CharterFolk X Volume 5.25 Cherie Graham — Seeing Every Person in the Room 

Article originally published on May 4, 2026 on the CharterFolk website.  Article written by John Ceballos

John Ceballos
May 4, 2026

We are honored to profile the extraordinary Cherie Graham, Chief of Instructional Support and Family Engagement, Sugar Creek Charter School.

There’s a story Cherie Graham likes to tell about the day she decided to join Sugar Creek Charter School.

It was 2015. She’d been working as a teacher for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) — the second-largest school district in North Carolina — for ten years and was feeling the pull toward something new. Cherie applied for different roles within the district, but began to sense that the next chapter she desired wasn’t going to find her if she stayed on the same path.

“My husband was the one who finally said it out loud,” Cherie said. “He told me, ‘You do know there are other schools outside of CMS?’”

She hadn’t, really. CMS was all she knew.

So she started looking and found Sugar Creek Charter School, where she is currently the Chief of Instructional Support and Family Engagement.

Cherie said she immediately fell in love with the school’s mission of eradicating generational poverty and didn’t apply anywhere else. On the day of the interview, she slipped out during an extended lunch break, drove over in her blazer, interviewed, returned to work, and waited.

When the phone call came a short time later, she had her answer.

 

Finding Her Place
Cherie grew up in Charlotte, majored in Human Development and Family Studies at UNC Greensboro, and was standing in front of her own classroom three months after graduation.

She was 21 years old at the time, trying to figure out a new position — and her first real job — on the fly.

“I’m not sure that was the best idea at that time, but I made it through,” she said.

She spent the next decade teaching various grade levels in CMS schools and building her craft. Upon deciding to join Sugar Creek, Cherie left the district with something that turned out to be just as valuable: a clear-eyed sense of what a school could look like when the adults in the building decided to move differently.

Sugar Creek provided that picture. Longtime superintendent Cheryl Turner, who retired as the school’s leader last year after 20 years, established the school’s mission, which is to eradicate generational poverty and prepare students for college and beyond. That mission strongly resonated with how Cherie had always thought about children: not who or where they are, but what they can become or where they can go.

Sugar Creek is the only school in Mecklenburg County where 100% of high school graduates are accepted to college with a scholarship. It is also the highest performing Title I school in the county.

Cherie started as a reading interventionist at Sugar Creek, working directly with students who were significantly below grade level. Over eleven years, she has grown into the role of Chief of Instructional Support and Family Engagement, a title that covers the ESL department, intervention, counselors, social workers, and the school’s full family engagement operation.

The K-12 school serves about 1,700 students in the Charlotte metro area across two campuses.

It is, by any measure, a lot of moving parts.

 

A Different Way of Moving
One of the things Cherie didn’t expect when she made the jump to Sugar Creek was how different daily work would feel.

In a district as large as CMS, decisions travel. They go up chains and come back down, and by the time something gets resolved, it was too late.

At Sugar Creek, her superintendent is right next door. In fact, she realized everyone involved with making key decisions — leadership, transportation, support staff — were readily available. The kind of institutional weight that often gets distributed across floors and departments within district schools was suddenly accessible and human scaled.

For someone whose instinct has always been to prioritize people over process, it was a perfect fit. What she brought with her from CMS to the charter school world mattered too, and she’s clear-eyed about that.

A decade in a large district gave her a frame of reference that pure charter-track educators sometimes lack. She could see the gaps, but she could also see what the district did well and let that inform how she approached her work.

“I think I’m one of the blessed ones,” she said, “who got an opportunity to work in the district, especially for as long as I did.” The tradeoffs are real. Cherie has had to go out and find things that would have simply existed around her at CMS, thanks to the resource infrastructure many districts can provide. But that constraint, it turns out, suits her. Cherie is someone who moves toward problems, not away from them. Having to build something, rather than inherit it, is less a burden than a calling.

 

What She Actually Built
Ask Cherie what she’s most proud of, and she doesn’t hesitate: It’s finding innovative and effective ways to engage with families.

Before COVID, family engagement at Sugar Creek was thin. When the pandemic ended, rebuilding that connection became part of Cherie’s portfolio. What she did with it says a lot about how she operates.

She didn’t design a program around what the school assumed families wanted. She asked.

Cherie created events and parent universities shaped by what families said they actually needed. She also kept asking as the answers from families changed.

One initiative she’s particularly proud of is Walk-A-Night, a curriculum night built around the invitation to walk a night in your child’s shoes. It had always been a fall event, but Cherie pushed for a spring version designed specifically around the end-of-year stretch.

“Here’s how to help your child through the final push of their senior year, here’s what to do this summer, and here’s what’s coming next year,” Cherie said of the initiative.

It was a simple idea that proved genuinely useful, so families kept showing up. Last year, Cherie earned a 2025 Schermy Award recognizing her as a Family Empowerment Champion. More recently, she was a featured presenter at the 2026 Family Engagement Symposium in Raleigh.

“If I walked away today,” she said, “I would say my families are in a good place. And they weren’t before COVID.”

 

A Champion for Students and Families
Like many educators-turned-charter leaders, the bulk of Cherie’s work now involves adults — teachers, families, and department leads.

But she makes a point of getting into classrooms regularly, not to evaluate, but to feel re-energized in her mission.

“They bring me back to life,” she said. “They are my why.”

Cherie also cherishes the moments where a family member or a staff member lets her know that the school has made them feel like they belong.

“My goal is for everyone to be seen,” Cherie said. “Whether it’s a student or a teacher, I feel like I am able to see the heart of people.”