To be a Durham school board member is to bear a monstrous amount of responsibility—yes, education for 30,000 kids, but also managing a workplace for over 5,000 employees and stewarding the tax dollars of over 340,000 residents—while having almost no power to actually do anything.
Need more money or a new school building? Go beg the county commission to raise taxes even more. Don’t like how the district administration is handling something? Go complain to the superintendent, your one employee, and hope he doesn’t follow a trend of superintendent turnover and leave for another district in a state that actually funds education. Want to take a principled stand for progressive values like Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s school board chair did? Enjoy getting your ass dragged before a state legislature hellbent on prosecuting a culture war rather than passing a budget to, say, pay teachers fairly.
That’ll be the reality for whichever four candidates win seats on the Durham Public Schools (DPS) Board of Education in the March primary.
Durham is split into four districts, and each board member is elected only by the people in that district, so check your registrationto see who will be on your ballot. This is also a non-partisan general election, not a primary election, so you won’t see these names again in November.
For this election, the Durham Association of Educations, the district’s majority-member union, endorsed a slate of candidates early in the campaign season and helped them land the coveted local People’s Alliance endorsement (check out our previous coverage for more information on who the major PACs have endorsed). All four endorsees have insisted they would be independent decisionmakers, but a DAE sweep would certainly give the union some leverage in a nascent meet and confer experiment, which gives the union a seat at the district decision-making table and has often been contentious.
Board members will also have to calculate how much leeway they want to give to the superintendent, who has something of a mixed hiring record so far (CFO Jeremy Teetor has gained near-universal acclaim for his work in untangling the district’s messy finances; Deputy Superintendent Tanya Giovanni was recently accused of obstructing justice).
And the board is set to lose at least 23 years of experience—of the four incumbents whose seats are up for election, only one is running for reelection.
Each of the four districts has three candidates, and we spent our January getting to know all 12 of them (in covering local elections, we’ve occasionally encountered candidates who should clearly never be trusted with any kind of power—this does not appear to be one of those elections). We asked them about their priorities, their experience, and how they imagine themselves working with the DAE, administrators, and parents. Here’s our rundown of the 12 DPS candidates.
Your move, Durham.
District 1
Dilcy Burton is an assistant attorney general for North Carolina’s Department of Justice. She has a list of agenda items she’d bring to the board, including changing the DPS holiday schedule to match the more inclusive New York City school calendar. As a state certified mediator, Burton says she is qualified to help get all the right people talking about how to fix DPS’s various issues. She’s also pushing for full budget transparency and teacher pay, arguing that DPS needs to fairly compensate its workers if it wants to provide students with the best possible outcomes. She’s particularly interested in, yes, trying to get more money from the state, but also in trying to better leverage grants and relationships with private companies in order to get the most possible funding for DPS.
“We want to see DPS successful. We want our students educated so that they have a better tomorrow. We want to do what’s right by the Durham community. So it comes to the fact that you have to be able to listen, reevaluate, and make sure that everyone is operating under that same goal as we move forward.”
Davit Melikian is a first vice chair of the Durham Democratic party and the owner of a custom home building company. He studied operations management and finance and worked in corporate finance before leaving to start his own businesses. While he doesn’t have education experience, he brings a strong understanding of infrastructure, which will be relevant as the board weighs its massive deferred maintenance costs from recent years. He’s also eyeing sites like the soon-to-be defunct Durham School of Arts campus for ideas including a trade education program or even renting the property to help DPS find a little more revenue.
“Charter schools aren’t just going to disappear. Private schools aren’t going to disappear. This is a long road, this is a long fight … There has to be good communication. If there isn’t good communication on the board, let alone between all these different parts of the governing bodies of the city and the county, it’s going to be very hard, we have to be on the same page.”
Natalie Bent Kitaif has a background in research and public health. She describes her view of public schools as hubs of community as well as places of learning, which she sees as especially important in 2026. She has been involved in organizing and advocacy around her children’s schools, including a push to bring back the social-emotional learning curriculum, and is interested in bringing more resources and attention to the DPS schools that don’t necessarily have the best reputations or rankings. With strong family ties to labor organizing, she says that she wants to see the meet and confer process continue in good faith from both the union and administrative sides. She’s also gained endorsements from most of Durham’s major PACs.
“I’m running because I believe that we need to bring transparency to our public schools, especially around our budget. We need to be fighting for student safety and well being, both their physical and their emotional safety, and I believe we need to be doing the best we can to support and retain our amazing staff.”
District 2
Bettina Umstead is finishing her second full term on the board and is the current chair. She previously served as chair from 2020-2024. Umstead previously worked at education nonprofit Student U and The Equity Collaborative, and was recently appointed to the governor’s advisory council on student safety and wellbeing. Umstead is highlighting that, in her tenure, the county commission has consistently increased its financial support of DPS and that she has continued to push for raises for staff each year. Umstead will have to convince voters that she is responsible for the positives of her tenure while sidestepping the high-profile messes. She could make a compelling case for experience, given that she is the only one of the four incumbents who has chosen to run again.
“Why I run for the school board and why I love public schools is because I really believe that public school education is transformative for our students … It’s our duty and our moral imperative, I would argue, as a public school system, to make sure the Black and brown students in Durham, the students who mostly will be first generation college students, have that same opportunity. I’ve done this work for over 10 years now, and that’s what I’m fighting for.”
Rachel Waltz is a program manager currently working with Community Solutions. She previously worked at Orange County Housing and Community Development. As a social worker, she says she has a clear understanding of the challenges that students and parents may be having at home that impact how they show up to school. She says that the best way for DPS to rebuild trust is to actually listen to the community, and implement changes based on those suggestions. She’s worked with various levels of government in her day job, and says she is prepared to build coalitions, both on the board and off, to respond to the district’s challenges. She’s jumping into the election this year because she was disappointed by the district’s response to federal immigration officials showing up in Durham.
“As I’ve unpacked certain challenges you see at school, I’ve learned that many of these challenges are not specific to our particular school. They’re really indications of a lack of oversight, lack of infrastructure, and a lack of accountability, oftentimes at the central office level and at the board of education level. I really learned that we have 57 loosely affiliated schools, rather than having an actual functional school system with infrastructure.”
Nadeen Bir is the director of finance and human resources at Press On, a media collective, and a co-founder of Mothers for Ceasefire. She sees her work in finance and HR as directly relevant to the issues that DPS is facing, with budget problems and a recent indictment of several administrators. Bir is running partly because she saw a lack of unity during the recent immigration enforcement crackdown, while she would’ve liked to see a uniform stance and training for staff. She is particularly interested in teacher retention via improving pay, as well as meeting some of the stated needs of the DAE (such as biweekly pay instead of monthly pay, which the union and administration have recently stalled over).
“I’m a long time Durham resident community organizer. I’m a mother who has two kids in Durham Public Schools, my husband is a teacher in Durham Public Schools, and I bring a lot of expertise in regards to management, human resources, budgeting. I also am very value centered. I believe in social justice. I believe in equity and transparency, and that’s why I’m running for school board.”
District 3
Peter Crawford is a co-founder and head of operations at real estate startup Acre. He has three children currently in DPS schools, and has worked as PTA treasurer and served in special operations in the Army. Crawford is arguing that he is equipped to bring board members together to build governance structures to avoid scrambling from crisis to crisis. Like many candidates, Crawford says he was motivated to run after seeing the district fumble a promised 2024 staff pay increase that it then had to walk back. He says that he wants to help steer the board to set achievable goals for the superintendent to reach.
Crawford is not registered with a political party, but his detractors may note that he voted in Republican primaries over the past 10 years. He says that he was doing his “small part” to try to steer the party away from Trump.
“What I’m bringing is a tremendous amount of experience leading in pretty complicated organizations: building teams and leading teams and going through the budgets and the hard decisions and all that that come with those kinds of organizations.”
Lauren Sartain is a professor of K-12 education policy at UNC Chapel Hill. She is also an E.K. Powe parent and the former PTA president of that school. In her day job, she has helped districts like Chicago Public Schools to navigate some of the same financial and logistical issues that have plagued DPS. She has previously pushed DPS to adopt zero-based budgeting, which rebuilds an annual budget from zero, rather than from the previous year’s allocations. As a self-described policy nerd, she is promising to use her professional experience to chart a data-driven path forward for the district.
Sartain also has a unique reputation in DPS circles—she’s aware that some administrators may not be a fan of her sharp comments at school board meetings and in emails to officials, but she says that she’s just not afraid to ask the tough questions.
“I have both these personal experiences firsthand with schools and advocating for students and employees, and then I have my professional expertise where I’ve spent the last 20 years of my career working with school districts to help them solve some of the same problems that we’re facing in Durham. So I feel like it’s a moral obligation for me to raise my hand and throw my hat in the ring to try to improve our schools.”
Gabby Rivero is the founder of a therapeutic dance company and she currently serves on the city’s recreation advisory committee. She has been an advocate for children since her undergraduate years, when she built a nonprofit around providing students with access to arts and often mentions her focus on finding “root causes” of behavior and issues.
In her campaign, she described how being a Black mother with half-Puerto Rican children has informed her perspective on DPS’s equity and achievement gap, which countless iterations of the board have struggled to address. She has promised to focus on communicating about DPS’s prestigious magnet programs to Black and Hispanic families that may not know about them.
Rivero, in a high energy interview, also called out DPS’s response to increased immigration enforcement last year, arguing that the district should be more outspokenly protective of its students and families.
“I’m not above community. I’m with community …We want things to be accessible to people. We don’t want people to have to find more resources to attain the things that they need, and we need to be able to bring things to people so that they have access”
District 4
Xavier Cason is a longtime educator and former board member hoping to make a comeback. He was a teacher for decades, working at literally every level of public education from elementary to university. He was elected to two terms on the board, but left at the start of his second term to direct the Bull City Schools Partnership as it would’ve caused a conflict of interest with his board role. He says that the district has made a lot of quiet progress in getting students caught up after pandemic-era setbacks, but that work has been overshadowed. Cason, along with Bent Kitaif, is also one of the most endorsed DPS candidates, with backing from Durham’s major groups.
“I’m coming back as an active listener in a way that I thought I was before, but having been on the ground for six years, working in the schools with school leaders, I’ve got some different perspective—a wider perspective—than I had before … I‘d love to get another chance to really, really look deeply into the actual staff work to see how we improve implementation, so the great ideas that are in our policies can actually come to pass.”
Kristy Moore is a former DPS teacher, former DAE president, and former vice president of the North Carolina Association of Educators. She is promising to bring a keen eye on the budget, and says that her experience in education, education policy, and education organizing makes her the best equipped candidate to deal with the state and national funding uncertainty that DPS is dealing with now. She would like to see the board implement a better communication strategy, especially in presenting options for parents who are being peeled away from DPS by charter or private schools. Despite her past work running the organization, Moore did not win the endorsement of the DAE; she says that perhaps the organization felt they would not be able to influence her data-driven approach.
“We in Durham Public Schools need someone who’s willing to stand up for what is right, and who will look at data strategically and understand where we need to go, and be able to work with all stakeholders—parents, students, educators, everyone across the gamut, business leaders—and being able to work as a board together.
Jerome Leathers is a former principal at Southern High School of Environment and Sustainability and Jordan High School. He describes his decades of work as an educator as a labor of love for his students, and says that “coach” is the favorite nickname he’s earned over the years. He says that the district needs to treat all its employees with respect, and that the district can attract students back by improving communication of all of the good things that happen in schools, instead of just ending up in the news during crises.
“We have to be transparent to our community. We are public schools, right? There’s no need of trying to conceal information or different things about what may be going on with the school district … Things happen, but how much confidence do we have in the board fixing them? Also financially, we’ve gone through a bit of a turn, and it is time to get us straight and steer the ship in the right direction.”
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