Jessica Carda-Auten

Board of Education Member

Said she will “continue to apply a racial equity lens to my work on the Board.”
Regarding the Parents Bill of Rights, she said she supports the LGBTQIA and Gender Support policy that allows school employees to keep secrets from parents about gender transitioning of their children at school. She said the policy was “the perfect example of how a progressive Board can work with our Board attorney to thread that needle very carefully.”
She said she wants to reevaluate having police/SROs in schools—she wants to “reevaluate safety measures on a regular basis, including the use of SROs, to ensure that the benefits outweigh the potential harms, including unnecessary arrests, disproportionate arrests and citations for our students of color, and damage to our learning environments.”
She said: “We also need to acknowledge the unique mental health challenges our youth face as developing adolescents in a tumultuous world that remains plagued by racism, classism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, and so many other forms of bias and discrimination that directly and indirectly negatively impact our youth.”
Voted for March 31, 2025 to be celebrated in Durham Public Schools as “Transgender Day of Visibility.” The resolution was prompted by a leftist advocacy group, Rainbow Collective for Change.