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Steve Rader became the newest member of the Beaufort County Board of Education on Tuesday night, July 15. He replaced former member Gary Carlton. 

On June 24, Carlton informed the Beaufort County Board of Elections that he was moving outside of his electoral district. Carlton served district 6 which covers small portions of Washington and Chocowinity. 

Rader was selected by the Beaufort County Republican Party on Sunday, July 13 to replace Carlton. It was a unanimous vote, according to Beaufort County Board of Elections Director, Kellie Hopkins. 

“Mr. Rader’s application was impressive and received a unanimous vote. Steve has served the Republican Party,  and his community for many years. I believe he is fair, an excellent mediator, and it is my hope that he will serve District 6 honorably,” Carolyn Garris, Beaufort County Register of Deeds and Chairwoman of the Beaufort County Republican Party wrote in an email to the Daily News. 

In 2017, Senate Bill 253 changed the Boards of Education in Beaufort, Carteret, Cleveland, Dare, Haywood, Hyde, Madison, Onslow, Pender and Yancey counties from being elected in nonpartisan races to partisan. Members of the Beaufort County Board of Education serve for four years. Rader will serve the remainder of Carlton’s term which expires in November of 2026. 

Because the board of education is partisan, eleven executive committee members from the Beaufort County Republican Party voted on Carlton’s replacement. 

Since Rader and Carlton are part of the same political party, there’s little difference between their political ideologies, according to Rader. One thing that will remain consistent between Carlton and Rader is keeping parents’ wishes and concerns their priority. 

“I think he’s had the same focus of doing what the parents want to see done in the schools. I’m very much in that position, too,” Rader said. “It’s really that the voters, the parents, the taxpayers are our boss and that’s who we look to for guidance on what we do in education,”

Rader said he will advocate for what parents would like to see (or removed from) in schools which means taking a traditional approach to education. 

“I think there was a lot of things that were injected in that parents are not too happy with,” Rader said. “I think a lot of that came out during the COVID, because the kids were all at home, and people could look on the computer and sort of see the stuff and say, ‘hey, wait a minute.’ So I’d like to see education get back to a more traditional fashion instead of some of the things that have come out.” 

While parents’ have concerns about their children’s education that are related to their personal beliefs and values, Rader said they also have concerns about the effectiveness of current curricula like Common Core math.  Common Core State Standards for Mathematics aims to provide students with an excellent education that prepares them for college and their future careers. 

Most parents’ concerns about Common Core come from the implementation of the curriculum, because it uses conceptual methods to teach mathematics rather than traditional methods. This means parents have difficulty helping their children with their math homework, because while they may know how to solve a math problem, parents don’t know how to solve it using Common Core’s instructional material. 

“Parents have been upset about that for years, because children aren’t learning that way,” Rader said when talking about Common Core standards for math. 

Rader would like to see Beaufort County Schools be “vigilant on local control of local schools,” he said. “Because you’re always having higher levels of government trying to come in and direct what you do.” 

Though there are things that the school system cannot control like the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s (NC DPI) funding formula for how much money schools receive from the state, Rader believes the school system needs to be wary when deciding to accept or reject money from federal programs that have “strings attached.”  

“A lot of federal programs have strings attached. We need to be very cautious about what strings are there,” Rader said. “Sometimes, it’s doing things that maybe we don’t want done in our schools or maybe sometimes it’s strings that just cost more money than what you’re getting.” 

When asked if there were specific programs he was alluding to, Rader said programs that promote “woke agendas” or programs that include Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT). 

Beaufort County Schools has added and subtracted from its facilities in big ways over the last three years. In 2022, Washington High School opened its Boat Building Academy. Then in February 2024, the school district was awarded $42 million dollars from NC DPI to build Washington Elementary School. Washington Elementary School combines Eastern Elementary School and John Cotten Tayloe School. On June 3, the Beaufort County Board of Education voted to permanently close S.W. Snowden Elementary, a K-8 school in Aurora. 

When looking at the future of Beaufort County Schools, Rader said the district needs to do a “public process of facility planning” in addition to looking at where potential growth will be in the future, discussing why Beaufort County Schools could lose students to neighboring counties  and reviewing school performance. 

Rader believes that if there was more transparency around facility planning, this would give families moving to the area a better idea of which school their children should or will attend. He believes there is potential for growth near the Beaufort County/Pitt County border. 

“We’ve lost a lot of students to Pamlico County that would have gone to Snowden and we’re probably losing more now with the closing of Snowden. When that happens, that school system gets the state money. So, it’s a loss to Beaufort County. I think we could flip that around if we put, particularly an elementary school, close to the Pitt County line to attract some Pitt County students here.” 

Rader is a former chairman of the Beaufort County Republican Party, the former First Congressional District Republican Chairman. He was involved with the East Main Street Neighborhood Association and was vice president of the Beaufort County Historical Society. He has previously served on the City of Washington’s Human Relations Council. He has also served as the Scouting Chairman for the Boy Scouts of America’s Blackbeard District which covered Beaufort and Hyde Counties. 

He served on the General Counsel for the North Carolina Republican Party and is a former Young Republican National Committeeman from North Carolina. He served Republican North Carolina Governor Jim Martin in several capacities including; General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, as North Carolina Commissioner to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and as a member of the North Carolina Rules Review Commission.