Editor’s note: Four Durham school board seats are up for grabs in the upcoming March 3 election, with a trio of newcomers running strong campaigns in the District 3 race. Over the coming days, The 9th Street Journal is profiling all three candidates in the race.
Peter Crawford does not mince words.
At the Oak House Durham, his “go-to” coffee shop just down the road from his workplace, Crawford sat straight-backed and articulated the vision behind his candidacy. A back-to-basics approach informs much of his campaign, as he seeks to bolster student outcomes and rebuild trust in Durham schools.
“So many of the things that we ought to be discussing when it comes to our schools over the next several years are really pre-political issues,” Crawford said. “We’re talking about basic issues of organizational competence and organizational excellence…and making sure that we are managing resources well.”
A Marshall Scholar and Army veteran, Crawford, who goes by “Pete,” is co-founder of Durham-based start-up Acre, where he manages sales and operations. Through the start-up, tenants purchase a “value share” in an Acre-owned home without mortgage or transaction costs and benefit from the home’s appreciation.
Crawford also works part-time at his alma mater, West Point, teaching economics and mentoring upperclassmen in the leadership-oriented Dawkins Scholars Program.
“Like many parents, my kids have helped me add other credentials along the way like dance dad, PTA treasurer, and soccer coach,” Crawford wrote in an email to The Ninth Street Journal. A product of Texas’s public schools, he has three children in District 3 elementary and high schools.
At the top of Crawford’s list of priorities is student learning outcomes. “That is our core purpose, to educate folks,” he said. He considers reading and mathematics proficiency key measures of “student flourishing,” since these skills constitute a critical foundation for future learning and success.
Teacher and staff retention come next in importance, followed by fiscal accountability — all goals he considers “mutually reinforcing.” Having worked in large organizations such as the U.S. Army and West Point, Crawford also recognizes the challenges of pursuing change in a complex, wide-ranging school system.
“I’m holding loosely any specific policy prescription, because I think the posture I want to bring coming in is actually a posture of curiosity…,” he said. “[The system’s] too complicated to come in and say, ‘Here’s the ten-point plan on day one we’re going to implement.’”
Instead, Crawford emphasizes the need for more active community engagement from school leaders. On his campaign website, he offered several virtual, 45-minute “office hours” in January where he invited community members to speak directly with him.
“Presence out in the district — where the real work gets done in support of that shared purpose — is imperative,” he wrote in an email to The Ninth Street Journal.
At a Jan. 11 candidate forum hosted by the NAACP, Crawford quoted a friend who said school board meetings are “structurally designed to make people feel unheard.” He proposed that the district host more than two meetings a month, eliciting murmurs of assent from the audience. In an interview, he said he envisions breaking up the school board “into its components” to form a robust committee structure, including distinct committees on budget and operations.
“You don’t put that on a slogan or a poster somewhere, like ‘I want committees,’ but I do,” he said, “and that is because I want us to actually make really informed decisions about a host of complicated things.”
Crawford frequently stresses the district’s potential. “There’s just so much to recommend DPS,” he said. He believes lack of good governance and structure hampers its progress, though. He favors building “proactive” systems instead of “reactive management mechanisms.”
As an example, he mentioned a current debate about possible tuition increases for district afterschool and summer programs. School board members have been sharply divided on the costs families will soon incur. “In general, we have made the [district’s] budget process so opaque that it’s really hard to answer the question: ‘What are we trading off?,’” he said.
The seriousness with which Crawford approaches his campaign belies a quiet sense of humor. His campaign website describes his credentials but also beekeeping efforts that yielded “mixed results.” And in an email to The Ninth Street Journal, Crawford wrote that he was “such a poor dancer [in high school musicals] that the director actually removed the taps from [his] shoes.” This taught him much-needed “self-awareness and resilience,” he added.
A longtime observer of Durham schools, Crawford penned an op-ed for INDY Week last January challenging the “stranglehold” that local political organizations such as the People’s Alliance have on school politics. In the last four election cycles, he pointed out, no school board candidate has succeeded without the PA’s endorsement.
Crawford’s op-ed calls for “more righteous anger” about the political process, as opposed to the unity that PACs purport to represent. Crawford has been endorsed by the Friends of Durham PAC.
Asked if his campaign is fuelled by such “righteous anger,” Crawford smiled and shook his head quickly. The goal of the op-ed was not to attack anyone, he said, but to question the “disconnect” between voters’ interests and political outcomes.
“There is a notion among certain pockets of Durham that if we just had more involvement from certain political groups…that it would be better. And I think that the facts don’t bear that out,” he said.
“Above all else, what I hope my Durham neighbors know about me is that I’m not running to make noise or push an agenda,” Crawford concluded. “I want all of their children and my own children to have schools that prepare them to flourish wherever their lives take them. We owe them this much.”
Above: Photo courtesy of the candidate.
Tanya Wan
