Chairman has experience on his side this time
By GORDON ANDERSON
anderson@sanfordherald.com
SANFORD — When Bill Tatum ran for a seat on the Lee County Board of Education in 2004, he was a political newcomer.
Now, as he makes his first bid for re-election, he’s a seasoned veteran, having spent that past four years as leading the school board through the opening of a second high school and breaking ground on a third middle school.
“I speak for the 15 percent of Lee County that can’t vote — and that’s the children,” Tatum said recently.
Tatum said he decided to seek a school board seat in 2004 “as a result of the feeling that the then-board of education has crossed the threshold of responsibility and had begun micromanaging the school system with what appeared to be a semblance of individual board members acting as quasisuperintendents.”
“It was my belief then and it is now that the board should function professionally and adhere to the mission by which a board of education should operate,” he continued. “Which is, simply put, to hire a superintendent, evaluate the superintendent, to set policies for the superintendent to implement and to establish annual budgets.”
Tatum was born and raised in Sanford and left for several years to attend college and serve in the U.S. Army. After getting out of the Army, he began teaching high school and coaching football in Granville County.
But when he returned to live in Sanford in 1984, it was to work for a concrete company in Raleigh.
He described the career change as easy. “It was a fairly easy jump because it was dealing with people and an organization,” he said.
“They both involved getting the maximum out of teamwork.” In the concrete field, he said much of his work came in the field of acquiring other companies. So when he started his own concrete company in Sanford but was bought out by a Dallas-based company before becoming operational, he wasn’t too surprised. Tatum’s last job before retirement was a consulting job with North Carolina-based construction company S.T. Wooten. Now, facing re-election, Tatum says he thinks the school board can remain viable “as long as those who aspire to be members realize the limits of responsibility and the fact that they are not board members except at regular or called meetings.” “If that’s the case, then the board can continue to be cohesive,” he said.
