Following Budget Win, the Durham Association of Educators Gears Up for Fight for “Meet-and-Confer” Policy

The mass of red-shirt wearers inside the Durham County meeting hall was abuzz with excitement. 

Symone Kiddoo, president of the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) teachers union, ushered members into the long wooden pews that faced the front of the hall where county staff and the board of county commissioners waited to deliberate over the 2024–25 fiscal year budget one final time.

The commissioners were expected to vote that evening, June 10, in favor of the school board’s historic $27 million ask for local funding after the county finance director, Keith Lane, had laid out the math for how to fully fund the board’s request during a budget hearing. 

But Kiddoo had been in this fight long enough to know not to let her guard down. She held a modest smile as the meeting proceeded. Even if Kiddoo and her allies scored a big win after a long, drawn-out battle, another struggle with the district was already under way. The DAE was going to the mat with the school board over a “meet-and-confer” policy, which would create a framework for the union to engage more meaningfully with Durham Public Schools (DPS) administrators and give voice to worker concerns. 

“[It’s] recognizing the union does not disrespect the workers that have not joined the union yet,” Kiddoo says of the DAE’s goal. “Rather, it affirms workers’ rights and shows all workers that the district respects our right to organize.”

Six months earlier, a payroll crisis set off a firestorm throughout DPS. DAE capitalized on the moment, organizing educators from across the district to push the school board and county commissioners for stronger communication and better resources. Union membership grew exponentially. 

Now, DAE wants a seat at the table to ensure its members are adequately represented in future negotiations and to prevent further deterioration of trust between educators, the school board, and county leadership. 

But as negotiations have stalled, the union continues to apply pressure to get a policy on the books. 

In January, turmoil ripped through the local education community after DPS administrators determined the district could not afford the pay raises it had allocated last fall. 

Realizing its mistake, the district tried to rescind the raises. More than 1,300 classified workers—nurses, cafeteria workers, instructional assistants, maintenance staff, and others—were affected. Frustration over the mishandling of the issue, which the school board and district administrators were addressing mostly in closed sessions, led to weeks of sick-outs, where teachers and other employees called out of work in protest, spending days marching through Durham streets and holding rallies with hundreds of community members.

Ultimately, the district’s chief financial officer Paul LeSieur and superintendent Pascal Mubenga resigned over the scandal. 

“There was obviously a lot of frustration, anger, and a sense that things are getting worse or things are not going to change,” says Carlos Perez, a Jordan High School history teacher and member of the DAE executive board.

As funding for North Carolina public schools has dwindled over the last decade, teachers are asked to do more with less, leading to burnout. DPS’s teacher attrition rate is up from 8.3 percent in 2021 to 12.9 percent in 2023, according to the NC Department of Public Instruction.

Supplemental positions such as instructional assistants and exceptional children (EC) educators have also been cut, placing a heavier burden on remaining school staff. Educators and staff felt that their voices were unheard, their demands unmet. DAE took the opportunity to bring those workers together under the banner of the union. 

“The pay debacle was a spark or a catalyst, but by the time that popped off, we had already generated a petition with clear demands that came out of talking to workers across the district about what their real needs are,” Perez says. “We had already been scaling up the union.” 

DAE members deployed various tactics—taking days off work to talk to colleagues at other schools, waking up early to visit school bus lots, tabling before and after school to talk to people as they came and went—all in service of building up the union’s membership.

“That’s what made us prepared to seize the moment in the way that we did,” Perez says. “But also part of what allowed us to position ourselves is a widespread recognition that public education is under attack and in a state of crisis. Anyone who’s worked a day in public schools, either here in Durham or elsewhere, knows that.”

DAE now had ample leverage to organize members in service of its cause.

“There was a sense of hope and solidarity and inspiration that people were on the move and on the move for each other,” Perez says. “And that was palpable, definitely at my building.”

Elevating workers’ voices is a major selling point for DAE. Employees, especially classified staff, have found a vehicle for their frustrations, Perez says. 

Quentin Headen, an instructional assistant at Riverside High School, quickly became a fixture at DAE rallies after he was recruited last year and spoke on behalf of the many classified staff members, who he says are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.

“If you mess with the classified staff, you mess with the 90th percentile of your school,” Headen said as he stood on a picnic table and addressed a cheering crowd through a megaphone at a rally on January 31. “We wanted a seat at the table. That message has now changed. We demand a seat at the table.”

Headen and others have become leaders at their schools and in their community after joining DAE’s ranks. Should another issue like the payroll crisis arise in the future, Perez says, more folks will have the muscle memory to act with confidence.

“Look at the number of people who have stepped up across the district in every school, in every job category, whether it’s cafeteria workers, janitors, EC, instructional assistants, teachers,” says Perez, who has been a DAE member since he moved to Durham in 2017 and started working in the district. “I’ve never seen this scale of activity or this level of participation and involvement in the union. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”

Membership in the NC Association of Educators (NCAE), the statewide parent organization of DAE, stalled in the mid-2010s after Republicans gained power in the state legislature and changed how the organization was allowed to operate. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, making union membership across industries some of the lowest in the country.

Toward the end of the decade, a new class of NCAE leaders rejuvenated the organization’s membership and fundraising efforts and bolstered the foundations of its local chapters. Momentum was already on DAE’s side when the union voted to elect its new president, Kiddoo, in the summer of 2023, leading the charge toward the union’s efforts to secure adequate pay and other worker rights.

Kiddoo, a Durham native and graduate of Jordan High School, knows the district intimately. She began working as a DPS school social worker in 2015, helping families access the resources they needed to succeed in the school system. Not long after Kiddoo started, Donald Trump was elected president and state Republicans continued to dry up resources for public schools. This put a particular strain on Latin American families in the district, Kiddoo says.

“I was now facing this very real issue of kids’ fears of their parents being deported,” Kiddoo says. “I can teach them about coping skills for anxiety. But that’s a legitimate fear. I can’t cognitive-behavioral-therapy their way out of that fear when the president-elect gets on the news and says he wants to deport their parents.”

In 2016, Wildin Acosta, a Riverside High School student was facing deportation two years after fleeing to the United States to avoid gang violence in Honduras. Members of the community, including folks from DAE, worked diligently to keep Acosta in Durham. Kiddoo says this showed her a blueprint for how to make a deeper impact.

“To me, the social worker who was trying, and what felt like failing, to address this major issue for students, I was now presented with ‘Oh, these folks are not just applying a Band-Aid. This is not just about let’s talk about your anxiety of your parents getting deported. They [DAE] are stopping deportations,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the thing that I want to do.’”

Kiddoo served as a DAE district organizer, supporting building leaders in different schools, before being elected president. Colleagues attribute her success to her background as a social worker, her skills as a listener, and her willingness to make space for others to be recognized while giving them tools to be successful.

“I’ve known Symone for years, and worked very closely with her, particularly during this campaign,” Perez says. “She’s a humble person who’s not in it to make a name for herself.”

In the year since she took over, DAE membership has quadrupled to over 2,600 employees across the district, according to Kiddoo and others. The union now represents a majority of DPS workers across the district and is taking its power in numbers back to the school board to fight for a meet-and-confer policy.

After the fallout from the pay issue, the school board organized an ad hoc committee to discuss ways to prevent future miscommunication and other challenges between the school board and workers. The process, intended to be a negotiation between DAE, the school board, and DPS administrators, broadened when district administrators included non-union workers, frustrating DAE leadership. Four DAE members representing the union in the ad hoc committee walked out in protest at the start of a meeting on May 20. 

Although there is overlap between the goals of the union and those of individual workers, Kiddoo says the ad hoc committee has stalled progress on enacting a meaningful policy.

“The board has created a narrative that the idea of meet-and-confer with union recognition is somehow excluding other workers,” Kiddoo says. “We understand our job, as an employee representative organization, to have the broadest representation of voices possible. We recognize that there is a clear mistrust and gap of communication between individual workers and management. That is still true. That was apparent through the classified pay issue.

“It has been conflated into the same issue, and it’s not,” Kiddoo continues. “A possible path is that they could bifurcate the process. We should deepen the policy that exists for individual workers to be able to have better communication about their working conditions between management. But that is different from an organization of workers being able to sit down with management and negotiate on working and learning conditions.”

The school board and DAE have been in “deep partnership” for years, says Bettina Umstead, chair of the Durham school board. She says she hopes that, despite the recent dissolution of trust, the two organizations can continue to collaborate on what’s best for public schools going forward.

“We know they have a growing membership that is touching these buildings across Durham Public Schools and connecting folks, with the ability to connect with each other and help us grow and be better as a district,” says Umstead. “That’s a vital partnership and relationship that we have, and we want to make sure we keep and strengthen it. And then, how do we also make sure that we are looking at something everyone feels they have some connection to?”

But the trust that once existed between the board and DAE is seriously frayed. Natalie Beyer, a longtime school board member, is clear-eyed about the damage the payroll crisis did to the relationship between DPS leadership and the district’s rank and file. 

“Mistakes with people’s checks are unforgivable,” Beyer says. “It was worse to govern through than the pandemic for me. Because there was no easy way to fix it. And there was no clarity about what money we had to fix it with. And we had no CFO. It was a nightmare that kept going. And we felt responsible for all of them and the mistakes that were made by our staff.”

Meeting the DAE’s request for a meet-and-confer policy is one way DPS leaders could begin to repair relationships in the aftermath of that nightmare, but, after five meetings so far, the union and school board still have yet to agree on the terms of such a policy.

“We often hear our leaders say that Durham is a union town. This moment tests that proposition,” Kiddoo said at a rally in front of the Durham County administrative building on May 28. “We call upon the school district and the Board of Education to stand on the right side of history and recognize our union as a legitimate employee representative organization with a meet-and-confer policy.”

DAE could have more allies in leadership come this fall. Wendell Tabb, a longtime drama teacher at DPS’s Hillside High School who retired in 2022, and Joy Harrell, an educator and art instructor whose husband, Malcolm Goff, previously served in DAE leadership, will join the school board. Former DAE president Michelle Burton and former school board chair Mike Lee will join the board of county commissioners. 

And DPS is searching for a new superintendent. Whoever fills the position will face the tough task of building back burned bridges and realigning DPS, DAE, the school board, and the county commissioners as a united front facing a common adversary, the Republican-led General Assembly, which last year passed legislation to route more than $4 billion away from public schools and into private schools via vouchers over the next decade.

“There’s a public school and public institution issue of being underfunded, and then having people in leadership positions who don’t have the resources they need to be good leaders,” Kiddoo says. She acknowledges that administrators such as Mubenga and LeSieur made mistakes—but that it’s “hard to be the superintendent and the CFO of a public school district in North Carolina with massive underfunding and deeply impacted schools.

“The underfunding problem from the state for public education has been a very deliberate attack for a long time,” Kiddoo says. 

On June 10, the budget vote was the last item on the county commissioners’ agenda. 

Lane, the finance director, stepped to the podium to explain that, between the county’s contributions and funds remaining from the American Rescue Plan Act, the school board was getting its $27 million.

Durham county commissioner Heidi Carter, who served on the school board for 12 years before she was elected to the county commission in 2016, and who is serving her final term, said the budget reached 98 percent of the school board’s request.

The vote was not yet official, but the writing was on the wall. Months of advocacy from teachers, staff, parents, and others had succeeded.

The audience in the county meeting chambers erupted in applause.

But not everyone in the chamber was celebrating. When it came time to vote, veteran commissioner Brenda Howerton was the lone dissenter. She expressed concerns about the long-term sustainability of an increasing amount of the county’s budget going to education, and keeping DPS financially accountable after recent mismanagement. 

Howerton said her duty as a commissioner meant she had to consider the impact of a 4.65¢ tax increase on all county citizens, not just those in the education system.

“As a commissioner, I’ve learned to force tough conversations regarding systems accountability,” said Howerton, who is in her last term after losing her reelection in March.

“This proposed increase on top of the increase during the previous years deserves more reasonable discussion related to accountability,” Howerton said. “The honoring and support of teachers, administrators, and classified workers is worthy of that kind of consideration. It is also worth noting the impact of tax increases on the most vulnerable citizens. It is my contention that property tax increases by both the city and the county during the same period—it’s too much to ask our citizens.”

Howerton’s comments received applause, even from DAE members. She was right. The challenges facing the county and the public school system were far from over. Without a clear source to increase revenues, the current method of supplementing DPS’s budget with county funding at this scale is not a viable plan year after year.

But that was a problem for another day. That night, once the vote became official, the folks who had worked tirelessly to advocate for stability within Durham’s public schools were overjoyed.

Kiddoo couldn’t contain her jubilation, even as she prepared herself for the next fight.

“The union work we’ve done together this year has already transformed Durham for the better,” Kiddoo said at a press conference the next day following the successful 4–1 budget vote. “This is only the beginning. This victory will serve as an example for years to come, not just in Durham but all over North Carolina and the South. We did this.”

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