Cynthia Stone tried retirement. Now, she’s south Charlotte’s new CMS board member
When you meet Cynthia Stone — “Ms. Cynthia,” as past students and folks at church call her — you realize pretty quickly she’s going to tell it like it is.
“I am who I am,” she said, laughing at a picnic table in south Charlotte Nov. 24. “I’m a straight shooter, and I don’t pull any punches… but I think people would also say that my values drive my life and always have.”
She decisively won her election to represent District 5 on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education on Nov. 4, unseating incumbent Lisa Cline. The district covers a portion of south Charlotte, including Myers Park, Eastover and Cotswold, and stretches across Matthews to the southeast border of Mecklenburg County.
She’s one of four new members that will be sworn in Dec. 9, after November’s election saw the third CMS board shake-up in as many elections. Incumbent Melissa Easley also was unseated by Charlitta Hatch in District 1, while incumbents in Districts 2 and 6 decided not to run again. Shamaiye Haynes and Anna London will be filling those seats, respectively.
Stone, 70, retired from CMS in December 2023, after teaching elementary students at Park Road Montessori and Chantilly Montessori before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. She raised two kids in the district and attended CMS schools. She grew up just a few minutes down the road from the house she now lives in near South Park.
She needed some time to exhale after years on her feet in the classroom, to “reengage with (her) life,” as she put it. But after about six months, she began volunteering at elementary schools and teaching Sunday school at church. Even in retirement, she couldn’t walk away from teaching, not completely. After all, like she said: she is who she is.
Eventually, Stone decided to run for a seat on the CMS board.
“As a consumer of the product in different capacities, and someone who believes that education is the only thing that is going to get us out of the mess we’re in,” she said, “what else could I do?”
2025 CMS board election
There was one side of education Stone hadn’t experienced yet. The newbie to Charlotte politics had never run for office when she filed to run last July.
She credits her success to the team she had around her and the hours she spent knocking on doors and connecting with the community. It required a different mindset than teaching does, she said.
“Most of the time when you’re teaching, you’re just so laser focused on what’s right in front of you, and you never really think about everything else,” she said. “But I think that I realized how important it is to engage constituents. It’s important for anybody sitting on a board like this to make sure that you are in touch, that you get out there, you visit the schools, you see who these kids are, you recognize the problems they have.”
CMS school board races are officially nonpartisan but unmistakably political. It’s easy to look up any candidate’s registered political affiliation, and the Mecklenburg County Democratic and Republican parties each made endorsements in November’s school board races.
“It’s naive to think at any level that any nonpartisan race is truly nonpartisan,” Kyle Kirby, chair of the Mecklenburg County Republican Party, told The Charlotte Observer. “Everyone knows the affiliation of everyone.”
A blue wave washed over the county, and every candidate endorsed by Mecklenburg County Democrats won their race. Stone, a Democrat, unseated Cline, the only Republican on the CMS board.
As to whether she believes politics played into the outcome of the race, Stone said “it didn’t hurt.”
Cline pointed not just to a “big blue wave,” but also increased attention on the election thanks to the transit-tax referendum.
“People have to realize my district encompasses Matthews, and there were a lot of heated, contested races there, so there were a lot of voters this year compared to past municipal races and the transit tax was at the bottom of the ballot,” Cline told the Observer. “And so if you were voting a particular way, you just kept on going.”
The issues
Stone was known for big picture ideas during her teaching days.
Colleagues called her “Norma Rae,” after the 1979 film in which Sally Field played a scrappy southern union organizer. A friend and fellow teacher made her a jar to put her suggestions in rather than bringing each one up during staff meetings. It was labeled “Brazen Proposals.”
One thing she’ll seek to do on the board is to make things easier for teachers. As an educator, Stone remembers more and more being heaped onto her plate, leaving little time for lesson planning — a complaint many CMS educators share today.
“You’re going to meetings, and then you’re doing open house, and then you’re doing this, and you’re doing that, and you don’t really have any time to do thoughtful planning,” she said. “There is a lot of expectation for teachers to work on their own time… but we weren’t being compensated for that.”
Raising teacher pay is also a priority for Stone. As a native North Carolinian, she hates that South Carolina pays its teachers better than the Tar Heel state.
North Carolina ranks 43rd in the nation for teacher pay, according to the National Education Association, putting it behind every state in the southeast aside from Mississippi.
Meanwhile, the state legislature still has not approved a budget for this fiscal year, which began in July. Until it does, teachers and other state employees will be paid according to last year’s budget and will not receive any expected raises from the state.
“I don’t understand why North Carolina has declared war on education,” Stone said. “We’re not just competing for talent against counties here. South Carolina is very close by.”
Stone ran on a platform partially focused on student mental health, and as a board member, she wants to see more resources dedicated to equipping teachers to identify and address challenges early as well as increase the number of school counselors in CMS.
“If we can identify those situations and start providing services to kids at a young age, maybe we can avoid what’s happening when they get older,” she said. “Also, counselors’ case loads are way too high. We need to reduce it.”
There are around 280 counselors across the district’s elementary, middle and high schools, according to CMS’ website. With a student population of around 141,000, that brings the student-to-counselor ratio to about 504:1. That’s significantly higher than the ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association, which is 250:1.
It will take some time to get her footing in her new role, Stone said, but she’s excited by the challenge.
“One thing about teachers is we’re lifelong learners … We’ve got lots of board training opportunities presented right now, and I’m very happy about that,” she said. “But then the work really starts.”
