It’s a new year and you’ve got work to do.

1. Work together for NC.
I adore a team, but y’all resemble power hungry vultures on a rural eastern NC highway.

2. Bring back Kindergarten.
Research clearly shows that play fosters long term academic success, yet you have turned our earliest classrooms into sweat factories.

3. Scrap Read to Achieve.
Senator Phil Berger’s brain child failed because you voted yes, rather than follow education guidelines. Millions wasted and now you sit, petulant children, too prideful to ask for help from folks that know how kids learn.

4. Quit it with the charter schools.
You have allowed TeamCFA Charter Schools and Greg Sinders (who was terminated from his job in Indiana for scoundrel like behavior) to prevail and why? Don’t give me that smack about school choice.

5. Apologize to teachers.
You bash, criticize, and blame our most important state employees. Anyone with a background in education knows that teaching is not the problem, it’s the vast tundra of resources between poor and wealthy counties and poverty.

6. Support teachers.
Be helpful, ask questions. They don’t want iPads or fancy posters taken out of Teen Beat, they need school supplies and no more half ass testing reform.

7. Remember you work for us.
This is a real job, not Chutes and Ladders. Many of you seem to be in it for the license plate.

8. Answer the damn phone.
Or, for all things Holy, set up voicemail. I don’t know which is worse, speaking to arrogant pubescent legislative assistants or phones ringing off the hook.

9. Get Kym Martin under control.
I’m not sure why she wears the pants in North Carolina, but it’s time to grow a backbone. Her salary as the director of the NC Center for Safer Schools is a waste of taxpayer money, her antics leave NC public school children in grave danger and yet, all of you put politics over safety.

10. Say NO to the five million dollar app.
And admit that she never told you about the three to five million annually to sustain a call center. All so that Kym Martin can point to her legacy. Find me one safety expert that supports this sh**show and I’ll eat crow.

Happy New Year! Adrian H. Wood, PhD Native of Eastern NC

Mother of Four