Shore
Joey Shore never could have imagined the sea of controversy he was about to dive into four years ago, when he agreed to become a member of the Cherokee County Board of Education.
The coin flip that put him into a vacant seat in late 2018 soon gave way to uproar over high school consolidation, which was then followed by more than two years of difficult decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Republican incumbent is part of Cherokee County’s most contested race, with five people vying for one of the two District 3 posts.
In spite of the many challenges school board members have faced over the last four years, Shore said he enjoys being part of the decision-making process. The plain-spoken Shore makes no apologies for his votes to upgrade the school system’s high schools.
“We’ve got the jail over here, and our Cherokee County criminals have better facilities than our schools,” Shore said. “We have new fire departments, a new courthouse, a new social services building – and this is stuff we all have to have, I get it – but our schools are on the bottom of the totem pole.”
Shore and his wife have two children, including a son who attends Murphy High School. He has been a general contractor for 25 years, which is still only half of the 50 years since Cherokee County officials began discussing school consolidation. Shore believes new school facilities should have been built decades earlier.
“I agree, the timing ain’t right, but the timing was right 20 years ago or 15 years ago, and it should’ve been done then,” Shore said. “You’ve got Murphy (High) with termites that have got two rooms shut down over there, and it’s really sad when you think about it, what our kids are in, and drive over here and see what our criminals are in.
“I bet there are no termites in their cells. We’ve gotten our priorities backward somewhere with our school system.”
The consolidated high school that has been approved in Peachtree has received a variety of critiques. Shore said those arguments often center on a push to instead build two new high schools – albeit without a plan of how to pay for multiple campuses – or a desire to build a consolidated campus in the “center” of Cherokee County, which would put it somewhere in Grape Creek.
“We spent countless hours of research going through looking into different locations,” Shore said. “This ain’t something that the school board took lightly. There was a lot of study, there was a lot of research that went into this and there was a lot of emotion that went into it.”
Shore hopes a brand-new Cherokee County high school will provide as good or better opportunities than schools like Union County High School in Blairsville, Ga., which routinely lures away local students and teachers. He would like to see local students have access to class options such as auto mechanics, which is offered by schools in a handful of neighboring counties.
Shore said those kinds of jobs are already out there, in desperate need of a new generation of trade workers to fill them. It’s something he’s experienced firsthand with his construction company.
“I’m begging for help,” he said. “I can’t find young folks to work.”
While school unification may be far and away the most talked about issue on a local level, Shore believes it’s the policies that come from outside of Cherokee County that may be most relevant to students. He said parents and grandparents shouldn’t have to worry about issues such as gender-neutral restrooms or mask mandates being forced on students.
“Our morals, values and standing up for our kids’ rights, that’s our most important thing,” Shore said. “We as a county (need to) stand firm on our beliefs.”