CHCCS candidate Meredith Pruitt. Photo from meredithpruitt.com

Meredith Pruitt is not your typical candidate for the Chapel Hill–Carrboro City Schools Board of Education. 

For one thing, she’s a registered Republican in one of the bluest counties in the state. For another, she’s raised a lot more money than any of her five opponents in the nonpartisan race, likely the most ever in a CHCCS school board race. This, combined with a vague platform and a handful of high-profile, conservative donors, means Pruitt has garnered much more scrutiny than other candidates. She’s emblematic, some parents and activists say, of a local iteration of a right-wing infiltration of school boards by conservative candidates hoping to launch their political careers that’s playing out nationally. 

“Beware the right-wing effort in the Chapel Hill Carrboro School Board elections,” wrote Susan Hester, a Chapel Hill resident and political activist, in an email to school system parents that was forwarded to the INDY. “School boards are the entry point for many elected officials—and the right-wing is maximizing that tactic.”

Pruitt did not respond to the INDY’s multiple requests for comment for this story. 

According to her website, Pruitt is a 10-year resident of North Carolina, originally from Boston. While in North Carolina, she served as the chief of staff and senior vice president of the UNC System under President Margaret Spellings from 2016 to 2019. Prior to this, she worked for Davidson College, where she served as special assistant to the president of the university. 

Most of Pruitt’s career, however, was spent working in national politics, including as a senior advisor to Spellings, who was then the U.S. secretary of education under George W. Bush, as a vice president of external affairs for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers in 2009, and at lobbying firms.

Spellings—who donated $500 to Pruitt’s campaign and officiated Pruitt’s wedding in her 2020 marriage to her husband Jonathan Pruitt, the COO of the UNC System and former vice chancellor for finance and operations at UNC–Chapel Hill—left a sour taste in the mouths of many. She was selected secretively after the UNC System Board of Governors fired Democratic System leader Tom Ross. 

In 2005, as education secretary, Spellings wrote a public letter to PBS condemning gay characters in a children’s television show. She went on to make disparaging comments about LGBT “lifestyles” around the time she was appointed as the UNC System president in 2015.

“Ms. Spellings has been a vocal opponent of the gay and transgender community,” said Chris Sgro, the director of Equality NC at the time of Spellings’s appointment. “Our schools’ administrators are responsible for creating safe environments for our students to learn without distractions. Spellings does not have the needs of North Carolina’s LGBT students in her interests.”

Big money

Along with Pruitt, Riza Jenkins, Mike Sharp, George Griffin, Tim Sookram, and Ryan Jackson are vying for spots on the CHCCS board. According to her 35-day campaign disclosure, Pruitt raised $14,079, blowing the other candidates out of the water.

Next in line was Jenkins, who raised $2,142.83 (Jenkins herself was the largest contributor). Candidate Griffin has amassed $1,018.77. Sookram, Jackson, and Sharp have not filed finance reports with the state Board of Elections because they are not spending more than $1,000 on their campaigns—the threshold at which a report needs to be filed.

A large chunk of Pruitt’s cash haul—$4,820—came from herself and several relatives.

Among other top donors are a number of well-known Republicans. John Preyer, who is the current vice chair of the UNC-CH Board of Trustees, nominated by state senate president Phil Berger, is known for voting against tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones and was the lone vote against the moratorium on renaming UNC buildings named after white supremacists; he contributed $1,000 to Pruitt’s campaign and has a track record as a major Republican donor.

Other conservative donors include Lauren Maddox, a Washington, D.C.–based lobbyist who also worked under Spellings, and Andrew Miracle, who is related to McMichael textile manufacturing magnates; both contributed $1,000 to Pruitt’s campaign. Nina Owcharenko, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a member of the Trump transition team, gave $200 to Pruitt’s campaign, and $250 came from Holly Kuzmich, the Dallas-based executive director of the George W. Bush Institute.

“They are literally trying to buy the seat,” CHCCS parent Karen Herpel wrote in an email to the INDY. “Her signs are everywhere, mailers have hit people’s boxes, pop-up ads are on the web, and she has a professionally designed website sprinkled with educational buzzwords.”

Such buzzwords and right-wing talking points—goals of “data-driven” decision-making and “focusing on the fundamentals: reading, math, and science”—fill Pruitt’s website, and she has repeated them when speaking publicly. While it’s not clear what data Pruitt would use to drive what kinds of decision-making, critics say that focusing on “data” is a way to avoid having to address the equity issues that exist in public schools, especially around race, a topic that Pruitt has been seemingly loath to address. Pruitt has also alluded to data informing decisions to keep students at home during the pandemic, with which she disagreed.

“One of my focal points of my platform is I think students need to be in school full-time learning, and I would say that hasn’t happened over the past year and a half and we could have done a much better job in thinking about data points that came down from the CDC or the American Journal of Pediatrics or whomever it was who had some thoughts,” Pruitt said at a recent candidate forum hosted by Tar Heel Teachers. 

At the same forum, she said she supports having armed police officers in schools. 

“We live in a world of laws and rules and we need some sort of enforcement when things get violent, and so having some trained safety officials on-site at these institutions makes some good sense to me,” Pruitt said. “It’s kind of common sense in that regard.”

A national strategy

Some public schools advocates say campaigns like Pruitt’s are indicative of a growing national movement and that we can expect to start seeing conservative foundations donating money to elect school board candidates, apiece with a broader strategy to undermine public schools and teachers’ unions through the school choice and voucher movements. 

“Earlier this year, Steve Bannon started talking about the way towards victory for Republicans was through local school boards,” says Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group with a mission to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools. “It’s not a coincidence. It is part of this strategy and it’s been a somewhat effective strategy.”

The movement has culminated, post-pandemic, in heightened scenes at school board meetings, with attendees railing against mask mandates and straw-man issues like critical race theory education, to the point that most parents “don’t even understand what is happening in terms of instruction in their schools,” in Burris’s words. 

Put another way, it’s a means to excite the base.

“[Republicans] certainly seized on the pandemic as a way to get a good foothold into all of this by promoting the narrative that parents were very unhappy with their local schools during the pandemic,” Burris says. “All of it is incredibly disruptive and incredibly discouraging for the professionals who dedicated their lives to work with children. If you’re out to destroy what you consider to be a government school, what better way to do it than to create chaos?”

But Pruitt’s supporters, including a local nonpartisan group that formed to petition for reopening schools during the pandemic, comprised of several dozens of CHCCS parents, are trying to steer voters away from the partisan narrative. Pruitt is the only candidate the group endorsed.

In an email to the group’s listserv, Leyla Stambaugh, a psychologist who donated $250 to Pruitt’s campaign, wrote the group doesn’t endorse the Republican or Democratic candidate “but rather voting on the issues.”

“We have seen some emails attempting to paint the school board election as overly political,” the email begins. “Our group includes parents from across the political spectrum. On the issues of protecting in-person instruction and putting students first, we believe that Meredith Pruitt remains the best candidate.”

Stambaugh writes that Pruitt is the only candidate talking about “the fact that 40% of CHCCS students are not reading at grade level” and the only candidate “who has acknowledged the learning losses accrued from remaining in remote school for over a year.”

“We do not foresee any of the other candidates bringing real change to the Board in terms of focusing on the learning and emotional needs of all students in the district, and getting away from the over-use of online technology in everyday learning, in particular for the youngest students,” the email says.

The email also mentions using bullet voting—where voters vote for only one candidate for the three open seats—as a way to shore up support for Pruitt. Pruitt herself has pushed this strategy to her supporters, too. 

“So many of these candidates are ‘same old, status quo’ and that will do nothing but perpetuate the recent and current directions of the Board,” the email states. “It’s not a requirement to vote for three board members.”

This strategy is alarming to voters like Hester, the political activist, and parents like Herpel. Despite some nominal support from Democrats and the unaffiliated—Pruitt’s campaign finance records show a $500 donation from Lindsay Kelly, the press secretary for Teach for America and a registered Democrat married to Andrew Kelly, senior vice president for strategy and policy for the UNC System and Pruitt’s former colleague—many in the community still view Pruitt’s campaign with skepticism. 

“Her candidacy is the Republican party’s first true attempt to infiltrate this school district,” Herpel wrote in a widely circulated email that was forwarded to the INDY. “As we have seen, they have been extremely successful in wielding power and therefore policy down the road at UNC-CH and across the state at every level of government, including school boards. Her candidacy is a strategic, well-funded effort to get a Republican on the CHCCS School Board.” 

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