I was thisweekold when I learned that Debra Freeman, Waynesboro School Board member, CEO at the local Boys & Girls Club, former executive director of the local homeless shelter, was herself homeless for six months, back in 2024 – as she was serving as chair of the School Board.
It was one of those things where, even a person with a good job, knowledge of the system, connections out the wazoo, found herself in a situation where the home she was renting was being put on the market by the owner, and she just … couldn’t.
She and her daughter rented a room in a hotel for the six months before she was able to pull together the money to become a first-time homeowner.
And y’all don’t think we have an affordable housing problem here in Waynesboro?
Good fit because of her background
I can identify with Freeman, who is running for a third term on the School Board representing Ward C in the Nov. 3 election, in terms of having grown up amidst a difficult set of circumstances, and I’m of the mind that we need more people like her in leadership positions in our city, because we need somebody who knows what a lot of our local residents deal with on a daily basis.
To that point: the median household income in Waynesboro is 64.3 percent of the state average, though, yeah, of course, the state average includes the wealth up in Northern Virginia.
Relative to neighboring Augusta County, our median household income is 73.1 percent of theirs.
We’ve got challenges here, just based on our economy, or lack thereof.
A person who has never known challenge can’t possibly be able to do more than sympathize.
Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it’s true.
Freeman grew up in Waynesboro in our housing projects – one part to her story, from the release she sent out this week formally announcing her candidacy for re-election, is that her great-grandfather, Clifton Carter, was a janitor at Jackson Wilson during the segregation era.
Jackson Wilson was renovated after segregation and is now home to the administrative offices for Waynesboro Public Schools.
We can assume that Mr. Carter, as he ran the mop and cleaned toilets at Jackson Wilson decades ago, would not have imagined one of his great-grandchildren helping to run the school system from those very halls.
“I grew up understanding that service does not always come with a title,” Freeman said. “It means showing up, caring about people and being willing to do your part.”
Freeman was named the executive director of the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry, which runs the WARM homeless shelter, in 2015, and served in that role for seven years.
She ran for the Ward C seat on the School Board in 2018, and won, and won her bid for re-election in 2022, which was the year that she also moved from WARM to the Boys & Girls Club, where she gets to work with young folks from a variety of backgrounds, including those that the state and federal guidelines classify as “at-risk.”
Tough choice
Freeman’s experience is a huge advantage for her candidacy for a third term – particularly when you look at an election not as a popularity contest, but, instead, that we’re hiring somebody for a job, which is, when you get down to it, what we’re doing.
Eight years on the School Board could also be a disadvantage.
I’ll be up front here: I’ve been writing, quite critically, of the School Board and the top folks in the central office at WPS for simply not getting the job done, even against the litany of reasons/excuses we hear about how we’ve been facing the uphill struggle of catching up from the two years basically lost to COVID.
From the archives
- Coverage of the Waynesboro Schools superintendent search: click here.
So has every other school system in Virginia and in America, and relative to everybody else facing the same challenges, we’re still losing ground.
Being the incumbent means you have to defend a losing record for our school system over the past several years – and that’s not me saying that, it’s the Virginia Department of Education, with hard data to back that up.
Freeman, the incumbent with the solid resume, has an opponent with a solid resume of his own – Kelvin Washington, a soft-spoken local evangelical pastor and college professor who, like Freeman, picked himself up by the bootstraps, and worked his way from being told by a Waynesboro High School teacher that he’d never get into college to going on to earn a Ph.D.
So, two really, really good candidates, is what we have here.
Gotta be clear on one important point: I am concerned about Washington’s views on the role of women and LGBTQs in modern society, particularly against the backdrop of the effort that was made earlier this year by another evangelical pastor to bring the Fox News war over bathroom politics to Waynesboro.
ICYMI
- The Waynesboro School Board candidate with MAGA views on women, LGBTQ
- Waynesboro School Board candidate addresses why he is running
I met with Washington to address that issue, and he went out of his way to distance himself from the LGBTQ bathroom nonsense, but, I need to note, for the record, that the statement of biblical doctrine spelling out his dated views on women and LGBTQs is still on his church’s website, three months later.
Where Washington gets my attention: he, very clearly, wants to be a force for change within Waynesboro Public Schools, which is a message that will resonate with a wide section of voters frustrated that it seems the School Board is working against our interests with regard to what some of us see as an opportunity, in the form of the pending retirement of Jeffrey Cassell, the current superintendent.
It sure does feel that the School Board has created a rushed timetable for naming a new superintendent to be able to elevate the top internal candidate, Ryan Barber, Cassell’s top assistant.
I’m among the folks who thinks we need to start over, from scratch, with our next hire.
But, I’m also leery of injecting bathroom politics into the monthly agendas for the School Board, given the very real challenges we face on matters of getting our kids a good education.
I’d love to host a panel discussion with Freeman and Washington, focused on the superintendent search and the bathroom politics issue, as the next few weeks play out.
Whaddya say, candidates?
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Chris Graham
