Katie Long, a Mom of two daughters in Wake County Public Schools- turned student advocate- has announced her candidacy for a Wake County Public School Board seat for District 7.
After a long year of concentration on organized legislative action and advocacy for her children, Katie Long is running to make positive changes at the school board level for her whole county.
All of Katie Long’s advocacy was to benefit Wake’s 160,000 other students, by restoring parents’ rights, so in a way, she has already done the job she is running for now.
Her website is located at: long4change.com
“I’d sacrifice a lot to save the 160,000 children in Wake County from ever experiencing the terrible side effects of those COVID lockdowns again. Our Founding Fathers did just that; they sacrificed a lot for us. This is my country. I love America,” Long said about the motivations for her advocacy and activism at the school board level this past year and her reason for running for the position.
Long, whose advocacy was reported by the North Carolina News and Observer, was active with a group of other parent advocates who attended Wake County School board meetings in 2021 and 2022. The parents met to petition the sitting school board to change their face mask mandates and PCR COVID-19 testing on children.
The group wanted the board to make mask requirements ‘ optional’ and limit the demands for testing, as was the school board’s choice.
Long was so passionate about restoring choice for Wake County Public School Children that after a year of asking the school board to hear the community’s concerns, she blazed a trail and served the Wake County School Board with a letter of intent to file against their insurance policy- in an attempt to be finally heard.
According to a News and Observer article about her, Katie crossed a COVID safety tape to hand the board members her legal documents, causing a stir in her opponents for being naughty and not observing proper social distancing mandates. (Watch video footage at the article.)
“We didn’t have any choice, is how I saw it. We had done everything, including bringing data to inform the board, who were not listening to us. It was at a time when the school board had a choice to make the masks optional, and they just would not hear us,” Long said about the reason she served the papers to the Wake County school board on January 18, 2022.
The parents claimed that removing the option to mask was oppressive, and the concerned parents said that children wearing masks all day was causing needless health concerns- both physical and emotional.
Long and her husband of 17 years, her high school sweetheart, both personally fled Communist regimes and immigrated to the United States. Both Longs are concerned about the creeping tactics of control and tyranny their families saw firsthand and experienced being used on American children.
Long’s own daughter suffered from the adverse side effects of the forced masking.
Long experienced firsthand the battle to heal her own daughter, which ignited her desire to run for office and protect other Wake County students and parents with what she has learned on her own.
Long says she wants to serve students and the larger school community of parents as well.
“I feel like the representatives we have now do not fully embrace how much they can serve the community and other parents. We felt ignored for the whole year we were trying to understand the need for the School Board’s extreme masking demands. We told the board the stories, every month, of how their masking mandates were hurting our children, and those concerns fell on deaf ears. It was painful to experience that disconnect with other American citizens,” Long said.
In particular, Long plans to address how to empower parents by restoring parental rights. In addition, she wants to see financial accountability by investigating whether the school funds have been used appropriately.
Long wants to return to using the curriculum to what she calls the 3 Rs and STEM, and she wants to see improved and cooperative board governance with parents.
“Ideally, there are more sensible and practical ways to make the changes we want to see at the school board level than the lawsuits, but that was done when we felt like we were running out of options for our children’s freedom. There must be a way to protect all children and address parents- all of the stakeholders- at the same time. I’m willing to sacrifice everything I have and lose everything for our children because I understand the importance of having the freedom from growing up in the United States, myself. I do not want to lose those freedoms for them, or for the country,” Long said.