seized it like it’s the Holy Grail. Marxist told you about it…Stalin told you about it….Hitler went with it too. They all went after it. We continue to talk about defenses and I am most proud of finance and economics and I am proud of and I focus on it. But we don’t pay attention to the undercurrent that is sweeping the way underneath in a generation of children. I am scared. I am scared for the future of this country. I am scared for the future of NC if we are not willing to fight. And it is time to fight for our children. The NC Department of Instruction in Raleigh, they joke about it. They call it the pink palace. If some of you have been up there, you may have seen it. Several stories, 800 employees who focus on bureaucratic oversight but teach nothing and they just focus on keeping the bureaucracy alive. So we have a bold vision for how we move forward. I grew up in Sunday School, so I learned where there is no vision, men will perish.
So we have a bold vision. First – we need to trim that bureaucracy dramatically. Give those dollars back to the local district. Next – I want to flip the model, I know how to manage administrations like that. I know how to manage departments. I want to flip the entire model from bureaucratic oversight to customer service of the local districts. Let the local districts make the decisions. What works for the people at the coast doesn’t work in the mountains. What works in the mountains doesn’t work in the cities, and what works in the cities doesn’t work in the rural areas. Whatever your economic indicators are in the different market places are not the same in other market places. We have to increase local control. And we have to correct the system at the State Level to do it. Because education is a state’s right issue, and not a federal issue. It is a state issue. So in the same token while we make the system lean we have to make it mean. We have to make a system that is lean and mean so that we can stand as a firewall to encroaching federal agendas that are coming down on education. These agendas have gone crazy, Some of you may have seen some of the things just in NC. We have bureaucrats running wild. Political agenda screaming at kids in classrooms and now we have chicken nugget police. That is ridiculous. In Raleigh they like to call me radical. Well, I have another radical idea. Let’s get the bureaucrats out of the classroom, get the chicken nugget police out of the schools, and let’s teach the kids how to read. I know that is radical, but I will fight for it because our children need to know how to be constructive members of our society. So I will always fight for them.
Next we’ve got to get rid of this ‘one size fits all’ education system. We’ve got to get the bureaucrats out of the class room, let the teachers actually teach, stop pushing the teach to the test culture, that standardizes everything and dumbs down everybody at the same time. Avocational programs and avocational tracts…I was at a conference with the NC Chamber of Commerce recently and they said, John, we have 600,000 jobs in NC that we don’t have the skilled labor to take. People can go off and get a skilled trade as a plumber, h/vac or electrician making $60,000 to $80,000 a year, but we push everybody in a college and they are lucky when they get out if they can get a job as a waiter. That is a problem. We have to have a society that has a diverse educated background to build a better educated workforce if we are going to be long term sustainable. That is a problem.
Next, on top of trimming the waste, we have to use some of those dollars to get them back to our teachers and classrooms. But as in any other profession in the world, if you take on extra duties that’s your responsibilities or produce extra results you will be rewarded. Why don’t our teachers deserve the same profession. So I agree we need to put in merit base pay models for teachers. Look at performance opportunities and we did in Wake. In Wake where we are adding all these parental choice models….I was telling you a little bit about diversity models when they were going on….we actually created the whole system to work as a parental choice model. All 165 schools have to actually compete against each other for parents to get involved. They have to actually tweak the system to customer service. They have to go out and have fairs and group parents. Parents don’t choose them because they’re failing or for whatever reason…only what they build on their bottom line. So we have to be able to create multiple options for kids. We created ten test schools, we created all boy leadership academy for 800 young men with an ROTC component. We created health programs that actually have the kids go half day in the morning to school and the other half day they are at the hospital learning trades, and nuclear medicine or whatever the case may be. We can do all this and more.
Finally my friends we have to teach American values once again. You don’t learn through osmosis. We have to teach things like capitalism, free markets, liberty, what it means to be America. We have to. So I want to fight for those issues as well.
I’m going to slow down there, give you guys a minute for some questions, and talk to you for a few minutes and then I am going to have to run, because I have your other meeting coming up shortly. With that said I thank you for your time. (applause)
HOWARD GARNER said he was going to have to back down a little bit on what he usually said to this group. I usually say that once somebody files, ignore what he says, but look at the track record. I am impressed by what you had to say tonight but I have been keeping up with you as best I could through internet since you were elected. I liked it when you told the Superintendent of Schools there….you read him the riot act…..the state law….that it was up to the Board of Education to set policy and it was up to him, the Superintendent to carry them out. I believe he resigned or you fired him because he was not willing to do that. I pray that I live long enough to see that happen in Carteret County. I doubt I will. I believe I read last week somewhere that you cut the central office from 64 employees to 8 employees. Is that correct? Mr. Tedesco said the senior leadership, the central office, 3,000 people we divided and cut probably 1,000 of those and the senior department we cut down to 8.
HOWARD said another problem he thinks he sees, and he doesn’t know much about it, they have all these regional education offices. I don’t see where they serve any useful purpose. They’re just building bureaucracy. Am I correct? Mr. Tedesco said “100%”. HOWARD said a lot of money is going there. Mr. Tedesco agreed. HOWARD said it is not teaching kids anything. Mr. Tedesco said ‘In the United States, education spending has tripled in the last 20 years, while performance has flat-lined. And most of our money hasn’t gone to our teachers, most of our money has gone into administrators or bureaucracy. In fact, what we have seen is a personnel ratio to students that was closer to 12 to 1 twenty years ago and more like 4 to 1 now.’
ERIC BROYLES said while he tended to agreed with Mr. Tedesco there, with NC being 47th or 48th in education and it has been that way for a long time, but because what the state was founded on…textile, low income, and the citizenry kinda held down, and the way the school system worked, I am deeply concerned like you said, 25% of our kids are dropping out of school. The other factor I am concerned about is based on the system of everybody going to college. Reality is only 53% of our kids go to college, 4 year or higher education school. What are you going to do to get every student, graduating from high school to have a vocation training. They should be skilled in brick laying, pipe welding, whatever. But they should walk out with at least a skill. Mr. Tedesco held up one of his handouts and asked if he had seen one of them. On the back is the first bullet point we focus on. On our web site we divide it up and it will give you more detail. A card will only hold so much. “The first thing we focus on is building a better educated work force and that includes expanding vocation programs…how to do it….We need to have vocational programs in multiple ways. We need to add it in existing high school framework. We need to add it in multiple tracts earlier too, trying in middle school to show and expose the kids to the multiple tracts. We then need to add it also to specialty schools. In Wake County we are actually in partnership now and taking an old Coca Cola bottling plant and creating an entire vocation high school for those kids who just want to do that. Additionally we need to open the doors to the business communities and their partners better. I went to the Wayne County Builders Association and I said ‘how come in the Wake County Builders Association we don’t have…which is one of the largest in the country…we don’t have an apprenticeship program in everyone of our high schools where they could be working in the morning on their math or reading class and in the afternoon be out on the job site with you learning carpentry, electricity, or whatever, and be able to get a certification in that when they graduate with their diploma and be job ready from day one. These are the type of things we need to do and I will fight to do. ERIC said he was talking about making it an actual requirement that in order to graduate you have to have a vo-tech skill. We all know the 12th year of high school is a waste of time in most cases. So that is the time to teach basic skills, how to run a household, teach those vo-tech jobs, because the reason we are losing jobs to the overseas markets is we no longer have those types of skills in this country. We are losing them by the thousands every month. Mr. Tedesco said we do have a lot of jobs that we are not losing that we don’t have the skilled labor for. I mean you can’t outsource a mechanic or a plumber or an electrician. We need those people here. Those are jobs that are never going to be outsourced….not a call center in any of them….they are jobs we need here and we need to teach those skills and provide children an opportunity to do that. I agree.
Another member asked ’What would be your recommendation to the Legislature as a way to correct the reading problem at the 3rd grade level? Senator Burger, I think, took a group to Massachusetts and they decided to adopt the testing program of Massachusetts since they have the best reading scores in the nation. Mr. Tedesco said he met with Sen. Burger and the part he agreed with ‘end social promotions’. If a kid can’t read at the 3rd grade level, don’t just keep pushing them through the system. Everybody doesn’t get a trophy every time. Everybody does not get a zero. You’ve got to let kids know what it means to fail. Stop passing every kid through the system just to make them feel comfortable and good about their self esteem. Because in the end, they don’t. My suggestion for that is to end social promotions. The member said. probably we have the wrong teaching program in the university system teaching teachers the wrong way to teach. If you shifted it to the Massachusetts approach then it appeared to him we would be on the right path. Is that correct or not? Mr. Tedesco said, ‘partly, I mean you have to change the curriculum at the university level of what we are teaching teachers now. But I also think we need to change how we do that. Instead of just having one pathway for teachers, I think we should have multiple pathways for people who want to come into education maybe from the business community and be educators, or other communities. I do agree that parts of that I would support but I think we also need to change the curriculum at the university level. That has to be something that…..see we can do that in a couple of ways…..it is sort of a chicken or an egg kind of thing that one….so we can change the requirements of K-12 education and the diploma and courses you need and stuff and what it means to get a job in K-12 education and then the universities will be forced to change if they want kids to get out and get a job as a teacher. Or we can work with the General Assembly and the Board of Governor of Universities and change it that way. I agree with your point…there are a couple of ways we can attack this problem.
A members asked if he knew what part of the NC Lottery is paying. Mr. Tedesco said, ‘That is funny because one of the things I say routinely is Democrats have given no solutions for education except two….raise taxes, keep saying the same thing, we need more money, we need more money….and gamble away our children’s future in the lottery. I think those are both failed solutions. So within the NC lottery there is a large portion of it that goes to where they say it goes…although not all of it….quite frankly if it were that effective they wouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars buying commercials telling you how wonderful it is…right? How many of you have seen the commercials (not buy your lottery ticket) but the other commercial that says ‘Wow, our school got this because the NC lottery helped us.’ You all see those commercials? Millions of dollars spent on that to try and justify what is really not justifiable. What they did with the lottery that they don’t tell us is: in NC we used to have our state schools, our public school system, that they pay tax on a product that they purchased throughout the course of the year…..the state decided to hold it…..like a government bond….the idea that a government bond is, paying tax to get the money back from the taxpayers so they just funnel it back through sort of like money laundering, right? But some districts don’t charge school systems tax. So in NC what they did; they were always charging tax, the state would sit on the tax for the year at an interest and then they would return the money back to the local districts. When they put the lottery in place, they ended up saying we’ll just keep that money which ended up equaling a greater amount than what they give the district in lottery, so basically it was a supplanting gimmick that they used to help offset some of Easley and Perdue’s other agendas. So, I think what we need to do is stop local school districts from paying taxes like any other government agency that wouldn’t pay taxes. Stop them from paying taxes to the tax payers who fund them with their tax anyway. It is a sick cycle, see that? It is a bad way to do it. That is the first thing I think we need to do that sends a shot in the arm to those people who are using the lottery.
A member said he did pay attention to what Mr. Tedesco said about individual solutions for individual areas. He did not want to use the term charter school, he was just going to use the term concept. He happened to be raised in New York City, where the drop out rate in his graduating class was 40%….and I think the general statistic, and maybe you can disagree with this, masks bigger problems. Generalized testing masks specifically large problems especially, if it’s true – that our test results are significantly weighted down by a disproportionate, underperformance in inner city schools. Do you support or do you think….I don’t want to use charter schools….taking them out of the environment and allowing kids to function in a learning situation that is free from violence and the drug deals. Mr. Tedesco said ’I fundamentally support that. I am a supporter of charter schools. I don’t think charter school is a bad word. It is a part of public instruction. Member asked, where does that fit in your program? Mr. Tedesco said one thing they talk about is empowering parents and we have to do that on multiple levels. I am a big fan of ’school of choice’ and that is why we created a choice model in the public schools and then we compete off each other. One of the things we did in 2009 when I was on the board (or 2010 before we elected a new general assembly) part of every school district had to recommend a legislative agenda. Part of our legislative agenda was to lift the cap on charter schools. No other school system in the state recommended that. In fact, it was such a controversy that NC School Boards Association argued with us about it because it was against their agenda. So, we dropped our membership, pulled out of the NC School Board Association, which would be like (on a smaller scale) the US pulling out of the UN. We said this is not the right agenda for us. We support choice. So, we have 100 charter schools in NC. We have 40,000 children in those charter schools. I am glad we lifted the cap on charter schools. If we opened 100 charter schools more tomorrow, God Bless Us, and we take years to do that, maybe 10 years, but, if we could open 100 charter schools tomorrow, what is that 40,000 more kids and so I think what we need to do is be innovative with expanding charters, expanding home schooling, supporting private schools, let the dollars follow the child so that the parents can use their money in the right way instead of following the schools. Allow more flexibility that way and on top of that we then need to go a step further. We need to allow these systems to sort of cross integrate and work with each other. For example, we have a charter school in NC called KIP Academy. KIP Academy is a national charter model. It has 94 or 95% minority, 90 something % free or reduced lunch kids and 100% graduation. WOW! They are doing different things. They do very different things. At 6th grade they take kids on a weekend trip to local colleges. In 10th grade they get private businesses to support the kids going away for a week to visit Harvard for a week or see other colleges. They stay an extra hour a day where they do different things that those kids might need or a whole variety of things they might need. So we know we have some failing interest in schools where there’s similar numbers and demographics, why can’t those principals and leaders get training in those models. Why not? They are all our schools. Public charter schools and traditional public schools are the same. Why can’t we learn from one another. For that same thing for home schoolers. We are one of the largest home school states in the country. I support and I will advocate for what is now being commonly called the Tebow Law. You guys know what the Tebow law is? The quarterback Tebow? So, he went to Florida and he was home schooled there but they have a Tebow law there (or what is now being called the Tebow law) where basically home schooled students are allowed to select course offerings or programmatic offerings in local high schools. If they want to join the band, but want their curriculum taught at home because of their Christian values or other reasons or what ever the case may be, but they want to play on the football team or join the band or do something else….they are tax payers, why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they be allowed. They build these big fancy stadiums, do the art centers, and theaters and all this stuff. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to sign up and do those programs. So I think we need to expand choice. I think we need to allow choice to sort of cross pollinate, work with each other a little better, and I think we need to take the public schools….you have two models here really…you have the charter schools, that are known for being very flexible, and then the public schools which cry all the time that they (the charter schools) don’t have to do this or they don’t have to do that so it is not fair. And so they say put restrictions on the charter schools….NO! ….the opposite….free up the bureaucracy and the rules on the public schools. We’ve already got the ability, we’ve already paid for these buildings. They are already part of our system. We already have 1.5 million children in them. Let’s force them to operate more flexibly. How we use our funding models, how we put our administrators in place, how we do all these other things. I think it is a new paradigm shift in the move in education. Does that make more sense?
Mr. Tedesco apologized that he was way over his designated time since he had to get to Cape Carteret to the other meeting. Before he left, he said ’Let me say this, I am going to do this because I know these are passionate issues and I want people to be involved in the fight. One of the things I did, I also worked together with other school board leaders who are conservative around the state….there is a handful of us….we created a new organization…the NC Center for Education Reform and we started getting it together and sort of behind the scenes built a network of sharing ideas of what they can do in their local districts and how they can push these administrators who train school boards to rubber stamp; how they can sort of challenge that. So if any of you have any other questions, I am going to leave my card (a small stack of them). My card has my personal number on it and my email. I get them. Forgive me, if it takes me a little bit to get to your email, we get tons of them, but I get them. People say to me all the time….why are you putting out your number publicly for the entire state. You are running a statewide campaign. That’s 100 counties. I say ‘we are asking to take care of other people’s children and other people’s money, don’t you think we should be accountable for both?’ I am an ultra conservative and fiscal conservative and we work really hard to raise just a few dollars to cover this statewide campaign and we don’t even have enough signs, or other items. We are out of just about everything, traveling in all 100 counties on my own. Even though these are only 5cents a piece, I don’t like to waste any, so would you do me a favor if I leave a few of these will you take it and give it to a friend, talk to them, get involved in your local schools, go to local school board meetings, challenge them. We have to win locally as well. Get involved. If anyone can help with a small donation to help cover gas to travel over the state with, please do so. If you know someone who might be willing to help, please take one of the envelopes and give it to them. I really would appreciate it. I believe in the power of prayer, so keep my wife, Jenny, my son, Gabriel, and myself in your prayers. It is a big campaign and I look forward to seeing my family again and spending some time with them. (applause) Thank you very much.
BOB asked “Were you all as impressed with that guy as I was?” A big ‘yeah’ from the audience and comments like ‘the more he said, the more impressed I was.’ BOB said if he wins this, I see governorship down the road. HOWARD said he heard this in New Bern last week but would not bring it up until he had spoken to us and left….but Mr. Tedesco had gotten pressured to resign from his job where he made a living in Wake County, so he has put his money where his mouth is. He resigned from the job he was doing because of political pressures from the liberals. He can’t be flush with money, I don’t think. BOB said definitely if you have a couple of extra bucks you want to send him, I’m sure he will appreciate it.
BOB said tomorrow is our parade. If you want to walk and pass out constitutions and our July 17 voting ballot, show up at EULA’s house no later than 9:00am so we can decorate the float, put the flags up, get the bunting and the frilly stuff. The meeting continued with those in attendance putting the TEA Party labels (Mr. Thompson had made for us) on the constitutions and folding and inserting the TEA Party recommended ballot inside. Since we did not have enough of the recommended ballots to include in every constitution, PEGGY said she would have the rest we need by tomorrow morning so, while some decorated, the others could finish stuffing the constitutions. RUTH PARKER wanted to know if she needed to bring a chair for someone to sit on on the float. PEGGY said we did not need to bring chairs. We bought 24 chairs last year so we would always have them available and not have to worry about chairs.
FRED DECKER said he had most of the remaining lists of potential voters for use in telephoning and encouraging them to get out and vote. He passed out the district lists to those who were in attendance for those districts. BOB said what he had considered was that we would take the Tuesday prior to the runoff on the 17th and conduct a phone bank here and spend our time phoning at that meeting. No decision was made.
Meeting adjourned (after the constitutions were completed).
Minutes submitted by PEGGY GARNER, Secretary.