Miranda Wicker

This page was current at the end of the individual's last campaign covered by Ballotpedia. Please contact us with any updates.

Miranda Wicker

Independent

Elections and appointments

Last election

November 3, 2020

Education

Bachelor's

University of Georgia, 2006

Personal

Birthplace

Charleston, S.C.

Profession

Director of Social Media for The Conferences for Women

Contact

Campaign website

Campaign Facebook

Miranda Wicker (independent) ran for election to the Cherokee County Schools to represent District 1 in Georgia. She lost as a write-in in the general election on November 3, 2020.

Wicker completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.

Biography

Wicker was born on March 13, 1982, in Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a bachelor's degree in 2006. She has also attended classes at Piedmont University. Wicker's professional experience includes working as the Director of Social Media for The Conferences for Women. She also has worked as a high school educator.

Elections

2020

See also: Cherokee County School District, Georgia, elections (2020)

General election

General election for Cherokee County School District District 1

Incumbent Kelly Poole defeated Miranda Wicker in the general election for Cherokee County School District District 1 on November 3, 2020.

		Candidate	%	Votes
✔	Submit photo	Kelly Poole (R)	99.0	18,729
		Miranda Wicker (Independent) (Write-in)	1.0	185

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	Incumbents are bolded and underlined. The results have been certified. Source	Total votes: 18,914
= candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey.
If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey.
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Republican primary election

Republican primary for Cherokee County School District District 1

Incumbent Kelly Poole advanced from the Republican primary for Cherokee County School District District 1 on June 9, 2020.

		Candidate	%	Votes
✔	Submit photo	Kelly Poole	100.0	5,417

---

	Incumbents are bolded and underlined. The results have been certified. Source	Total votes: 5,417
= candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey.
If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey.
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team.

Campaign themes

2020

Ballotpedia survey responses

See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection

Miranda Wicker completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Wicker's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.

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Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

As a former teacher, local mom, and education advocate, I am the right candidate to serve on our School Board. I graduated from the University of Georgia in 2006 with a BSEd in Language and Literacy Education and earned my Masters of Arts in Teaching from Piedmont College in 2008. I believe that many members of our community feel unheard by our current school board, and I want to listen to their concerns and then be their voice on our school board. Our parents, students, and teachers deserve representatives who advocate for them, even when it means going against the status quo. Just as I did in the classroom for so many years, I'm here to serve my community.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

• Our pandemic response has not been equitable, particularly for our special needs students. We owe our citizens and students better.
• Our students and teachers deserve stronger mental health initiatives to face the growing numbers of adolescents facing mental health crises.
• We need to attract and hire diverse teachers. Minority students deserve to have teachers who look like them.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Beyond COVID-19, students today are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis. While our district has begun the work of teaching mental wellness skills and social-emotional learning, there is more work yet to be done. We must focus on dispelling the myths of mental illness, train our teachers in how to spot signs and help students who may be struggling, and begin having community conversations about mental health and suicide prevention. The earlier a child can receive mental health support, the better their outcomes will be.


We are fortunate in Cherokee County to have one of the best school systems in metro Atlanta and the state of Georgia thanks to a commitment to excellence which reaches every level of our school system. But that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement. We have a representation gap in our classrooms which we must address. Minority students need to see and experience teachers who look like them; majority students need to see and experience teachers who don't. While we have committed to diverse hiring practices in the past, I would like to see us recommit to those efforts and make them a priority focus for future school years. We need to recruit actively in ways that make it clear we are seeking diverse teacher candidates so that our schools can more accurately reflect our communities.

Who do you look up to? Whose example would you like to follow, and why?

It may sound cliché, but I look up to my mother. She is the hardest working, most selfless woman I know, and the example she set for me, the one she continues to set, is the reason I am who I am today. Growing up, we didn't have much. In fact, some would have classified us as poor, and by financial metrics, we were. But we were committed to each other, to our family, and that was in large part due to my mother. She always found a way for us to have what we needed, even when it seemed impossible.

My mother has never seen herself as above or better than anyone and taught me that the best leaders work alongside the people on their team. When I was in high school, she opened a restaurant, and she was always the first one in the door and the last one to leave, working just as hard as everyone else in the building to ensure a job well done. She's not content to tell others how to do a job; she's going to do it with them. And there's no job beneath her.

She is patient and kind and dedicated to serving others above herself. Growing up, she empowered me to speak my mind respectfully, to advocate for myself and eventually to advocate for others. She has taught me the power of unwavering support and love, of standing up for what's right and good. There is no problem she can't figure out and nothing she's not willing to learn.

She is the epitome of a strong leader and a strong woman and I'm proud to know her and be her daughter.

What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

Humility, a desire to serve others, empathy, those are the characteristics that I look for when choosing who gets my vote.

We need leaders who aren't afraid to admit that they don't have all the answers and call in the people who do. Leaders cannot be afraid to work collaboratively to come up with solutions that work for everyone, even for the people with whom we disagree. They're still our constituents and deserving of our time and consideration.

Leadership isn't, by itself, an act of service. Serving is an action. Our leaders need to understand that leading doesn't mean sitting in the big seat and telling others what to do. It means being unafraid to do whatever job needs doing, knowing that no job is beneath you and that you cannot and should not ask others to do what you are unwilling to do yourself.

Finally, our leaders need empathy. A leader's job is to listen to and try to understand where their constituents are coming from, what that person needs, especially when that person's background may be different from our own. By listening to hear instead of to respond, we ensure that we're able to do our best to work toward solutions that work for everyone, not just those who are loudest or who agree with our personal politics or beliefs.

What legacy would you like to leave?

I hope my greatest legacy will be my children. I hope they learn the value of hard work, empathy, and servant leadership and understand that there is no problem they cannot solve if they're willing to work in cooperation with others. More than I hope that they grow up to be doctors or teachers or lawyers or engineers, or whatever they set their sights on one day, I hope that they grow up to be kind, to understand that they have been given advantages others haven't, and to use their voices to uplift others. To put goodness into the world.

What was the last song that got stuck in your head?

The entire songbook for Hamilton: An American Musical. I can, at almost any time, answer a question with a Hamilton lyric and consider it both a blessing and a curse.

What is the primary job of a school board member in your view?

The primary job of a school board member is to represent the students, parents, and teachers-our community stakeholders-to county administration and policymakers to ensure that the needs of the community are being both heard and met. We are the elected representatives of the community and aren't chosen to give the green light every project the county decides is necessary, particularly if the initiative will take money away from other, more necessary projects. The school board member should act in the best interest of the community, always, and should not play partisan politics with our students and our schools like we've seen with COVID-19.

Do you believe it is important to intentionally recruit with the aim of diversifying the district’s faculty, staff, and administration? If so, what would be your policy to achieve this?

It is vital for school districts to recruit minority applicants to fill vacant faculty, staff, and administrative positions, particularly in Cherokee County. We have a representation gap in our classrooms which we must address. Minority students need to see and experience teachers who look like them; majority students need to see and experience teachers who don't.

While we have committed to diverse hiring practices in the past, I would like to see us recommit to those efforts and make them a priority focus for future school years. We need to look at what has held us back from attracting minority candidates and solve the problems preventing us from reaching the candidates we'd like to reach.

We need to recruit actively in ways that make it clear we are seeking diverse teacher candidates so that our schools can more accurately reflect our communities. We can partner with HBCUs in Atlanta to reach qualified candidates and provide signing bonuses to minority candidates who choose to work in Cherokee County schools.

We also need to ensure we're implementing anti-racism and diversity training for our existing administration, hiring teams, and staff members. It's not enough to hire minority candidates; we have to make this a place they'll want to stay because they feel welcomed, valued, and heard here.

How might you support the mental health needs of students/faculty/staff?

In my third year of teaching, I lost a student to suicide, and I spent months wondering why I hadn't seen the signs. What had I missed? Could I have done something to stop this? I didn't have the training to know what I didn't know.

Students today are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis. While our district has implemented the beginning of social-emotional learning, there is more work yet to be done. We must focus on dispelling the myths of mental illness, train our teachers in how to spot signs and help students who may be struggling, and begin having community conversations about mental health and suicide prevention. The earlier a child can receive mental health support, the better their outcomes will be.

With nearly 50% of mental health disorders being diagnosed before age 14, I would consider it a tremendous success to see us change the conversation about mental health, namely suicide prevention in Cherokee County and in the state of Georgia at large. I want us to be a district unafraid to discuss the hard things, to teach our students about the resources available to them when they need help. I want to see our teachers receive the training they need, not so that they can serve as counselors or so that we can add more to their responsibilities, but so they feel empowered to identify students struggling with mental health.

There are myriad organizations out there with which we can partner to achieve these goals, and some of this is as simple as being unafraid to have the conversation. When my student died, we were instructed NOT to talk about it with our students for fear that it would instigate copycats, but all the prevailing research tells us that talking openly does the opposite. We can make a difference simply by refusing to shy away from the difficult subjects.

Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.

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