Valerie P. Foushee - On getting into politics (clip)

Tracey Barrett (TB): How did you decide to sort of get into politics? I mean, you described a long career in the Police Department, and obviously you were working your way up in many ways, from where you started to where you ended up as an administrator, but what led to your decision to -– am I right in saying that the School Board was the first political office --

Valerie Foushee (VF): Um hmm.

TB: --that you were on? What led to your decision to run for School Board?

VF: I was pushed into that one. When my, when my kids started elementary school, I was very involved. My husband and I were, just as my parents were, as, as hard as they worked, they never missed a school event, and so I did the same. My children were very involved. Because I saw to it that they were. Just like my parents made sure that we were at the church every Sunday, I made sure that my kids went to church every Sunday. And any event in which they were involved, we were there. I was, when I first started working at the Police Department, and after a year and a half, I started working shift work. I was a desk officer. And so when I got off at seven a.m. in the morning, I would go to Seawell like two or three times a week and help in the classroom. The first thing they did was to have some activity time out on the blacktop, and so while the teachers were inside working on centers or whatever, I was sitting out on the blacktop watching the kids play, I think. And so then afterwards I would come in and, cut out things, and that sort of thing. So I would come and help with whatever activities they had, when they had the activities outside, my husband and I would bring water, we would keep time for athletic stuff. And so that was part of what we did. There were teachers who thought that I should be involved in governance for our school.

TB: Like the PTA?

VF: Or the School Governance Committee is what it was called at that time. And so I was part of the SGC. We had elections for it, and so when I got elected, I was “Okay, this is interesting,” and so it gave me an opportunity to not just work for my kids but to work for a number of kids. Particularly black kids, because as I started to do research I realized that the expectation rate of young black males graduating from high school were kind of slim. And since I was raising two black males, which was always a statistic for me, working at the Police Department. I’m listening to the radio, because I’m a desk officer, I’m listening to it all night, and you hear these reports and “suspects are two black males,” “two black males,” “two black males,” and I would go to bed hearing “two black males” or wake up reading “two black males,” or “young black males” or whatever andso it was just important to me that my sons got a chance because what I also observed in the schools was that there was not a high expectation for African-American students in general, and even less so for black male students. And so my thing was to make sure that my kids were getting a chance, and they had great teachers. But I didn’t know that, until they got in those classes and I saw how those teachers related to them. And every teacher was not a great teacher and I also observed that that was not the case and so I was trying to look out for those kids whose parents didn’t have the opportunity to be involved, or those kids who, unfortunately, have parents who were not going to be involved because it was not their fault. And so after having served on the SGC for a while there were folk who said, “Maybe you should run for school board,” and I said, “Maybe I should not.” And I thought about it and my husband and I talked about how we would operate with me being gone at night and with there being an expectation that I would have to attend a number of meetings, and so we worked out a schedule for that to work. And so I ran and I won and then I ran again and I won. And over the course of that time there were some things developing with how schools in Orange County were being funded, and having an understanding of what those needs were, I felt like the Board of County Commissioners just did not have a clue, and that’s not to be disparaging of them. The whole conversation about competing needs for me was just buzz, until I became a Commissioner. But I just didn’t think it was being heard in a way that it should be. And then there were, there were folk who said to me, “Well maybe you should think about it.” And so I decided to think about it. And then the whole question of merger, merging the two systems to be one county school system. I don’t think on its face that it’s a bad thing. But when the people don’t want this and your reasoning is about funding being such that it’s going to be cheaper to merge when the evidence shows that that was not the case, when you’re saying that we have a system that disparages a group of students. Well, that was not true either. There were a number of untruths that were being promoted in the community about what merger could or would do. And so I had this idea that I think was held by the majority of people in Orange County that merger should be for one purpose, and that would be to elevate student achievement, and where you could not show that that was going to be the result of your merger, then perhaps merger was not--. The other thing was that most people in both districts wanted to maintain local control. And so that was clear to me and the other thing was what we talked about earlier, the lack of affordable housing in this area is just scary to me. I want to live here all of my life if I can, but I don’t know that I can. I told you that I started out in a two-bedroom duplex and then a three-room apartment, and then when Stan and I first had an opportunity for a homeownership, we purchased a fourteen-by-seventy 1969 trailer. We bought property, but that’s what we lived in until we were able to build a manufactured house on that setting. And from that, because we were in the school system, we sold it for three times what we paid for it.

TB: Where was that?

VF: That’s how we were able to move here.

TB: Wow.

VF: Out on Dairyland Road in Calvander. It’s amazing. And so, I think that my impetus had to do with school funding and affordable housing in Orange County. And so I was able to run for the Board on that platform. And I was the frontrunner in that race. That was kind of scary to me. The second time I ran, I ran unopposed. So here we are.