Tongde Wu, a scientific consultant and parent of a Glenwood Elementary School student, is set to join the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education to fill a vacant seat.
Wu, who works as a pharmacology and toxicology senior consultant with Biologics Consulting Group, was selected Thursday night by the board’s current members from a group of three finalists and 53 total applicants for the seat. She was joined by Honoria Middough and Jo Wyrick for additional interview questions from the board and earned the appointment with four of the six votes. Wu will be sworn in to formally join the board at a future meeting, which was not set after Thursday’s vote.
Wu will take over the unfinished term of Rani Dasi, who departed the CHCCS Board of Education in August — because she filled a vacant seat herself on the Orange County Board of Commissioners. Dasi’s four-year term expires at the end of 2027, meaning Wu will serve on the board through at least that time frame while the seat is up for election that fall.
The current president of Glenwood’s Asian School of Asian Culture PTA, Wu said she became much more active and engaged around the Board of Education’s activity amid the school closure discussion and vote, which ultimately was to close Glenwood Elementary at the end of this school year. Her third grader, who Wu said receives Exceptional Children services, is set to move to Rashkis Elementary School along with other enrollees of the Mandarin Dual Language program.
“I have been attending school board meeting since this past February,” Wu told school board members in her opening comments on Thursday, “and I also attended a lot of community engagement meetings and [the district administration’s] hearing series. I think the all these experience helped me evolve my role, my perspective from parent to a more broad, district level. So, I believe what I can bring to the table is an educator’s perspective, mother’s lived experience, and also disciplined way [of] learning complex issues and making hard decisions.”
Wu used the closure of Glenwood as an example in her response to the board’s question to finalists of ‘Using a recent decision by the board you disagree with, what would you have decided?’ Saying it was a “traumatizing experience” for her community, she said her first reaction as a parent was to question next steps and scrambling to figure out what made sense for her family. But as she followed the board’s meetings, the complicated nature of such major decisions highlighted how they do not happen in a vacuum.
“I started paying more attention to the whole process — the district-wide process [of] the enrollment, the staffing, the facility, the resources, program continuity – and the reality [is] that every major decision affects more than one community,” Wu said. “So, I still think I would have reached a different conclusion. But the biggest lesson here for me was not to simply say that I disagree with the board [or] with the outcome.”
In the scenario of being more involved in the Glenwood closure decision, Wu said she would identify “several options” to make a good comparison for which school to close or approach to take, using evidence to weigh on each option to understand the benefits and trade-offs. She also said she believes community engagement could have started earlier in the process and allowed for more dialogue between the district and the impacted school. Listening to input and providing more timely feedback might have given Glenwood families a better chance for understanding the decision and time to adapt.
“But,” Wu added, “what I said is an ideal situation. We are facing multiple challenges at at multiple levels. It is very difficult and during this district, district redistricting process decisions has to be made quickly and evidence-based. So I understand board’s decision. I’ll bet that I couldn’t agree with it. So for me, personally, this experience, the question [has] evolved from, ‘how does this affect me’ to ‘what is the best decision for the district as a whole?’ That’s why I’m here today.”
Prior to her time with Biologics Consulting Group, Wu worked for Eliquent Life Sciences and served as a research assistant professor at North Carolina Central University in Durham. She earned her Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the University of Arizona.
The full Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education meeting from Thursday, September 24 can be watched here.
Featured image via Biologics Consulting Group.
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