Valerie P. Foushee

This interview is in association with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center’s Life History Series. Senator Valerie Foushee, born May 7th 1956 is a lifelong member of the First Baptist Church. She began attending First Baptist at the age of two when her grandmother would bring her and her siblings to church as their parents worked. She met her husband and the majority of her loved ones at the church, because it has been a focal point of her life spiritually and socially. Her children are also members of the First Baptist congregation and attend on a regular basis as she did as children. She reflects on this in the time transcribed. Valerie reflects on how being a part of the First Baptist community shaped her as an individual, not just as a spiritual center but as a social and educational community center. She reveals that that is where she was first introduced to parliamentary procedure, which influenced her future career as a North Carolina State Senator. She concludes this portion with the discussion of how her faith sustained both her and her family through troubled and painful periods and how she and her husband and long time friend use prayer in their lives.

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.

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.

TB: So after you left you mentioned that you were working full time, what job were you working at?

Valerie Foushee: I started out working part time while I was at Carolina for the Chapel Hill School system driving a school bus and being a bus monitor, and then I got a job at Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and I worked there for almost five years. And from Blue Cross and Blue Shield I started working for a private company, Research & Evaluation Associates, and both of those jobs allowed me to use my skills for writing and my mathematics skills to move up. And at Research & Evaluation Associates I was a bookkeeper who prepared all of our documents for the CPA, and the CPA was always telling me how good my documentation was, that they never had to worry about the information that I forwarded and that sort of thing and so I kind of stuck with it until I left there. I was laid off from that position but I started working for the Chapel Hill Police Department shortly after that. And I did a number of things, but I started out as a records clerk, making about twelve, a little over twelve grand a year, and that was the beginning of my career at the Police Department and I stayed there for 21 years. When I left I was an administrator, without a college degree.

Valerie Foushee: ...or I would just kind of like stay in my room, watch TV and study, but I was at Carolina, and that was important.

Tracey Barrett: So did you, you lived on campus all four years?

VF: I lived on campus for two years, and my roommate the first year was a sophomore from the Henderson area, from Vance County, and so when I was social on campus it was with her friends. And then my sophomore year my roommate was a freshman from Chapel Hill, and we knew each other well and we planned to share a room. But by that time my boyfriend who is now my husband was stationed in the military and so he was at Fort Bragg by that time so he came to visit, you know, when he came to Chapel Hill so I really didn’t have much of a social life on campus. My freshman year also there was a lot of political kind of racial unrest at Carolina so I was marching on South Building like all the other black kids until my mom saw me on TV. My mom was a maid at the Carolina Inn at the time, and I happened to be, I was living on the ninth floor in Hinton James dorm and I happened to be looking out the window and I saw this woman walking down the brick walkway at like thirty five miles an hour, and she came into the dorm and she came to my room on the ninth floor and she told me in no uncertain terms, “I am not sending you to college to riot every day. You are here for an education, and that better be the last time I see you on TV,” and it was the last time she saw me on TV because I went to class after that. So it was--, I was too afraid to be embarrassed that my mom came to the dorm with her maid uniform on because she made it clear to me that, again, my education was important, and that they were making huge sacrifices because I was the first, I was the oldest kid. They were making a huge sacrifice for me to be there. So I knew the importance of it but after that year I didn’t return to Carolina, after my sophomore year. And then the year after that I got married.

This interview is part of a project of biographical interviews, 1979-2012, with men and women in North Carolina who have made significant contributions to business, the arts, education, and politics. Topics discussed in Valerie P. Foushee's interview include : growing up in Chapel Hill, N.C.; attending segregated elementary schools; relationship with her grandmother; the town of Chapel Hill, N.C.’s land purchase and creation of the Tandler affordable housing community; early experiences with racism and the development of interracial friendship in junior high; race relations in the Chapel Hill High School class of 1974; changing socioeconomic demographics of Chapel Hill, N.C.; college application process; first impressions of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and difficulty fitting in on campus; marching on South Building to protest a 1974 lawsuit that threatened the Black Student Movement’s funding; lack of social relationships on campus; withdrawal from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and marriage to Stan Foushee; changing views of the University; jobs immediately after leaving the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; birth of two sons; career in the Chapel Hill Police Department; return to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at age 50; experiences as a parent volunteer in her sons’ classes at Seawell Elementary School; decision to run for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) Board of Education; pride in the CHCCS Board of Education narrowing the achievement gap; reflections on the debate about a possible merger of CHCCS and Orange County Schools; lack of affordable housing in Chapel Hill, N.C.