News and Observer Endorses Lori Millberg and Eleanor Goettee

Goettee
and Millberg were the top vote-getters in their districts in the
October general election, but to claim those seats on the nine-member
board, they must repeat that performance in Tuesday's runoff. Here's
how those two races shape up:

District 9

Eleanor Goettee's first North Carolina teaching job was at Carnage
Junior High School in Raleigh back in the days when it had 900 black
students and no whites. Teachers working with bedraggled social studies
textbooks containing outdated information are stuck in her memory.

Her experience tracks what researchers have learned about schools with
a majority of students hampered by poverty, a characteristic that
unfortunately still correlates with race. Without middle-class families
making demands, such schools receive few extras in terms of equipment
and programs, and it becomes difficult to retain the best teachers.

Wake has bucked those trends, despite patterns of segregation in
housing. For two decades, school board members have sought to
decentralize the work of teaching poor, mostly black students. The
board's policy is to keep populations of disadvantaged students between
25 percent and 40 percent in each school. It's a policy that has led to
a dramatic narrowing of the racial achievement gap.

Goettee, 57, now is executive director of the N.C. Professional
Teaching Standards Commission. She is superbly qualified to serve on
the school board and well understands the benefits of the district's
diversity policy at a time of record enrollment growth.

. . .

Goettee is unequivocally the candidate better prepared to help Wake's
schools maintain their steady progress toward excellence.

District 1

The N&O also gave its editorial endorsement to active school
volunteer Lori Millberg of Wendell in the general election. Millberg, a
lawyer by training and a former prosecutor in Houston, now faces a
runoff with Tillie Turlington of Wendell, director of children's
ministry at a Baptist church.

Turlington rightly points to parental involvement as a key factor in
student achievement. But she dodges the hard choices before school
board members on growth and diverse schools, gaining support from the
taxpayers' group and ABC.

Turlington says she counts on overcrowding to resolve itself. That's a
prescription for decline in this county. Without enough new seats,
classes will grow too large for teachers to give enough attention where
it's needed. Without a school board pressing for adequate operating
funds, Wake stands to lose good teachers to counties more willing to
supplement state salaries.

Millberg has chaired the District 1 advisory committee to the school
board and served on the district's Healthy Schools Task Force. She
offers her support for the diversity policy as willingly as she has
given her time in a host of volunteer roles in the schools.

Millberg's common-sense approach to growth is to increase the number of
year-round schools and step up the building program. She remains The
N&O's choice for the District 1 school board seat.