Jessica Carda-Auten, currently the incumbent representative for District 3 on the Durham Public Schools Board of Education, was appointed to the post in March 2023. Now 43, she attended public schools in New Hanover and Mecklenburg counties. Her three children attend DPS schools. She’s got 15 years of experience in public health and research, currently working on staff at UNC Chapel Hill.

Southpoint Access asked Carda-Auten to answer some questions for our readers. The same invitation has been extended to other candidates for Board of Education. We will publish their responses as soon as possible after they are received.

Please share your educational background and any professional or personal experiences that qualify you to serve on the DPS Board of Education.

Jessica Carda-Auten: I am running for the Board of Education District 3 seat, a position to which I was appointed in March 2023. I am the mother of three children that attend Lakewood Elementary and have been an active parent in the school for nearly 5 years. Being part of this school community provided me with a window into the amazing work of our educators, but also into the systemic issues facing our schools. I saw how staffing shortages, language barriers, poverty, and inadequate funding for the public education system, among other factors, contribute to learning environments that often fail to meet the needs of Durham’s children. And I saw that our most vulnerable students – children living in poverty, English-language learners, immigrants, Black and brown children, neurodiverse children, and LGBTQIA+ children – were often most negatively affected.

I have 15 years of experience as a public health practitioner and researcher, and am currently on staff at UNC Chapel Hill, where I use qualitative methods to integrate patient perspectives into medical care, improve healthcare provision in the criminal justice system, and expand services for individuals recently released from incarceration. I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Masters in Public Health with a concentration in Women’s and Reproductive Health and certificate in Maternal and Child Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I believe that every child deserves a strong public education and I bring my collaborative style of leadership and my research-based approach to analyzing problems and finding practical solutions to support all children of Durham Public Schools.

What do you think of how the board and administrators handled the classified pay situation?

Jessica Carda-Auten: Now that we have the report that provides details from the investigation, I believe it is clear that a number of DPS leaders should have taken steps to prevent the initial error and then could have taken steps since it was initially discovered that would have minimized harm. There has also been plenty of room for improvement in communication from administration to staff and families.

The intent of the Board of Education–and the reason that a salary study was conducted and an increased budget request to the county was approved by the Board in spring 2023–was to increase the salaries of our classified staff and address issues of wage compression and inequity. From the time that the Board received preliminary information about the error in early January, I believe we have tried to make the best decisions possible with the information that we had available to us. As more information has been revealed, we have taken and will continue to take additional steps to ensure that we pay all of our staff in a way that is equitable and fair and competitive with neighboring school districts, while also making fiscally responsible decisions.

What is your vision for the future of Durham Public Schools, and how would you help to achieve it?

Jessica Carda-Auten: It is my vision that Durham Public Schools is a place where every child — regardless of race, background, or zip code — receives a high-quality education. I will help to achieve this vision by:

• 1: Working to improve the ways that I am listening to our community (students, families, and staff) and incorporating their vision and values into my work on the Board.
• 2: Continuing to participate in professional development opportunities that provide me with the skills and abilities to be a strong school equity-minded, outcomes-oriented board member.
• 3: Following the data in all of my decision-making, which includes the existing research on a given topic when available, and the perspectives of our community members.
• 4: Maintaining our most vulnerable students at the forefront of my thinking and decision-making.
• 5: Working to ensure that our district and our schools have the strongest leadership possible through guidance, clear communication, and accountability mechanisms.

Durham Public Schools, like many districts, faces challenges with achievement gaps. What strategies would you use to address these gaps?

Jessica Carda-Auten: I believe DPS needs to address achievement gaps through data analysis and equity-focused decision making.

Durham Public Schools needs to develop a regular cadence by which we are evaluating district data, including academic data and student discipline data. ALL data needs to be disaggregated by race, ethnicity, limited English proficiency status, and disability status (the Strategic Plan requires some of this and the Black and Hispanic Student Achievement Plan will require more) and by school. As we monitor data, we need to be prepared to shift our strategies and resource allocation when we don’t see the results our children need and deserve.

As a researcher, I believe we should rely upon best practices and up-to-date research, but I believe it is also important to prioritize the voices of families and teachers, and particularly those most affected by the disparities in academic outcomes and disciplinary actions, as their lived experiences make them our most valuable experts on these topics.

How would you engage with and incorporate feedback from diverse communities in Durham into your decision-making process?

Jessica Carda-Auten: I am a public health trained qualitative researcher who works with incarcerated and recently incarcerated individuals to improve their access to and quality of healthcare by listening to their experiences and their needs. I use the skills I have honed in this work–including active listening, an ability to build relationships with individuals who have very different life experiences from my own, and ways to use data to inform policies and procedures–to more effectively do my work on the DPS Board.

During my time involved with the PTA at Lakewood Elementary, I was able to be part of the implementation of the Community Schools model. My public health background gave me the expertise to help with developing listening sessions, surveys, and focus group/interview guides. I also ensured that we heard from a demographically representative sample and had the information necessary to transform our school into the learning environment that our community wanted and needed. This research-based approach to gathering feedback allowed us to build a school that truly centered the families at the school. Similarly, applying this approach to my work on the Board of Education, I believe we can build a school system that centers the students, families, and educators who are actually in our school buildings.

In my first year on the Board, I have met with parents, students, educators, and school administrators, and I incorporate what I learn during these meetings into my decision-making. In this next year, I would like to establish a more systematic way for the Board to gather community input and for us to share information with the community, and I would like for this to occur on a regular basis.

What are the greatest challenges that you think DPS faces and how should the board address those challenges?

Jessica Carda-Auten: The top four issues facing our schools right now are:

• 1: Gaps in district leadership that have resulted from recent financial mismanagement/classified salary crisis.
• 2: Disparities in academic outcomes and discipline methods used for our white and/or financially-privileged students and our Black and Hispanic students, our students living in poverty, our students with disabilities, and/or our students with limited English proficiency.
• 3: Social, emotional, and mental health challenges facing our students and staff as we emerge from a global pandemic that brought isolation and a separation from community.
• 4: Insufficient numbers of staff in our schools to adequately address challenges 2 and 3 noted above and to provide the best educational experience possible for the children of Durham.

The challenges are enormous, multifaceted, and not unique to Durham, but I do not believe that they are insurmountable, even amidst the current state-level attacks on our public education system. To address these issues, I believe we need to prioritize the following:

• Strong leadership: This begins with the Board of Education, especially in terms of supporting and holding our leadership accountable. We lead by example and we need to provide the superintendent with clear expectations for what we want to see, a road map of how to get there, and clear metrics to evaluate our progress. We also need strong leadership in every school building that is able to recruit and retain excellent teachers, foster a supportive working environment for all staff, and cultivate a nurturing, academically rigorous environment for all students.
• Data-driven decision making: DPS must engage in data-driven decision making if we want to use our limited resources in a way that produces the outcomes our students deserve. We need to use evidence to guide the work–from the selection of curriculum to improve academic outcomes to the identification of strategies for reducing the use of exclusionary discipline–and evaluate our efforts–at the district and the school level–to determine whether what is being done is achieving the intended outcomes.
• Student-centered work: DPS is an incredibly diverse learning environment. This is an asset and part of what makes our schools unique. The diversity of our student population also means that each of our students have different strengths and different needs, and the same is true for our families. To be an effective educational system, DPS must simultaneously be able to support our immigrant students and their families, our English language learners, our students with disabilities and neurodiverse students, our students living in poverty, our students of different races, students of different gender identities, those that have experienced complex trauma, and students with intersecting marginalized identities. Our schools have to be prepared to support the whole learner and shift our culture away from expecting children to rise to the needs of a system that is no longer working for them.

What policies or initiatives would you support to enhance the safety and mental health resources available to students at our schools?

I am supportive of the recommendations made by the Community Safety and Wellness Task Force, especially putting more resources into implementing restorative practices more consistently across the district. This will need to look like training for all school-based educators as well as support for educators who are struggling to implement these practices with fidelity, all of which should be led by a Restorative Practices Director/Administrator.

I have also been pleased by the work of the HEART program throughout Durham, and I am interested in exploring what this might look like in the school setting. Currently, school-based staff can find themselves so busy responding to crises that they are not able to do the work of counseling or social work or behavioral interventions that the rest of our student population so desperately needs. Providing our schools with crisis response personnel will allow school-based staff to invest in preventive strategies that we know work.

Finally, to the extent that it is possible with our limited resources, we must continue to work to ensure that our schools have the support staff needed. This includes, but is not limited to, school counselors, social workers, psychologists, nurses, and restorative practice coordinators.

Would you like to add anything else for consideration that hasn’t already been touched upon?

Jessica Carda-Auten: I take the following general approach in my interactions and my work: To remain humble and recognize that I do not know everything and that my experience as a white, upper-middle-class, cisgender, able-bodied woman limits my ability to understand the experiences of those of other races, social classes, gender identities, and abilities. It is for this reason that I make an effort to step back, to listen, and to learn from others before asserting my position and that I am always open to feedback and critique from others, especially those with a lived experience that is different from my own.

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