Newly-elected Alamance-Burlington school board member and Alamance County native Tameka Harvey aspires to help others grow where they’re planted.
Next month, Harvey will join newly-reelected incumbent school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves, who won a second term in the General Election; incumbent Seneca Rogers, who was elected to a full, four-year term; and fellow newcomer, Avery Wagoner, along with the three other incumbent school board members.
An Alamance County native and 43-year-old Eastern High School graduate, Harvey reflected in a recent interview with The Alamance News on her formative years in the Pleasant Grove community outside Burlington and in east Burlington. Her paternal grandparents lived along N.C. Highway 62 “in a big old house,” situated on a family farm, where they raised hogs and had gardens the size of football fields.
“We grew up eating from the land. My grandfather farmed tobacco. . . When he wasn’t doing tobacco, we were in the gardens. . . A lot of fond memories, picking beans, watermelons, and digging potatoes out of the ground. [I] remember my grandmother cooking the tenderloins and biscuits. My mom’s mom, she lived in the city always, so I had the best of both worlds.”
– Newly-elected ABSS school board member Tameka Harvey
“I was raised between both [sets of] grandparents,” Harvey tells the newspaper. “We grew up eating from the land. My grandfather farmed tobacco with [Luther] ‘Marshall’ Cobb. When he wasn’t doing tobacco, we were in the gardens…A lot of fond memories, picking beans, watermelons, and digging potatoes out of the ground. [I] remember my grandmother cooking the tenderloins and biscuits. My mom’s mom, she lived in the city always, so I had the best of both worlds.”
Today, Harvey works as a retail customer service manager and lives in a house she bought 10 years ago in east Burlington, where she says she wanted to raise her children and have them attend school in the Cummings zone from elementary school until graduation. “As parents, we make a lot of sacrifices for our children,” she says, adding, “I want to move back to the country someday.”
A first-time candidate and single mother of three children, Harvey says she’d never contemplated running for the school board, or any other office, but was motivated to run by concerns about the impact of a high school redistricting plan adopted several years ago.
“That really bothered me as a parent, but you kind of did not think it would go through,” until all of a sudden, it did, Harvey explains.
The original high school redistricting plan, adopted in 2017, called for closing Cummings and Graham as traditional high schools and reopening them as specialty schools, with no attendance boundaries, concurrent with the opening of the county’s seventh high school (Southeast) and the 2023-24 school year. Cummings would’ve been converted to a specialty school of the arts for grades six through nine, with higher grades added during subsequent years of operation. Graham would’ve been converted to a skilled trades academy for grades nine through 12.
As details of the redistricting plan emerged, Harvey worried that her children would lose a sense of their identity, rooted in the Cummings zone and surrounding neighborhood; their connections to teachers and coaches they’d come to look up to; and the opportunity to participate in school sports.
“It just wasn’t right,” Harvey says. “I’ve been a parent of Cummings kids, so I know what that means to them. To have lost where they belong [was almost unthinkable].”
Most likely, the Cummings Cavaliers and Graham Red Devils would’ve faded into memory. A little-known component of the 2017 redistricting plan was that, had Cummings and Graham been converted to specialty schools, their athletic teams probably would’ve been eliminated entirely, partly due to the combined grade spans at Cummings and low enrollment projections, former ABSS superintendent Dr. Bruce Benson revealed during a subsequent review of the plan several years ago.
That possibility also worried Harvey, as did lower enrollments and sports participation numbers at Cummings and Graham. “We know the numbers at Cummings and Graham are not the numbers we see at other schools,” she says. “We did not have wrestling; we did not have baseball last year; nor did we have softball.”
The original 2017 redistricting plan prohibited high school athletes from participating in sports at their new high schools for 365 days – as does the revised plan adopted in 2022, though the latter iteration retained Cummings and Graham as traditional high schools.
A voice for the working class
“You need a board with regular, working people,” Harvey says in explaining her desire to serve on the school board.
“You need a board with regular, working people. . . I’m a strong single parent. . . “[But] it’s not only me I think about; it’s the other parents who might need that support in school. I want people to be able to talk to me, just like a normal person, and to know I will do what’s best for children. I actually have kids in the school system that I [serve on the board for]. It makes a difference, knowing there’s a parent on there that understands what you’re going through.”
– Incoming ABSS school board member Tameka Harvey
“I’m a strong single parent,” says Harvey, who’s been active in parent- teacher organizations, athletic boosters, and her children’s other activities since they started school at Andrews Elementary School. She currently serves as treasurer for the Cummings High School boosters and helps run the concessions stand at home games. In between, she sings in the choir at her church, Christian Tabernacle on Rosenwald Street, and enjoys reading and cheering on the Carolina Panthers.
“[But] it’s not only me I think about; it’s the other parents who might need that support in school,” Harvey explains. “I want people to be able to talk to me, just like a normal person, and to know I will do what’s best for children. I actually have kids in the school system that I [serve on the board for]. It makes a difference, knowing there’s a parent on there that understands what you’re going through.”
Her youngest, daughter Jamoni, 16, is a junior at Cummings and a member of the cheerleading squad, with a 4.0 grade point average. Jamoni is also dually-enrolled in the Career & College Promise program at Alamance Community College, on track to graduate in 2026 with both her high school diploma and an Associate’s degree. Son Hezekiah, 18, is a senior and a receiver for the Cavaliers who plans to enlist in the Navy after graduation. Her eldest son graduated from Cummings this spring and went on to ACC, where he’s enrolled in the welding program.
As a single parent, Harvey often draws from some homegrown wisdom. “My grandmother would always say: ‘There’s a time and a place for everything,’” she recalls. “‘Your teachers have their degrees; you need to get yours.’ And sometimes I say that to my kids.”
‘We have to change the mindset’
As a school board member, Harvey hopes to provide some cohesion between the former county schools and former city schools, which, some observers have said, appear to remain fractured nearly three decades since the two systems merged in 1996. Simply put, she envisions “one ABSS, one whole, [where] we come together collectively, and we do what’s best for all.”
For an example, Harvey points out that, while all ABSS high schools offer some Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which she says “boost the GPA a lot higher than traditional classes,” the number of such courses varies widely among the seven high schools – and following that track isn’t always considered the norm for all students.
“We have to change the mindset of our kids,” Harvey emphasizes, “so they know they can do anything they want.”
As a first-time candidate, Harvey credits her success in winning a seat on the seven-member school board to shoe leather and word-of-mouth.
“I think name recognition is major, but I don’t think 30,000 people [who voted for me] know me,” she says with a laugh. “I live in east Burlington, so in east Burlington they know me. When people see someone like themselves, it makes them proud. When they hear someone say, ‘I will advocate for your child, I will come to meetings,’ they know that to be true. The gain is not for me. It’s for our students and what’s best for them because they deserve the best.”
Harvey came in fourth among eight candidates for the four open seats on the nonpartisan school board in this year’s General Election.
Ellington-Graves led the voting with 38,125 votes (15.35 percent) to win a second, four-year term. She was followed by Wagoner, who came in second with 36,532 votes (14.71 percent) to win a seat in his second run for the school board. Rogers, who was appointed in November 2023 to serve the remaining term of former school board member Patsy Simpson, received 36,382 votes (14.65 percent) in the General Election to win a full-four year term in his third run for a seat on the school board, falling short in 2020 and 2022.
Unofficial election results show that Harvey received 33,961 votes (13.67 percent) to win the fourth open seat on the school board, beating three other political newcomers, as well as incumbent school board member and retired ABSS administrator Donna Westbrooks.
Ellington-Graves, Harvey, Rogers, and Wagoner are scheduled to be sworn into office on December 2.
