She got a degree probing why people pick CMS. Now she’s north Mecklenburg’s rep
You’ve seen him: the high-powered executive type zipping through the airport in a tailored suit. He’s got a suitcase in one hand and a cellphone pressed to his ear with the other, chatting with someone somewhere about something surely very expensive.
Charlitta Hatch saw him, too, one day in the early 2000s at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport while she was still a student at Hampton University. Except she walked up to him.
She’d grown up in Charlotte and, to her, success looked like working for one of the big-time financial institutions in the city.
“I saw him and thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” she said. “So, I went up to him, interrupted his business call, and he was so shocked that I had the audacity that he gave me his business card.”
When Hatch graduated, he hired her and was her boss for three years at IBM.
“My mantra is ‘Come from a place of yes,’” Hatch said.
That’s the attitude that led her to author children’s books featuring Black boys as main characters when she didn’t see her son represented on bookshelves, to begin pursuing a doctorate in 2023 and, eventually, to run for school board in 2025.
Hatch, who works as the chief data and analytics officer for the city of Charlotte, unseated incumbent Melissa Easley, a former CMS teacher who served on the CMS board since 2022.
Four new board members will be sworn in Tuesday, including Hatch and Cynthia Stone, who unseated incumbent Lisa Cline in District 5. Board members for Districts 2 and 6 decided not to seek reelection, and Shamaiye Haynes and Anna London will fill their seats, respectively. It will be the third board shake-up in as many elections, and new representatives will make up nearly half of the nine-member body starting next week.
Hatch, 41, has seen CMS through a number of lenses. She attended CMS schools throughout her K-12 education, eventually graduating from Vance High School, now called Chambers High School, in northeast Charlotte.
She married her high school sweetheart, and they now have two children, one of whom is a CMS third-grader. The other isn’t old enough to attend yet. Hatch also serves on the board of directors for the CMS Foundation, the district’s official nonprofit fundraising partner.
In November, she received a doctorate from UNC Charlotte, where her research centered on discovering why families choose or don’t choose CMS for their children. While writing her dissertation, she decided it was time to run for school board.
“I’m writing my dissertation, and I’m seeing all of these policy-related things going on, the dismantling of public education right in front of us, and I’m seeing Black mothers’ voices not at the table,” she said. “So, I’m like, ‘How can I be who I say I am if I don’t try?’ And that’s what I did.”
The campaign
Typically, school board races aren’t high-fundraising affairs, with most candidates garnering just a few thousand dollars. Not Hatch.
She won north Charlotte’s District 1 race and raised an eye-popping $56,000 between her filing in July and the election in November. It was the most of not just any candidate in her race but any CMS school board candidate on November’s ballot.
While CMS board races are officially nonpartisan, they’re unmistakably political. District 1 incumbent Melissa Easley, a Democrat like Hatch, believes Hatch’s fundraising totals are what earned her the endorsement of the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party.
Hatch said she was surprised by how much politics played into an ostensibly nonpartisan contest.
She filed to run on a Friday. On Monday, she got a call from the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party, asking “what was I doing?” she said.
“I wasn’t going into it to unseat somebody,” Hatch said. “I never saw it as me running for political office or, ‘Oh, I’m doing this to be an elected official.’ I saw it as being on the board of education and advocating for children.”
She had the controversial support of Raki McGregor, a Charlotte business leader and former advisor to Superintendent Crystal Hill. At the time he attended Hatch’s filing, his tenure as a CMS advisor wasn’t yet up. SYDKIMYL Consulting, a firm owned by his wife, also had a six-figure contract with the district.
The original contract expired in June, but public records show CMS signed a new $180,000 contract with SYDKIMYL that runs through Jan. 30. The new contract falls below the $250,000 threshold that would require board approval.
Hatch has objected to the idea that McGregor had any influence on her decision to run.
“My own husband couldn’t even tell me to do something like this or even suggest it, and I do it,” Hatch told WFAE in October. “Because the first thing I would do if he said that to me was like, you do it yourself. I’m not your secretary. So, I find it completely offensive, misogynistic, patriarchal, and a little bit racist.”
The issues
Hatch sees three main challenges as the most pressing in CMS right now: school safety, teacher burnout and preparing kids for “an AI-driven future.”
School safety is top-of-mind for Hatch after federal Border Patrol agents swept through the city last month as part of its “Operation Charlotte’s Web.” Each day that agents were active, between 21,000-30,000 CMS students were recorded absent from school, a substantial increase over the 10,000-15,000 absences CMS sees on a typical day.
“School safety includes physical safety, but I think it’s also about psychological and mental safety,” Hatch said. “Like if you think about what just happened in our community with immigration, all kids were probably impacted in some way…not just kids who were afraid to go to school or parents afraid to send them to school, but also all the other kids around them who were watching.”
She wants to see a more “proactive” strategy around student safety — not just when it comes to securing and protecting buildings.
When it comes to reducing teacher burnout, Hatch said the district needs to take more of the administrative burden off of teachers and reduce the number of tasks on their plate.
She’s not sure exactly what that would look like but believes more partnership between parents and teachers would help.
She said CMS is on a “great path” when it comes to artificial intelligence but that it needs to move fast. The CMS board created and passed its first AI policy this fall.
“So, we need to think about how we do that in a responsible and ethical way that not just prepares kids or jobs that exist today, but jobs we don’t even know that exist. What are some of those fundamental skills?,” she said. “Parents are worried about critical thinking skills being lost, and I argue that you need even more critical thinking skills as we think about approaching artificial intelligence.”
CMS is tasked with meeting the needs of 141,000 individual students. Hatch said many parents don’t understand how to navigate the system or what options are available to them.
While she excelled in school, her brother, who was also a CMS student, had a very different experience.
“Growing up with my own brother, my parents did not have that navigation. What would it have looked like for him if they knew how to navigate the system?” she said. “That’s why we find so many families not even feeling like CMS is an option… I hope to bring the voice of someone who’s a product of the system, who’s an advocate of the system, who can help demystify the system in a way in which people can understand.”
This story was originally published December 5, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story included an incorrect date for when Charlitta Hatch started purusing her doctorate. She began her doctorate studies in 2023.
