Episode 257: Leading the Way in Business and Education

On this episode, we’re joined by business leaders to discuss the important relationship between businesses and local public schools in their communities, and the role those schools play in maintaining our status as a leading state for business.

Guests:
Tom Oxholm, Retired Executive Vice President, Wake Stone Corporation 
Mike Hawkins, President, Pisgah Enterprises 
Jarian Kereekes, Head of Social Impact & President, Equitable Foundation
Doug Shackelford, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Taxation at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome to Education Matters, presented by the Public School Forum of North Carolina. I'm your host, Dr. Marianne Wolf. This week we're joined by business leaders to discuss the important relationship between businesses and local public schools in their communities, and the role those schools play in maintaining our status as a leading state for business. We are so pleased today to be joined by Tom Oxtholm, retired executive vice president of Wakestone Corporation, Mike Hawkins, president of Pisca Enterprises, Darian Karakus, the head of social impact and president of the Equitable Foundation, and Doug Shockleford, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Taxation at the UNC Keenan Flagler Business School. Welcome all of you. We'd love to hear from you at the beginning, and I'd like to actually hear from each of you because you do bring different perspectives. Why should business leaders care about local public schools? Jarian?

SPEAKER_04 1:10

Yeah, I'm happy to start. A privilege to represent Equitable. We've been around for 169 years. Part of our business is supporting K-12 educators. And I just think about how we pour into public schools, specifically the educators of these schools. I mean, it really is key to a vibrant and healthy community. It starts with those that are teaching our future leaders, our future colleagues, the folks that are going to be driving the agenda for our state for years to come. And so I think investing in educators, and we believe that as a company, it really starts with that, making sure they're whole, supported, and doing everything we can to support that group of individuals here in North Carolina.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Thank you, Mike.

SPEAKER_03 1:59

I would echo what Jarian said and just add, I live in rural North Carolina. And from a rural perspective, I think that that businesses should care and do care about public schools because it's very personal in rural areas.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Thank you. Doug.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Well, today we have many different choices of how to get educated. It's critical that we have an educated decisory. But the bottom line is the vast majority of our children are go through to public schools. And those people are going to be our employees, they're going to be our customers, they're going to be the managers, they're going to be the leaders. So wherever we are, uh the local public schools are the training grounds for the business leaders and the people who are going to work in those places, and the people going to be the customers and suppliers of all those companies. It's fundamental to any success we're going to have in business.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Thank you. And Tom?

SPEAKER_02 3:16

So I've I spent nine years in public accounting and advising businesses, mostly privately held ones, and then 40 years helping to run a stone quarry company. And 75-80% of our employees are not college educated. And so when they come to us, they're coming with a K-12 education. And over time that's become more and more important for them to be able to understand employee handbooks, 401k programs, health plans, all those different things. They come to us, and if they aren't able to deal with that, we can't hire them. So we're counting on the public schools to help us promote and um work well with our most important asset, which, as all businesses will say, our people are our most important asset.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Thank you so much. Darian, how are business and businesses and business leaders uniquely positioned to help address some of these issues facing local public schools?

SPEAKER_04 4:09

We've got to help drive the agenda at the state level, at the local level, um, teacher pay, uh, all the things that are going on as it relates to being an educator, the challenges they're facing, the workloads, um, the shortage, these are all things that we think about too, because uh a vibrant and healthy public school system is often going to help us attract talented employees that want to bring their families, raise their families here in North Carolina, specifically where I am in Charlotte Mecklenburg schools. So uh I think we're uniquely positioned and have a seat at those tables where we can continue to advocate and beat the drum and say, listen, uh this really has a downstream effect. It's not just educators in a particular school, it has effects far beyond just the school building and the vibrancy of our uh overall state.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Thank you. And and Mike, I want to take a minute and focus on rural and have you talk a little bit more about the value of the connection between business and local public schools in rural areas, but specifically if you have some examples too, because I know you have a long history of being very engaged in this work.

SPEAKER_03 5:20

I don't think you can understand rural North Carolina until you understand that in rural North Carolina there are two cornerstones of life that the entire community revolves around. One is faith, one is your church, but the other is education and public schools. Public schools in rural North Carolina are not just schools, they're community centers, they're places of gathering, they're where you have fake, it's not just it's not just football games on Friday night, it's fake sales and band concerts and all of the things that make a community a community. And so, as I mentioned earlier, I think in rural North Carolina, there's this very personal connection uh between schools and the communities that they serve, including the business community. And businesses understand that. Businesses understand the importance of public schools, and in some instance, in one instance, in one degree, it's the traditional workforce development thing that's true in urban areas as well. But in the other instance, it's this whole sense of community that public schools bring. Um, again, in rural North Carolina, people don't care what college they went to that you went to, they care what high school you went to. They're not going to ask you if you went to Carolina or State or Duke. They're going to ask you if you went to Brevard or Rosman, and it makes a difference. And they're proud of it in a way that it's hard to describe to people who don't live in rural North Carolina, but it's very real. It exists and it's important.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

I appreciate that so much. And Doug, I know you've spent a lot of your career in higher education, and we're curious to hear more. Is there a potential space for colleges and universities to play a role in encouraging rising business leaders to work alongside education leaders and policymakers?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Absolutely. You know, all I ever heard, and I spent a lot of time with businesses that were recruited on the campus, and all I ever heard was we can't get enough talent. Um, as Tom said earlier, it's all about people. If we've got better people, we can do more things. If we don't have the people, we can't do the things. And the thing that all people on the campus understand is we can only work with the material we get. And the students have got to get a solid foundation in the K through 12 experience because if when they get to college, if they're really only in college beginning to learn the things they should have learned before they got to college in high school and so forth, you can't give them a college degree. So it the whole thing works back through the channel. And um, I the people in higher education are fully aware of the critical nature and in this state that we have strong public education K through 12 and are deeply committed to the entire education trail from kindergarten or for that matter, from pre-K all the way through the education trail. We got a lot of students to go through the community colleges and and so forth. So um there is no question that uh the universities and the colleges absolutely dependent and absolutely supportive of the very best K-12 education that we can possibly provide in the state.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Thank you. And Tom, I know that you are a longtime education advocate. You've been on the school board, you've tutored in schools, you've done so many different things. And yet I know sometimes we've talked about there are business leaders who care a lot, the way all of you are describing and like all of you, but they just don't really know how to get involved or what to do. Um, so what would you tell them if they said, I care too? I'm like Doug, Mike, Jarian, and Tom. What can I do? Um, either in my own community or in North Carolina?

SPEAKER_02 9:09

Well, for most public schools, if you're an elementary school parent, the way to get involved is through the PTA. And PTAs are very helpful in almost every community. Once you're past elementary school, helping at the middle school level or high school level is more challenging. I would still recommend doing what I did 33 years ago, which I just went to the closest high school, got an appointment with the principal, and I said to him, you know, you must need resources in this school. I'm sure you're underfunded and you've got faculty that have needs and you've got students that want to understand careers. How about if I created a board of business leaders from this area that would meet with you whenever you wanted us to? You could tell us what your faculty needs, and we'll go out and get it from the community, from the business community. Would that work? He looked at me and he said, Well, you know, I work with 41 other groups, 42 won't be so bad. And that I that was my first learning experience about what it's like to be a high school principal. And that is in in eastern Wake County, which was kind of rural at the time, back in the early 90s. But that's the best way to find out. Business leaders won't understand schools until they spend some time in a school. A principal usually would be happy to have you shadow for a short period of time, half a day, and you'll know a lot. Or just spend a couple hours in the classroom at any grade level, and you'll learn a lot about what teachers have to do to help students every day move towards their goal. But uh, I promise you, a principal, if you go volunteer to help in that kind of manner, don't ask me to teach a class, but ask me for other things, they'll be ecstatic to have that.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Thank you so much. We will continue this conversation after the break. As a state, we have been for several years first or second in business, while at the same time we're 48th in terms of how much we invest in our students per pupil. That's 48th out of 50 states. Um, and we're 49th in effort if you look at the percentage of our GDP that we invest in our public schools in terms of per pupil expenditure. Can we continue with what's happening in our state? Will we continue to be able to thrive in business with the investments in our local public schools? Or do you have other recommendations that you would make? And I'll open this up to all of you for somebody that would like to chime in.

SPEAKER_04 11:46

I'd love to, yeah. And I want to just echo again Tom's recommendations were amazing. Um, I'm fortunate at Equitable. We have 23,000 K through 12 clients. We're speaking to those uh educators every day. We hear firsthand some of the challenges, some of the opportunities. And um, I think you're right, that seems to be quite a delta from where we are as far as leading in business, but then that investment. And I think it underscores what an amazing job our educators in the state are doing, despite some of those things. Um, I think about those that may be hearing this conversation, thinking about their own organizations. It's not about just writing a check, but what are the other resources you may have access to that could benefit a school community? Um, and whether it be something endemic to who you are as a business, like what you focus on or what you manufacture, what are those skills that you could go share with a group of students, enlighten them, open their eyes to that as a career path? Or what are some things that you could do specifically to support educators in that vein? Um uh professional development is always of use and valuable to educators. Um, the last thing I'll say, and um uh I get the pleasure of working closely with uh a contingent of current and former North Carolina teachers of the year, and Leah Carper, I believe she's the 2022 North Carolina Teacher of the Year, and she talks a lot about listen, times have changed professionally. Like, it's not where our parents went to work somewhere for 30 years and got a gold watch when they retired. And so maybe it's time to think about the teaching profession the same way. Like, that's okay if an educator comes in and this is something that they go really hard and after five years they find another career. Uh, we should support that and not think it's all or nothing as far as they're a lifetime educator. And uh, as businesses, we think like that with our employees. We we don't hire people thinking that they're gonna retire here. We hire them thinking like we're gonna get the best of them, train them, develop them. And if they go somewhere else, that's kind of part of the equation. So um, maybe as a business community, how do we pour into educators in the same light? Um, maybe that could be a way that that would help advance and support and maybe close that gap a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Mike, Doug, or Tom, would you like to add any comments just about where we are, Doug?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Yeah, I you know, I just think we're resting on our laurels. Um, I think um most business leaders went to school a long time ago. Um, I haven't uh, you know, when I graduated from high school in the mid-70s, so it's a long time ago. Um, so I'm in no position to evaluate what's going on in the schools in 2025 when you know I'm I'm looking at my 50th anniversary, I mean uh a 50th reunion from high school. So uh the truth of the matter is uh some of us might have received a very good education in the 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s, and we don't know what's going on now. And so the the problem is that if you if a third grader is not receiving a quality education today, we're not going to know about that for two or three or four decades when we look around and we don't have the same quality of leadership that we might have today. But then it's too late. And so uh we're we're just being lazy. And if you look at some of the states that are around us, they're not being lazy and they're moving past us. And you can look at things like just one statistic is teacher pay. So we're losing on the borders. Uh, teachers are going to South Carolina, they're going to Georgia, they're going to Tennessee, they're going to Virginia because those states pay more than us, because other states in the South are not resting on their laurels. And so we we think of ourselves as the education state and things like that. It's no longer true because we haven't made investments there. And as business people, you you clearly know if you don't invest in certain areas, one day you wake up and you're behind the competition. And we're behind the competition. Now, what we, you know, if you're a business, you might still be doing well because you build a brand, you you, you know, you got a good seasoned uh product, it's still working. But one day you'll wake up and you'll be you'll be behind uh the competition, you'll be losing. And and we're gonna wake up and and and we're gonna find ourselves in that number one or two position in business because we've been resting and we've been lazy while others have been moving ahead.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

This is kind of your last uh final word we're coming up on. And so you each have a nice minute, so we're not rushing, but I want to make sure if there's something else you haven't said. So recommendations for business leaders, how can we advocate at the state level, but also what do you want people out there to know?

SPEAKER_04 16:32

Yeah, I think my message would just continue to be uh we know how vital uh our K th12 educators are, we know how important the school systems are, and um, I think we really, as businesses, uh how do we um create that positive energy internally? Not all of our employees are gonna have school-aged children. Um, not all of our employees are gonna understand maybe today the importance of um a really sound uh education system in our state, but how do we educate internally? I think that's another way that we can make a difference, uh, creating these influencers and engage stakeholders for our public education system early and often, creating that mechanism internally could perhaps uh bode well for the future.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Doug? Uh you know, I occasionally have an opportunity to talk to a state senator or a state representative and I talk about some of these issues that we're talking about right now. Uh, I am I'm amazed at the number of times they say, I haven't heard this from a single business leader in my uh district. So I would I would encourage business leaders who who do care about these issues, just pick up the phone and call your senators, pick up the phone and call your representative and and be the voice that says, I think my local public schools matter.

SPEAKER_02 17:53

Tom? So building on what Doug said, business leaders, we we survey our customers to know how how we're doing. Tell us how we're doing. I don't think I've ever gotten a survey from an elected official saying, tell me how we're doing on our policy and our decisions. It's never happened. They assume we'll do that and they do it every election year. And if we keep re-electing the same people and we never contact them, they're going to assume they're doing the right thing. So, as Doug's saying, I I rarely contact my elected officials. I'm too busy. I got plenty going on. But when I take time to learn about the things that are going on in public education that don't make any sense, and yet I and I expect my chambers of commerce to do BR lobbyists. Well, chambers of commerce don't do that. They are economic development lobbyists. They're not lobbying for more pay for teachers. They're not lobbying for lower for higher corporate taxes so that we can pay teachers more. They need to hear that. Legislators need to hear that directly from business leaders saying, stop cutting the corporate tax rate, put it into teacher pay. That's what we need. We need quality students coming out, K-12. And you're not going to do that by being 49th or 50th in the country. Please, let's get back to where we were in the late 90s when we were at least at national average. We we used to be in this position before in the early 90s, and business leaders stepped up and demanded something be done. Well, that hasn't happened since. And, you know, it's not just the big banks and textile companies and the tobacco companies now that are leading. It's all business leaders need to step up and take that step, go to schools, talk to their elected officials, and let's get something done that'll help us and be make the certain future much more certain and positive than it is right now.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Thank you all so much for this thought-provoking conversation, both tangible, what can I do in my local school tomorrow? How do we support educators? And just once again, how important our local public schools are in North Carolina. So I'm grateful to know each of you and really appreciate you being here today. After the break, this week's final word.

SPEAKER_02 20:15

Virginia took the top spot, with one of the cited reasons being the state's strong public education system. While that drop in ranking is far from drastic, it does demonstrate that if North Carolina does not prioritize our local public schools, we risk losing our spot as one of the best states for business. These two areas are not separate. They're inextricably linked. A thriving business environment depends on more than just favorable tax policies, tax percentages, or robust infrastructure. It also requires a strong foundation of well-educated, prepared individuals who are ready to contribute to a dynamic and evolving economy. Local public schools build that foundation. Community colleges and universities can add to it, but K-12 is the foundation. They are where the future workforce is developed, where critical thinking and problem-solving skills are nurtured, and where the next generation of leaders first discover their potential. Local public schools also play a vital role in the stability and appeal of communities. Strong schools attract families, retain talent, and foster civic engagement. In many rural communities, including several in North Carolina, schools are among the largest employers while also serving as community hubs. When local schools succeed, their communities are more likely to succeed with them. Business leaders are uniquely positioned to play a role in supporting and strengthening local public schools. The business sector has the capacity to help address long standing challenges through direct partnerships, mentorship programs, workforce development initiatives, tutoring opportunities, advocacy at the state level. These collaborations benefit both. Students and businesses, and are necessary for a sustainable long-term progress in our state. In rural areas, the relationship between schools and local industries can be particularly impactful. When students see viable career paths in their own communities, they are more likely to stay or return after college, invest in the local economy, and contribute to regional growth. For businesses, this means access to homegrown talent who love their community and reduced workforce shortages. For students, it means access to opportunity without the need to leave home to find it. Many business leaders already serve as champions of education through volunteering, serving on school boards, tutoring, or other school activities. For others, the path to engagement may be less familiar. Advocating for better funding and support is not what business leaders normally do. We rely historically on our chambers of commerce, but they don't really do that. They are economic development engines. Advocacy can take many forms, whether speaking up for teacher pay, supporting access to early childhood education, or helping to shape policies that close opportunity gaps. There are countless ways to make a difference if you're willing to stand up for public schools. The strongest partnerships between the education and business sectors are built on consistency, trust, and shared goals. These relationships don't emerge overnight, but when cultivated with care, they can transform communities. They allow schools to be better to better respond to workforce demands, give students a clearer view of their postgraduate options, and create a more resilient and inclusive economy. North Carolina's reputation as a top state for business is one worth protecting, but that reputation will not hold if local public schools continue to face the level of investment or disinvestment and widening opportunity gaps as we've seen for the last 15 years. The future of North Carolina's workforce, communities, and prosperity depends on the strength of our local public schools, and right now they depend on us as business leaders to step up and make sure they get the help they need. Thank you for taking time with us to learn and think about public education. That's all for today, and we'll see you next week.