Candidates for school board, sheriff take questions

ROCKINGHAM — Round 2 of the Ashley Chapel Community Center’s town halls was held on Thursday which gave candidates for Richmond County Board of Education and Sheriff a chance to speak to voters.

Like last week’s town hall with the candidates for county commissioner and Clerk of Superior Court, too much was said to fully summarize here. Instead, the Daily Journal has selected one question from the night that had the most substantive answers and summarized each candidate’s answer with exact quotes for their most salient points.

Their responses are presented in the answers they were given Thursday night in order to maintain continuity, as some candidates based their responses on those of others.

Check next week’s paper for a follow-up article detailing their answers to another question.

The race for school board is nonpartisan.

The candidates present were as follows:

• Nigel William Bristow (D) – running for sheriff

• Bobbie Sue Ormsby – running for reelection to Board of Education

• Jeremy McKenzie – running for Board of Education

• Eddie Rainwater – running for Board of Education

• Bess York Shuler – running for Board of Education

• Joe Richardson – running for reelection to Board of Education

• Daryl Mason – running for reelection to Board of Education

The candidates who were not present were Sheriff Mark Gulledge, who is running for his first full term as sheriff after being appointed in August following the death of Sheriff James Clemmons, and school board candidates Scotty Baldwin and Cory Satterfield.

Gulledge explained in a letter to moderators Nic Nicholson and Sheila Brosier that he could not be there due to coming down with pneumonia, and Baldwin and Satterfield both reached out to the moderators to apologize for not being able to make it as well.

The questions and answers are presented below in the order that they were asked and answered Thursday evening.

Question (Nicholson): As sheriff, with drugs being a major topic of concern for the community, it’s very simple: do you have a plan to mitigate the problem?

Nigel Bristow

Bristow answered emphatically “yes,” and explained that this would start with “precision policing” and community engagement using the department’s beat officers’ knowledge of local crime trends and issues in the neighborhood to “formulate a strategy to deal with those criminal elements.”

“Drug dealing, we’re going to take that federal so that way the drug dealers will be looking at double-digit years in federal prison,” Bristow said. “So, after a while, it’s going to be said [by would-be drug dealers], ‘We’re not going to run drugs in Richmond County because we’re going to do federal time.’”

Question (Brosier): If you are elected what would you do to ensure our students that are academically impacted or live in rural areas will have access to virtual education if the need should arise in the future?

Daryl Mason – incumbent

Mason touted the work done by the school system in response to the pandemic shutdowns to get the needed technology to those without reliable access to a computer or internet. He said that with this work done since March 2020 to provide Chromebooks to every student and hot spots to those with weak or no internet, Richmond County Schools is more prepared if the pandemic were to flare up again.

“When this all started everyone was scrambling to figure out how we’re going to educate our kids at home. Over the years we have built a platform to address the needs of our kids that are within the city limits and our kids in the rural area,” Mason said. “I’m going to be the first to say that virtual learning is not the best technique to teach kids, I think face to face is the best technique but there comes a time when you have to do what you have to do.”

In a second go at the question, he expressed frustration that the state has made COVID-19 mandates on local school systems but hasn’t always provided the funds to comply with them, forcing the school board to pressure the Board of Commissioners to provide more money in the annual budget.

Bobbie Sue Ormsby – incumbent

Ormsby commended the school system’s technology staff for maintaining continuous communication with students and families that didn’t have what they needed to reliably attend class virtually and working to solve that problem. She said the board and school system “did a really good job” despite “working with territory we’d never worked with before.”

Ormsby agreed that face-to-face is the best way for students to learn.

“When we have to do virtual we need to do everything we possibly can to make sure every child has that opportunity and support them with every device that they need,” Ormsby said.

Joe Richardson – incumbent

Richardson said he views virtual learning as a “necessity” rather than a preferable method for teaching students. He’s confident in the school system’s ability to address the issue of another shutdown in the future, but said one way that it could improve is by doing more to get parents involved in virtual education.

“Especially with the economically deprived students, the parent is sometimes is not involved ­with them at home,” Richardson said. “It’s just got to be the parent at home making sure the kid has time and knowledge — if they don’t have it they can get it from the school system — but the parents need to be more involved to push us one step further than we are.”

Eddie Rainwater

Rainwater agreed with Richardson on parental involvement, but challenged him by saying that some kids don’t have hot spots, and asked how soon the school system would provide them. Richardson began to make his way to the microphone to respond before Nicholson told Rainwater to refrain from addressing other candidates in his response.

“This kid here may not have [hot spots] and this kid [in the city limit has] got it,” Rainwater said. “I grew up here [Ashley Chapel], I know what’s out there and they don’t get as much as some kids in the city limit.”

After Rainwater spoke, Nicholson allowed Richardson to respond. Richardson emphasized that every student in Richmond County has a computer they can take home and that hot spots are available to every student that needs it including students in Ashley Chapel, courtesy of Richmond County Schools.

Jeremy McKenzie

McKenzie stressed the impact that virtual learning has had on students who don’t learn well in that medium, and on students who don’t have the ability to drive to pick up hot spots and other equipment from the schools in the first place — which Mason later challenged, saying that the schools were delivering hot spots via buses in the earlier stages of the pandemic.

“When you think about virtual learning, everybody don’t learn the same,” McKenzie said. “There should be a plan of action in place in the event that this happens again so that way we can learn different styles so we can get our children back on track.”

Bess York Shuler

Shuler stressed the need for school board members to communicate with each school to address their specific needs, because each one has different population levels. She also shared her experience working as an instructional coach in Marlboro County beginning in 2019 where administrators had to “think outside the box” and devised a system where students who didn’t have access to computers and internet at home could come into the schools’ media centers to get their work done while remaining socially distanced.

“We learn by being thrown into the fire, we’ve had one go at this so we’re definitely going to be better at it,” Shuler said. “Hopefully we don’t have to face this but if we do we’re going to just have to be creative and deal with issues at that time that meet the needs of our students.”