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. The 9th Street Journal is profiling all three candidates in the race.
At a candidate forum in January, Gabrielle ”Gabby” Rivero strode onstage and gesticulated with conviction as she spoke, her fiery delivery drawing several rounds of applause from the audience.
On budget issues, she said: “[We need to know] where the money’s going, who’s doing what.” On the perils of book banning, her voice rising: “They are trying to erase us.” On how to boost funding for Durham schools: “We can’t just keep raising taxes…We gotta go to Raleigh…[and] ask the right questions.”
Rivero, founder of Express & Release Therapeutic Dance, is a parent and foster parent whose children have attended Burton Elementary, Jordan High School, and Southwest Elementary. At Southwest, which her three children attend, she serves as vice president of the PTA and has led the Title 1 initiative for the last two years.
In an interview at Bean Traders, Rivero nursed a hot tea and unreservedly pitched herself as a candidate for the District 3 seat. “Our system, in some ways, is broken, and we have to fix it. But we don’t fix it by just adding more policies. We fix it by listening,” she said.
Rivero’s involvement in schools has its roots in a comment last year by her six-year-old. He asked her about his dual-language class: “Mommy, why does nobody in my class look like me?”
“I was shocked and disappointed that in a school that is 35% Black, the resource of being in a magnet program was not being allocated equitably across all demographics,” Rivero said in an email. “That called me to action.”
Rivero works as a contractor for Durham schools, teaching emotion regulation through movement to students and teachers.
The philosophy that informs Rivero’s work in therapeutic dance — “addressing root causes rather than punishing behavior” — gets to the heart of her campaign. As her website states: “When children are overwhelmed, the solution is regulation, connection, and support — not discipline alone. That mindset must guide our schools.”
Rivero’s work with healing circles, listening sessions that use movement and conversation to inspire healing, also led her to consider running for school board. “This past year, the healing circles ended up being predominantly for the Hispanic population…,” she said. “And there was just a lot of conversation around feeling unheard, feeling unsafe,…often around schools.”
The question of safety came to a head in November, when federal agents conducted immigration raids in Durham. Rivero co-led efforts with Durham Public Schools Strong to support and transport immigrant and other vulnerable students travelling to and from Southwest Elementary.
“I’m not a politician. I’m a mom. I’m a PTA VP, right?…So stepping into this space [of school board candidacy], is so new for me,” she said.
Rivero has held several community-oriented positions. She serves on the City of Durham’s Recreation Advisory Commission, where she says she “review[s] budgets, ask[s] hard questions about equity and impact, and push[es] for transparency and responsible decision-making.” She is also the membership chair on the board of the Greater Durham Black Chamber of Commerce.
Community encouragement solidified her decision to run for the board, she said. She is part of a slate of school board candidates endorsed by Durham Association of Educators and has also been endorsed by the People’s Alliance PAC.
Rivero favors raising teachers’ pay, conducting regular financial audits of the district, and drawing families back from charter schools to public schools through consistency in teaching and programming.
“Families leave the district because they feel like there’s too much happening behind closed doors. They don’t know what’s happening with the money. They don’t know what’s happening with our budget,” she said in an interview.
Rivero believes she is well-equipped to restore transparency and accountability to the district’s finances. Enough “whack-a-mole” solutions, she said — time to “go down to the root” of the problems. Citing the Greater Durham Black Chamber of Commerce’s practice of consistent budget reviews, she suggested the school board do the same.
“With big dollars, it’s very easy to miss projections if you’re looking at them over long periods of time,” she said. “So one of the ways that we kind of have to go around this is…starting to just review the budget. And I know that sounds so simple, but it’s not happening.”
Rivero feels the pain of budget cuts personally. The district no longer funds collateral mental health services except for students with Medicaid. As a result, one of her children, who has high anxiety, cannot access much-needed support, she said.
To restore necessary funds to the district, she said, counties in North Carolina must work to collectively seek funding from the state.
“Say 60 counties all come together and say, ‘Our schools need restorative practice centers and we need this amount of funding…,’” she said. “We have to have the whole group moving forward to make change…If we’re going to the state level, it can’t just be Durham County.”
Rivero argues that her personal connections to families and educators lend her unique insight into the community’s unmet needs.
“There’s so much distrust between families and the school board, administration, and there’s so much work to do to rebuild that trust…,” she said. “Luckily, that’s my sweet spot. I like to coin myself as a ‘bridge builder.’”
In vying for a seat on the school board, Rivero hopes to apply her professed ability to heal – honed through years of teaching therapeutic dance – to the district.
“This stuff is complicated, and there’s so much hurt…,” she said. “And our community can’t move forward until we address the hurt.”
Above: Photo courtesy of the candidate.
Tanya Wan
