by Steven Hale, Nashville Banner
April 13, 2026
The seven candidates for the upcoming Metro Nashville Public Schools board primary gathered Sunday for a forum at Kairos-Ebenezer AME Church in South Nashville co-hosted by Nashville Organized for Action and Hope (NOAH), the Banner and Delta Sigma Theta. With early voting starting on Wednesday, the group answered questions about school safety, charter schools, immigrant students and more.
Watch the full forum on the Banner’s YouTube page.
Only four of the nine board seats — Districts 2, 4, 6 and 8 — are up for election this year and just two are being contested. Below are some highlights from the candidates running in each district.
District 4
Dr. Berthena Nabaa-McKinney, the board’s current vice chair, is running for re-election against challenger Jennifer Bell in District 4, which includes parts of Donelson, Hermitage and Old Hickory. The two expressed a lot of agreement at Sunday evening’s forum, but with some differences in emphasis based on their individual experiences.
On charter schools, both acknowledged that they are part of the educational landscape in Nashville but said they oppose adding more, citing the fiscal impact on the system. Bell, a former teacher who also served as the director of the Academies of Nashville, said the district should adopt the ideas that are working in existing charter schools.
“We need to be stewards of best practices,” she said. “I’ve seen some interesting and creative things happening in our charter schools. Let’s share the practices we have that are working, abandon those that are not and work to strengthen all of our schools.”
Nabaa-McKinney said she valued a parent’s ability to choose the school that is best for their child, but that MNPS already offers a wide variety of choices. She cited concerns about accountability as another reason she does not support charter expansion and, in what would be a consistent theme throughout the night, pointed to the state government as a source of frustration.
“Over the last four years, there have been two existing charter schools that we have made a recommendation to close because of the academic performance and the decline in performance for students,” she said. “Those recommendations were overturned.”
Asked about school safety, Bell and Nabaa-McKinney both emphasized how social and emotional safety contributes to physical safety.
“I’ll tell you what shaped my leadership style,” Bell said. “As a first-year teacher at [Glencliff High School] on Wednesday afternoons, I would travel down Antioch Pike, I’d cross Harding Place and I’d go visit my brother, who was incarcerated. One day while I’m visiting him — I’m a young teacher, I’m working multiple jobs, I’m trying to earn a graduate degree — he says, ‘how are things going?’ I felt like it wasn’t my place to complain because I wasn’t incarcerated. But anyway, he goes on and he says, ‘hey, don’t forget about the kids like me.’”
She said the district’s safety policies and procedures should be evaluated at least every two years.
Nabaa-McKinney said MNPS lives by the mantra “every student known” and cited an idea from the late teacher and education advocate Rita Pearson, who said in a 2013 TED Talk that “kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.”
While she highlighted some of the recent steps MNPS has taken to bolster security at schools, including weapons detection systems, she also repeated a point made by several of the candidates, noting that gun violence was a problem bigger than any set of district-level policies.
“Kids don’t get guns in school,” she said. “They get them in the community. So what are we doing to advocate at the local and state level to change laws to help protect kids and make kids a priority?”
Asked about how to support immigrant students amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy, Nabaa-McKinney said the issue was “deeply personal” to her as “a Black Muslim woman who is often mistaken for an immigrant.” She affirmed the right of students to a public education regardless of their immigration status and said board members have an obligation to advocate against “harmful policies” at the state legislature.
She also referenced a recent article in The Tennessean about the race between her and Bell, which she said attracted hundreds of “atrocious” comments on Facebook. Speaking after her, Bell denounced the “messages of hate,” which she said were largely directed at her “friend” Nabaa-McKinney.
“It is unacceptable, and it has no place anywhere in this community or in our schools,” Bell said.
Referring to her experience at Glencliff, she said diversity was the school’s strength, “but we had to go out and establish trust with our families.”
In a discussion about the MNPS budget, Nabaa-McKinney pointed to her experience as chair of the board’s Budget and Finance Committee, while Bell noted that she was the only candidate with experience managing local, state and federal money for MNPS.
District 6
In Southeast Nashville’s District 6, current board member Cheryl Hayes is running for re-election against former board member Fran Bush and retired MNPS school bus driver Mary Bernice Polk.
More than once on Sunday evening, Bush criticized the current board and officials who have led MNPS since she left office in 2022. Citing the high number of students who are not reading at grade level, she said the district hadn’t done enough to address learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. After a question about school safety, she noted that last year’s shooting at Antioch High School took place in District 6 and said it came after calls for security improvements “fell on deaf ears” after she left the board.
“This shooting could have been prevented,” she said. “It fell on deaf ears with Metro Nashville Public School board when we knew we had an uptick of guns coming into our schools.”
Later, Bush said she felt she left the school board in “stable condition” but that it was now in “critical condition.”
Mayes highlighted how she has approached her role on the board for the past four years. When the candidates were asked about Black students being suspended at higher rates than white students, she talked about the importance of understanding challenges at the community level.
“Every month I hold community meetings in my district for every single parent and every single student who wants to join me to talk about the issues that they have,” she said. “One thing that I’ve learned is that you have to meet people where they are, and you can’t just create an opportunity and expect people to show up to it. You’ve got to meet people where they are, and that means understanding what some of the barriers are for our Black and brown children.”
Polk repeatedly referred to her experience driving a school bus full of students of different races, speaking different languages. Building trusting and individual relationships with them, she said, shaped her views on the issues facing schools.
“For these last 14 years of my life, I have spent [time] with thousands of children and on our school bus, the very first thing they hear from me is that nobody’s different than anyone else,” she said. “When you walk on here, you’re respectful, you treat people the way you want to be treated. I don’t know how we continue to say these rates and data processes. I don’t do data processes, I do students.”
She agreed with the other candidates’ opposition to charter school expansion, saying she worried that it would bring back a racial divide in the school system. And on school safety, she called on gun owners and parents in the community to do better.
“If you have those guns, get the safety thing to put on the gun so that they don’t get to your children,” she said. “Why are they trying to put them in their backpack? Because they see you putting it in your purse.”
District 2
Running unopposed for re-election in District 2 — largely made up by the Overton Cluster — Rachel Anne Elrod discussed various steps the district has taken during her tenure, but also repeatedly highlighted the ways that challenges faced by MNPS are downstream of state-level policies.
“I believe there is no single thing we can do, purchase, provide as a policy or as a procedure, that will be the fix for the situation of gun violence that plagues our children,” she said. “Nothing will add up … to the positive outcomes that would come from common sense gun laws.”
On issues ranging from school safety to funding and the status of immigrant children, she emphasized the need to advocate for policy changes at the state legislature.
During the panel’s discussion of immigrant students, she said she was absolutely opposed to state Republican efforts to force school districts to track the immigration status of students. She also said she opposed placing license plate readers at schools.
“I think we need to prove to our families that we are safe places,” she said.
District 8
Also running unopposed is board member Erin O’Hara Block in District 8.
She said she felt the board spends an “outsized” amount of time talking about potential charter schools, which risks distracting from the job of ensuring the highest quality in existing schools.
On school safety, speaking just moments after Bush’s comments about the Antioch shooting, she said there was no easy solution.
“For anyone to think that they have one answer to this question and that is false,” she said. “We shouldn’t believe that.”
She agreed with other candidates about the importance of creating an environment where students feel comfortable and trust the adults around them.
“What I do know is that when kids feel safe with someone, they will tell them when they hear that something is wrong,” she said.
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