Who is Steven Rushing, District 3 CMS Board of Education candidate?
Name: Steven Rushing
School board seat you’re seeking: District 3, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Age as of Nov. 8, 2022: 48
Campaign website: N/A
Email: mr.rushing75@gmail.com
Occupation: Business owner of a kid taxi transport company. My company offers the ability for parents to get to work on time while my company picks up and drops off their child to school and drops them off at home after school for a lower cost than having to pay high daycare costs.
Education: High school graduate
Have you run for elected office before? (Please list previous offices sought): No.
Please list your highlights of civic involvement: Jury duty, food drives, soup kitchen, clothing drive, helped with domestic violence victims, and helped in men’s and women’s shelters
What qualities, skills and experiences do you think would make a good superintendent for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools?
Self motivated, driven, bilingual (Spanish), empathetic, understanding, passionate, quick to listen and slow to speak, open minded, and leadership mindset.
CMS, along with other districts across the country and state, has lost a lot of teachers. What are your ideas to keep teachers in CMS classrooms?
Give teachers the support they need by asking them for what they need to help our children succeed. We need to back up our teachers by making sure they know they matter, having a financial investigator review all aspects of CMS financials to find funding to give teacher raises and possibly upgrade school supplies instead of pour that money into other areas that can wait until we have a full working teacher workforce.
What solutions would you offer to improve student and employee safety on CMS school campuses?
Start a program I’d call D.O.D. — Dads on Duty. Ask for volunteer fathers to donate their time and pitch in for the safety of their children and others before during and after school to help car riders, traffic direction, monitoring halls, and an afterschool program where these dads offering mentoring/coaching for kids without father figures at home.
How do you define CMS’ achievement gap? How can CMS bridge the achievement gap, raise test scores and get the 50 district schools off of the low-performing list?
I believe we should first remove cell phone use from the classrooms so it’s not a distraction, help our students by asking for parents to offer remote access tutoring for free in the afternoons, and making learning fun by bringing back prep rallies and award recognition (with snacks being sold to raise funds for school supplies) for only the students that meet the criteria in both academics and attendance. No more of the everyone gets a trophy for just showing up.
Why should voters choose you over your opponents?
I offer the perspective of a regular, everyday, father that wants the best for his kids, which means that comes from great teachers. I am a business owner that knows how hard it is to succeed with what’s available to me. I am half Latin American so I know how hard it is for those parents that can’t understand or be able to help their children because they are from a foreign land like my mother was.
This story was originally published October 3, 2022 at 12:45 PM.
