The Durham Public Schools Board of Education is under new leadership … sort of.
At their July 8 meeting, board members elected Bettina Umstead as chair for the 2025-26 school year. Millicent Rogers served as chair for the past year but only received two votes, including her own, to continue in that role. The other four members present opposed her nomination, and then all six members, including Rogers, voted for Umstead.
The (figurative) gavel will feel familiar to Umstead, who served as vice chair for 2019-20, and then chair from 2020 to 2024.
“I think we have a lot of work to do,” Umstead said from the dais after her election. “But I look forward to doing it in collaboration with you all.”
Chairing the elected body can be a pretty thankless chore. The chair doesn’t really have any special powers but must do a lot of behind-the-scenes wrangling of members and serves as spokesperson for the board. That makes the chair an easy target for a lot of the public ire when teachers don’t get paid or buses stop showing up.
“You give endless amounts of time, you’re on call, I imagine it’s incredibly stressful,” said Jessica Carda-Auten, who just finished her tenure as vice chair.
After electing Umstead, the board then tied on a vice chair nomination, with three members supporting Joy Harrell Goff and three supporting Rogers. Board member Emily Chávez, a frequent ally of Harrell Goff’s, was not in attendance to provide a tie-breaking vote.
In an apparent compromise in a second round of voting, Harrell Goff then voted against her own nomination to hand Rogers the vice chair position.
It’s probably worth no one’s time to try to untangle the web of personal, professional, and political relationships that led the board to bring Umstead back as chair nearly exactly a year after they replaced her with Rogers. But there were several signs that Rogers’s influence over the board was waning through the spring.
At the board’s April 24 meeting, Rogers used her power as chair to set a time limit on the night’s public comment section of the agenda, which would have only allowed for 30 speakers despite 48 showing up at the meeting. Several members interrupted in frustration and the board then unanimously voted to overturn Rogers’s decision.
At another spring meeting, Chávez and Harrell Goff worked around Rogers to place a meet and confer update on the agenda. Those board members were more in line with the Durham Association of Educators (DAE), who had accused Rogers of slow-walking the meet and confer policy process (Rogers entered office in 2022 with the endorsement of the DAE, but ended up on the union’s shit list as the meet and confer policy debate dragged on).
Still, under Rogers’s leadership, the board passed a meet and confer policy that the DAE agreed to and successfully petitioned the county commission for a generous $13 million increase in funding.
Under Umstead this fall, the board will need to put the meet and confer policy into practice, deal with ongoing transportation disruptions, and try to figure out how to run a school district under a state government that continues to divert local funds to charter schools and a federal government hell-bent on cutting off funding for the nation’s most vulnerable students.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].