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Mayor on a mission to expand opportunities

Chances are that few mayors in North Carolina can make the claim that they helped found a charter school.

Joe Peel can.

Mayor Peel isn’t just any mayor, either. Peel, now in his second term as mayor of Elizabeth City, is a retired public school career educator who spent eight years as superintendent of the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank school district. That’s probably not your typical profile of a charter school leader.

But earlier this month, when the State Board of Education unanimously approved the Northeast Academy of Aerospace and Advanced Technologies, Peel’s proposal for filling what he and other local leaders saw as an educational void became reality for the community and prospective students.

“If I had not become mayor, I wouldn’t have done the charter,” Peel said in a recent interview.

Peel didn’t set out to open a charter school. His objective was to solve a growing problem for the city in northeastern North Carolina, struggling with a widening gap between the skills of the local workforce and the skills needed by local employers. As home to the U.S. Coast Guard’s largest air station in the nation, Elizabeth City and its surrounding area has seen promising growth in jobs related to aerospace and aviation. But Peel said employers in the field have been reluctant to expand because of a shortage of high-skilled workers.

During his first term, Peel convened a citizens’ group to assess the community’s needs. Six of the nine areas they identified, he said, touched on education in some way: the need for more and better job training; more focus on entrepreneurship; importance of quality pre-school and K-12 education.

Their conclusions, Peel said, “heightened my awareness for the need for a different approach.”

The charter idea was born from those discussions as a solution to a problem hindering economic development and limiting opportunities for students.

“It grew out of what we have in the region,” Peel said. “We wanted a STEM school. Aerospace is big industry. We’ve got higher education focusing in that area. We have good options but not a good pipeline from K-12 education.”

But the board of the school district he once led refused to support the charter as did others in the area, fearing that the charter school would siphon off resources, he said. The proposal did win the support of county commissioners in the area, viewing the new school as a progressive response to a significant regional need.

Peel has high hopes for the school, not only for creating promising new opportunities for students and as a means for strengthening the workforce, but also as a catalyst for change in the region’s educational approaches.

“There’s a lot of potential here for change in the quantity and quality of education in the region,” he said.

For his part, the new charter is Mayor Peel’s latest engagement with innovation. As superintendent in Elizabeth City-Pasquotank during the 1990s, the district implemented standards-based grading, performance assessment, problem-based math, balanced literacy, inquiry-based science, and successfully implemented one of the first student promotion/intervention policies and senior project graduation requirements in the state.

The district was also a pilot for developing the statewide ABC Accountability model, the Outcomes-Based Education Initiative, and was a statewide leader in the work of the Standards and Accountability Commission. During his eight year tenure, the district was honored by Gov. Jim Hunt as the “Most Entrepreneurial District” in the state, and Peel was named State Superintendent of the Year by three different statewide organizations.