Valerie P. Foushee - On her accomplishments with the School Board

Tracey Barrett (TB): What is something that you are most proud of? That, sort of, you feel like was an accomplishment during your time on the School Board, that you look back on and say, like “I’m glad that I was there for that” or “I know I made a difference in that way?”

Valerie Foushee (VF): My biggest accomplishment is raising two sons, both of whom graduated from Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools. So that’s my greatest accomplishment because it means that those efforts that we put in place so that every child could be successful, because my tenure on the School Board was about that. It was about raising achievement levels for all kids. We talked so much about eliminating the gap, and we are still talking about that, but during my tenure we were able to see the gap start to close. What happened after that, is what happens across the country. But the gap started to close. And Chapel Hill High was one of the best high schools in America during that time. The pinnacle of what we do as School Board members -- and you see I talk about it in the present, its my favorite job – was sitting on a graduation stage watching three hundred or so kids walk by and seeing that jubilation, particularly if you are in the Smith Center, seeing all those folk being happy about these young folk that we are about to release upon the world, and everybody’s happy, and you see futures are really starting. I think that we worked hard to identify and start to remove stereotypes about children so that people had greater expectation for success of those students. All we wanted to do at one point was to have teachers when they stand at the door on that first day, see the same thing in every child. That this is a child that I can teach today. I think we made some inroads on that. I think that helping those who were responsible for kids every day to see them differently was probably, that was very important to me. We built a number of schools during my tenure, I think maybe three or four, after a period of maybe thirty years of not building schools and we put emphasis on those being healthy places where learning could occur and people weren’t worried about mold, or all those things that hinder the environment that we don’t think of until somebody gets sick. That we were building facilities that would last for- that they would have a long life cycle because it was green building, we were using less energy, I mean we had a focus on a number of things that we thought were not just important to the community, but were important to the environment, that was important to families, that was important to students. And so there were lots of things that I thought we accomplished as, maybe three or four iterations of school boards during that seven-year period that I was a member.