Elyse Dashew: Ready for ‘big, gnarly issues’ on CMS board

It’s safe to say that Elyse Dashew’s childhood experience with education will be a first for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board: She was home-schooled on a sailboat for seven years while her family circled the globe.

Her experience as a mom, though, is one many can relate to: choosing a magnet school, worrying about transportation and taking a chance on a neighborhood school that’s working to entice middle-class families.

On Dec. 8, Dashew will be sworn in as the only new member of the school board. She placed second in a field of nine candidates in the Nov. 3 countywide election, joining returning members Ericka Ellis-Stewart and Mary McCray.

Dashew, 46, is already well known to people who are involved with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. She has progressed from a PTA officer and magnet-school activist to a community leader who has fought for school bonds and against budget cuts – not to mention running two school board campaigns.

“I think everything I do, I do really whole-heartedly,” says Dashew, who keeps a full schedule of volunteer advocacy work while raising her two children.

Dashew brings an upbeat persona and a knack for making connections to a board that’s in the thick of potentially divisive tasks, such as hiring a superintendent and reshaping student assignment. Even people who campaigned for opponents say they respect her.

“She’s very easy to talk to and work with,” said state Sen. Jeff Tarte, a Cornelius Republican who sent a pre-election email urging people to vote only for Jeremy Stephenson. “She’ll be a good addition.”

Exotic childhood

Dashew is a native of Los Angeles, and around here her name is unusual enough that her volunteers handed out cashews to help voters remember how it’s pronounced.

But in yachting and sailing circles, Steve and Linda Dashew are famous for the yachts he makes and the articles they’ve written chronicling their adventures at sea with their two young daughters.

Sailing and business ventures both run in the family, Elyse Dashew says. At one point in her childhood, her dad used his skill with fiberglass to create roadside dinosaurs, steakhouse steers and Paul Bunyan statues.

When Elyse was 6, her parents sold her father’s construction business and the family home, bought a 50-foot sailboat and set out for the South Pacific. The trip turned into almost seven years at sea. At ports around the world, Elyse and her younger sister would make new friends. Their parents taught them, except for short classroom stints in New Zealand and South Africa.

Dashew says her love of different cultures and ability to relate to people from different backgrounds traces back to her childhood.

“The more international Charlotte gets,” she said, “the more I feel at home.”

Choosing schools

Dashew came to Charlotte in her mid-20s, drawn by her then-husband’s job. Their first home was in Pineville, where everyone went to the neighborhood elementary school.

When they moved to southeast Charlotte’s Stonehaven neighborhood, Dashew says it didn’t occur to her that things would be different. When their daughter, Emma, turned 5 they enrolled her in kindergarten at Rama Road Elementary.

At the time, CMS was just emerging from court-ordered desegregation. Rama’s zone included affluent neighborhoods, but more than half the students came from low-income families and only about 35 percent were white. It’s what was known as a tipping-point school, where white and affluent families didn’t feel comfortable and fled to magnets or private schools.

“People would have this look of horror when they heard we were sending her to Rama,” Dashew recalls.

In first grade Emma switched to Smith Language Academy, a K-8 magnet school where her lessons were conducted in French. Dashew says she was motivated by the opportunity for her daughter to become fluent in another language, rather than rejection of Rama. It was a perfect fit for Emma, who is now a senior in South Mecklenburg High’s world language magnet program, Dashew says.

It wasn’t as good for son Ian, who wanted to go to a middle school where he could learn in English.

By then, Dashew was far more knowledgeable about CMS. In the 12 years since her daughter started school, both Rama and McClintock Middle School had seen white enrollment erode and poverty levels soar.

At McClintock, though, the district and the school were fighting to bring neighborhood enrollment back. The school has a dynamic principal, a new building with state-of-the-art science labs, an award-winning robotics program and a math-science-engineering program offered to magnet and neighborhood students alike.

Ian enrolled last year; he’s now a McClintock seventh-grader. White enrollment is nudging upward. Poverty is hard to measure now, but it’s high enough that CMS provides free meals for all students.

“It’s good,” Dashew said. “It’s not perfect for him.”

When Dashew joins the nine-person board, she’ll be one of only three members who still have children in CMS, along with district representatives Rhonda Lennon and Eric Davis. That means she gets first-hand experience with the kind of challenges the board hears about, such as seeing her son lose an outstanding math teacher in the middle of last year.

Becoming a leader

Dashew worked for her family’s publishing business when she came to Charlotte, but eventually quit to focus on her children and their education.

She was a PTA officer at Smith when recession-driven turmoil swept through CMS. With teachers facing layoffs and the board contemplating drastic cuts, there was talk that CMS might end busing to magnet schools.

Dashew tracked down parents at other magnet schools, forming a network to advocate for their schools. Among them was Chris Bishop, a Chantilly Montessori parent who’s a professional community organizer. They clicked, and Bishop taught Dashew how to mobilize and communicate more effectively.

When then-Superintendent Peter Gorman warned that state and county budget cuts could endanger the quality of education, Dashew and some friends invited county officials and other experts to explain the situation to parents. Doug Swaim, a CMS parent whose children have since graduated, was impressed by Gorman’s message and Dashew’s leadership.

“She had a presence when she stood up in front of folks,” said Swaim. He asked Dashew to help him start a coalition to fight the budget cuts. They created MeckFuture, and Dashew emerged as the group’s public face.

The budget battles also brought Dashew into contact with Ellis-Stewart, a fellow magnet parent and activist, and McCray, a former teacher and president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg of Association Educators. All three entered the 2011 race for three at-large board seats, along with 11 other contenders.

Dashew, who wasn’t affiliated with a political party, had an ardent crew of friends campaigning for her. She topped that year’s fund-raising but finished fourth, about 1,300 votes short of a seat on the board.

It had been a difficult campaign, with feelings still raw about school closings. One of the most hard-fought battles involved Waddell High, a high-poverty neighborhood school in southwest Charlotte. Those students ended up relocated to Harding High, with Smith’s language magnet taking over the Waddell building. Some said the more privileged magnet families had commandeered their school.

After the 2011 election, Dashew recalls, “I was so exhausted, so depleted.”

But board member Tom Tate nominated her for the board’s Bond Oversight Committee, and she later served on the steering committee to promote school bonds. She worked with Ann Clark, then deputy superintendent, to create a crew of high school journalists who would cover the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and served on Superintendent Heath Morrison’s task force on college and career readiness. She got involved in a push to persuade the county to provide nurses for every school.

In the midst of all that, she and her husband divorced.

At the start of this year, Dashew decided she was ready to try again. She consulted her children, registered as a Democrat and started planning another campaign.

Complexity and clarity

This time around, Dashew says she had learned to be a better candidate. She wasn’t scared of reporters. She had learned to speak concisely about complex issues.

Nine people entered the race. As incumbents, Ellis-Stewart and McCray had a strong chance of returning. Many were watching Dashew and Stephenson, who live within 4 miles of each other, to see who would claim the seat being vacated by Tim Morgan.

Both had strong support, Dashew’s from an array of people active in public education, Stephenson’s from Republican elected officials, including Morgan.

Student assignment dominated the debate. Dashew staked herself out in favor of increasing school diversity, though she, like the current board, left open the definition and the strategies.

Stephenson hit hard in the opposite direction, insisting that candidates and board members who wanted to increase diversity would do it by disrupting successful schools and busing suburban students.

A candidate forum in Cornelius, hosted by the Lake Norman Chamber of Commerce, illustrated the difficulty of fighting that message.

Cornelius town commissioner Dave Gilroy wanted a promise that candidates would guarantee students a seat in their community schools. Dashew said there were no simple solutions, but that “I see no value in turning our whole system upside down.”

“We also are in a situation where we bus children more today than we ever have in the history of CMS,” Dashew added.

Dashew thought she was just making a point about the complexity of assignment and transportation, but by the next day the word was being circulated: Elyse Dashew wants to bus your kids.

Bill Russell, president of the Lake Norman Chamber of Commerce, says he thought Dashew handled the question well. But in the final days of the campaign, anti-busing emails and social media posts proliferated, circulated by Stephenson, his supporters and worried parents.

“There are a new group of activists and candidates from Charlotte who would enact an income based busing program sending your children to schools miles away from your home,” Tarte wrote in his vote-for-Stephenson eblast.

Dashew and her supporters worried the busing rhetoric could sway the results. But when the votes came in, Dashew not only surged past Stephenson but took second place, behind Ellis-Stewart and ahead of McCray.

Now that she’ll be one of the nine making student assignment decisions – and picking a superintendent to lead the district – Dashew says she’ll keep talking and listening. She thinks McClintock could serve as one model for increasing diversity, but doesn’t claim that’s the answer for the whole district.

For now, Dashew is getting up to speed on board procedures, knowing that as much as she has dealt with CMS, she has a lot more to learn.

“The advantage I have right now is that I have a clean slate,” she said. “There are all these big, gnarly issues, but ultimately we just need people that are going to think it through and do their best.”

This story was originally published November 24, 2015 at 12:57 PM with the headline "Elyse Dashew: Ready for ‘big, gnarly issues’ on CMS board."