When Darrell T. Allison came to Fayetteville State University in early 2021 as its 12th chancellor, he was largely unknown to the campus and the community overall.
His primary connection had been his mother-in-law, Brenda Timberlake, a Fayetteville native and FSU graduate who served on the university Board of Trustees from 2013 until February 2021. She resigned just before Allison was appointed.
What little the people in Fayetteville did know about Allison — he had no academic background; in his career, he primarily was a lobbyist; it appeared that political strings were pulled to put him in office ahead of other qualified candidates — sparked protests from students, alumni and others.
Read all about it: An Unconventional Chancellor Keeps His Cool
More than three years later, Allison has a track record at Fayetteville State. Some of his initiatives to improve student performance and help them jumpstart their careers are based on his experiences growing up and as a first-generation college student who relied on a scholarship.
CityView sat down with Allison in July and talked with him about his life and career before Fayetteville State University.
Here is what he had to say.
Political lessons from his father
Darrell Allison grew up in Kannapolis, a town about 35 miles north of Charlotte. “K-Town” may be best known for being the home of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt and the headquarters of the former Cannon Mills textiles company. Cannon employed much of the community before it went out of business.
“A lot of my roots, my grounding, my sense of who I am, and what helps me navigate, comes from Kannapolis, North Carolina,” he said.
Allison went to the public schools there, and was a wide receiver for the A.L. Brown High School Wonders football team, the 1989 AAA state champions.
He is one of six children. His parents, Thomas Edward Allison and Guerleane Weathers Allison, worked in the mills, as did his oldest brothers, Allison recalled. Thomas and two of Darrell’s brothers later operated a painting business.
Allison’s father, who died in 2015, was community leader and a behind-the-scenes mover and shaker, he said.
“Again, my father really demonstrated to me the power, the real power of politics, and what it ultimately should be for,” he Allison said.
“So again, he never was one who ran for office,” Allison said, but candidates for mayor, city council and even Congress stopped by the family home on Esther Circle to solicit his support.
“Because they knew that if Tom Allison got behind you, he was all in. And ‘all in’ means — he wasn’t made of wealth — but it was clear as to what goals and objectives are you looking to get done in the community. What’s your commitment on that? What does that look like?”
He recalled his father making the wooden stakes for candidates’ political signs and hammering them into the ground and otherwise supporting them. Mostly the candidates were Democrats.
“Well, my dad was a blue-dog Democrat,” Allison said. “Although, there was one Republican, I’ll leave unnamed, that he strongly supported primarily because that elected official supported initiatives for the community.”
That’s how it should be, Allison said. “I’m not a big titles guy. I’m really big in meeting the needs, how we best meet the needs of others.”
Allison said he gets behind any leaders — Republican or Democrat — who are doing good things. He’s registered unaffiliated, and says he’s never been a member of a political party.
Thomas and Guerleane Allison also pushed their children to succeed academically, the chancellor said.
“You say ‘encouraged’ — it was a mandate,” Allison said, laughing. “As my dad would say, ‘You can do it with or without.’”
Do with or without…?
“A little correction or not. But you’re gonna do it,” Allison said, and he waved his hand, miming the swinging of a switch or a belt. “Either one, you chose. But luckily for us we were wise enough to take the safe route, and we’re all better off for it.”
From brake pads to the White House
Whether or not as a child Allison needed switchings to keep up his grades, he won an academic scholarship to attend North Carolina Central University in Durham. His older sister and his younger brother, too, went to NCCU on scholarships, he said. Their generation was the first in their family to attend universities. In 2017, Allison donated $75,000 to N.C. Central to fund a scholarship program in his father’s name.
Many students at Fayetteville State are similar to Allison and his sister and brother — first-generation college students, from working class families of color, from lower income communities, he said. And without scholarships or similar financial aid, they would have not been in a position to attend college — at least, not right out of high school.
In Kannapolis at A.L. Brown High School, Allison said, he thought he wanted to become a lawyer. His undergraduate major at N.C. Central was political science. Law school would come later.
The scholarship got Allison onto the NCCU campus in 1990, but it didn’t cover all his expenses. He went home his first two summers to make money, helping his dad on the paint truck and working at a factory in nearby Salisbury that made brake pads for trucks.
“Third shift, to be exact, because you got a bit more money,” Allison said.
What goes into making brake pads?
“What goes in, is 10 degrees hotter inside that factory than it is outside. That’s what goes in. You were just hoping that you can come out. It was hard work. No matter how clean you were going in, you were going to be dirty coming out.”
Allison’s plans to work at the factory again in the summer after his junior year changed when he got a call in spring 1993 from the office of then-Chancellor Julius L. Chambers, the prominent civil rights leader who led N.C. Central from 1993 to 2001.
“I had not met Chancellor Chambers at the time,” Allison said, and he had not applied for an internship. But the university picked him. He said it was based on his good grades, which he maintained so that he would not lose his scholarship.
“I had to maintain a certain GPA in order to continue, and if I did not do that, I would be shipped back to Kannapolis, North Carolina, with the real likelihood … that I would be working in the mill,” he said. “And I absolutely needed no more motivation than to try to do my best.
“Plus I would have to answer to my mother and my father.”
When Chambers’ assistant told Allison it was a paid internship, the decision was made. He went to Washington to work in the Clinton administration’s presidential personnel office. The White House internship that summer put him on his path to his career. “To have funded this opportunity of a lifetime, it’s a game-changer,” he said.
He wants students at Fayetteville State to have similar career-making opportunities. None should be held back from an internship because they cannot afford to work for free, he said.
“It’s not enough now to just have a high GPA and a four-year degree,” he said. “We want to make sure, similar to me, that you get some work experience as work is just as valuable as that GPA.”
While students at FSU were getting paid internships when Allison became chancellor, he said he noticed a need for more opportunities. So Allison started an effort to help students get paid internships.
“Since about ’21, we launched this up with the goal that we can get in three years over 750 internships with companies and agencies who will fund those internships for the experience,” Allison said
This past summer, students had 964 paid internships. Allison said the total is expected to surpass 1,000 by December.
“I am so, so fortunate now that we have over 200 companies and agencies that have come alongside and will be nearing $6 million here” with funding for those internships, he said.
Flimsy paper, powerful words
As a college intern in Washington back in 1993, Allison said, part of his job was to make notes during meetings — pen to legal pad — and then make photocopies of his notes for the staff and leadership.
He had a realization when he was assigned to a meeting where the Clinton administration was choosing the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as “the drug czar.”
“I remember, literally, when I had the stacks of about 10 copies of whatever the conversation was. And I remember saying, ‘Man, this paper is so flimsy. But the words on this paper are so powerful, for the good of millions of people or for the bad,’” he said. “And it just really connected with me: The power of policy. The power of policy.”
Allison said he went back to Washington after he graduated from N.C. Central in 1994 and worked in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Justice Department, then returned to North Carolina for law school at UNC.
After graduating in 1999, Allison didn’t get his law license. “My pathway was more of public policy,” he said.
At first, he said, he was with a Florida-based faith-based organization and worked with Congress and the George W. Bush White House to help low-income communities, assist with hurricane relief and reduce homelessness.
In 2002, he and his wife, La Nica Allison, returned to North Carolina from Florida and formed Allison, Allison & Associates, a political consulting firm.
Parents for Educational Freedom, a school choice advocacy organization, in 2005 hired Allison to become its founding president. School choice advocates call for taxpayer dollars to be used to help families educate their children outside the traditional public school system.
Allison, a man who went to public schools from kindergarten through graduate school, was now lobbying the General Assembly on behalf of two things that some claim are anathema to traditional public schools: charter schools and tuition vouchers.
Charter schools are independent, taxpayer-funded public schools that operate separately from traditional public schools.
Tuition vouchers, provided under North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program, are a taxpayer-funded tool to help parents pay the cost of enrolling their children in private K-12 schools. They have been politically controversial. Originally issued only to lower-income students, the vouchers are now available to all families regardless of income. The General Assembly this week voted to boost school voucher spending by $463.5 million across this school year and next school year to eliminate a wait-list of 55,000 students, the Associated Press reported.
What attracted Allison to the school choice job?
“There was just thought that … we could be doing better for certain communities, certain children in North Carolina,” he said, specifically referencing dropout rates in the public schools, which are disproportionately higher for Black children and other children of color. Nearly 20 years after Allison took that job, in the 2022-23 school year, the North Carolina high school dropout rate for Black students was 2.26 per 100 students, 2.99 for Hispanic students, 2.35 for students of two or more races, and 1.38 for white students.
Navigating and networking
As a school choice lobbyist, Allison said he considered the past as he tried to change the future.
He recalled America’s racial K-12 education history following 1954’s Brown vs. Board of Education United States Supreme Court ruling, which desegregated public schools. White people who opposed racial integration established private schools — often called segregation academies — to keep their children out of classrooms with non-white children.
“The proliferation of private schools post-Brown vs. Board of Education, and also understanding that you know, you’re in the South here” had to be kept in mind, Allison said. “I remember thinking very strategically about, ‘How do you navigate that?
“How do you work it, where you get beyond the partisanship, get beyond the politics of it all? And look at ways in which we can at least provide some options for children who are in counties that you and I both know are not Mecklenburg and not Wake, in terms of resources. And by the time they turn 18, their life is pretty much directed, if you will.”
Instead of demonizing one form of education or the other, Allison said, elected officials should provide families multiple pathways for their children to succeed. “So instead of one bridge, how about we look to have two or more bridges, because at the end of the day, the goal is to get that student to the other side,” he said.
In 2005, Democrats controlled the legislature. Republicans, who swept the Democrats out of power in the 2010 elections, have broadly been more receptive to school choice ideas.
Fayetteville State alumnus Elmer Floyd, a Black Democrat, was serving District 43 in the House of Representatives back then. Allison was effective, Floyd said.
Allison had key lawmakers, such as Republican former Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam, on board with the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program, he said.
“There was only three good minority lobbyists in the General Assembly … that had a good rapport with the legislators,” Floyd said, Allison being one of them. “Those were the three that I saw that had the skill set to work and deliver.”
Allison delivered for his organization:
- An end to North Carolina’s cap on charter schools. Prior to 2011, state law allowed only 100 charter schools to operate in North Carolina. The legislature did away with this limit in 2011. Now there are more than 200.
- Also in 2011, the state approved grants to help the families of disabled children pay for private schools.
- The General Assembly approved the Opportunity Scholarship private school tuition voucher program in 2013.
- In 2018, North Carolina began offering Education Savings Account (now called Education Student Accounts) to children with disabilities. The students receive $9,000 to pay for private school tuition and other education expenses.
Allison was elected by the UNC Board of Governors to the N.C. Central Board of Trustees in 2015.
In 2017, the state Senate unanimously voted to give him a seat on the Board of Governors. Two Democratic state senators praised him in an article about the appointment in the Durham Herald-Sun.
“Darrell is one of those people who is generally well-regarded and respected even though he may be someone I have disagreements with from time to time,” former state Sen. Floyd McKissick Jr. told the newspaper.
In 2018, Allison left Parents for Educational Freedom to become the national director of state teams and political strategy at the American Federation for Children, a national school choice organization.
And in 2021, he came to Fayetteville State.
Allison’s hiring was surrounded by controversy. Critics questioned his lack of a higher education academic background, and some felt politics led to his selection.
But now in Allison’s fourth year at the helm, FSU has lowered tuition costs, boosted enrollment to a record high, increased student retention rates, more than doubled its research grants and has more than $200 million of construction and capital projects underway. Read the accompanying story on Allison’s tenure, published in partnership with The Assembly.
· · ·
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.This story was made possible by donations from readers like you to the CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.
