Dot Kendall Kearns was nearly speechless when the Guilford County Board of Commissioners announced they had designated June 27 as Dorothy “Dot” Kendall Kearns Day. Kearns was invited to the commissioners’ meeting in early June for the announcement, which had been kept a secret.
“I’ve never been so surprised,” Kearns said. “I would never have come in jeans.”
The recognition was fitting for a woman who has spent most of her 90 years in public service, advocating for equal opportunities for education for all children.
“It is staggering how one person can spend a life standing toe-to-toe with so many issues of critical importance on behalf of all of us — the education of children, the strength of families, preservation of local land, preservation of voting rights and women's rights — working to build the strengths of our society and eliminate the weaknesses,” said Ellen Weiner, who nominated Kearns for 7 Over Seventy.
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Kearns’ grandfather, a school bus driver in the segregated South, was forbidden to pick up black children. It pained him that those kids had to walk to school. Decades later, as a member of the PTA at Northwood Elementary in High Point during desegregation, she diplomatically addressed concerns of parents when the school got its first black principal.
“We talked to them and said… ‘Let’s see if we can make our schools acceptable to all our children.’ It worked out OK,” Kearns said.
Her handling of the situation got the attention of the High Point Chamber of Commerce, which was looking to appoint someone to the High Point Board of Education to help with desegregation woes. The chamber called Kearns.
“I’ve never even been to a board meeting,” Kearns told the caller.
She took the appointment anyway.
Two years later, when North Carolina transitioned to school board elections, Kearns ran for a position on the High Point Board of Education and won, the first woman to do so.
A decade later, she helped lead the merger Guilford County’s three school systems.
“Change was in the air, and it took a very long time get that implemented,” Kearns said.
She also wanted to see magnet programs in High Point.
“Greensboro had 16 magnet schools; High Point had none,” Kearns recalls.
Kearns served four terms on an at-large seat on the Guilford County School Board. High Point also got its magnet schools, and Kearns served for over 25 years on the foundation to create one of them — the William-Penn School for the Arts.
Another, The Academy at Central, was later renamed for her.
Kearns was on the Guilford County Board of Commissioners for nearly a decade and was the first woman to chair the board.
“Her caring, her savvy, her gentleness, her strength, her leadership, her mentoring is astounding, especially in a … generation where females were rarely encouraged to speak up,” Weiner said.
Kearns called her service on the board of commissioners “golden.”
“We were among the first counties ever to declare Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday,” she said.
Kearns worked with former congressman Robin Britt to establish the Smart Start Partnership in Guilford County, for which she served on the board of directors.
“I was always a believer of education for very young children and their mothers,” Kearns said.
Kearns has long been an advocate for water quality and the preservation of green spaces. She served on a committee to look at buffer zones around the county’s watershed lakes.
She also helped to establish the Rich Fork Preserve.
These days she is working to save historic High Point properties and repurpose some of the city’s abandoned factories.
“Our big hope is to establish a greenway in the southwest portion of the city to make it more attractive to people who want to start a business,” Kearns said.
Kearns is grateful to have been a part of some of the most significant transitional points in Guilford County history.
“It has truly been an amazing journey,” she said.
“Dot Kearns didn't have many role models, but she is the role model of a citizen for all of us — women and men,” Weiner said.
