Tuesday was an advocacy day for education rights statewide, with a special event held in Raleigh that was intended to “lift up the needs of North Carolina public schools,” according to the N.C. Justice Center.
“Supporting public schools is about being a good neighbor to all people in our communities,” said Sarah Montgomery, senior policy advocate at the Justice Center. “We know that a well-funded and equitable public school system leads to improved health and economic outcomes for students, which in turn strengthens the social fabric of our society.”
That’s why the Cherokee Scout has spoken out against the General Assembly giving away hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to families with wealth and private schools with zero accountability. It’s also why your local newspaper has focused much of our coverage in recent years on education.
While growing up, my family always said I was going to college; not doing so never occurred to me. That’s why I was astounded to find out later that not only was I the first person from my family to attend and graduate from college, I was one of the first to even graduate from high school with my class.
Despite that, my mother and grandmother in particular realized education was important and drilled that thought into me at a young age. Our family was at the lower end of middle class, and they knew the more I learned, the better chance I had at leading a better life.
However, I really didn’t get passionate about education until I moved to Cherokee County in 11th grade.
During my freshman year at a 2,500-student high school in south Florida, I took algebra and passed, despite it being my first class of the day. During my sophomore year, I was assigned geometry.
For whatever reason, nothing clicked in geometry. I didn’t like it, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to do it, so somewhere along the way I decided to just sleep that hour away. Since the teacher never bothered trying to wake me up, I earned a D and a F for the first two nine-week periods before not even showing up to take the final exam, earning a great big I in the process.
For the second semester, I transferred to statistics. Being that I was a big baseball buff, and that class was easier than figuring out Phil Niekro’s earned run average, I pulled up my overall grade point average by earning a couple of A’s.
My family moved to Murphy for my junior year. While in the high school office figuring out my schedule, the counselor put geometry in the lineup. No thanks, I told her, I tried that and have no interest in going back for more. Don’t you offer an advanced statistics class?
The counselor frowned. She looked at my grades in other advanced classes during my first two years in high school. She looked at my high test scores. And she said, without equivocating, that as a result I would be taking geometry whether I liked it or not.
I’m quite certain I was the most unhappy person in Matt Rogers’ geometry class, which met in the circular building that also served as Murphy Middle School once upon a time. This was only Rogers’ first or second year in the classroom. He used the same textbook as the school in Florida. So everything was perfectly set up for an incoming disaster.
Yet, something changed. I don’t know whether my brain kicked into another gear or I just “got it,” but whatever Rogers did worked. For the first six weeks, I averaged 92 out of 100. My next five geometry grades continuously improved at 93, 94, 95, 97 and 99. I was even picked to go to the state geometry mathematics contest at Western Carolina University.
Just a year before, I had a 0 on the final.
So I’ve seen firsthand that education is very relevant. That teachers and schools are important. That public schools are not failing. We need smart people today more than ever, and that’s not going to happen if people decide they know enough and quit learning.
“It’s time,” Montgomery said, “for lawmakers to show that they care about the future of our communities by investing in our public schools.”
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 828-837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on X @daviddBstroh.