Other Topics

Responsibilities as a School Board Director

As a school board director, I would take seriously my responsibility to help shape the education that students receive.  If you are unfamiliar, the responsibilities entrusted to school board directors are: levying taxes, approving budgets, adopting curriculum, evaluating the superintendent, implementing disciplinary procedures, and hiring personnel.  In addition, I will take an oath to uphold both state and federal laws that shape our public education system.  

Vo-Tech and Life Skills

Many students feel a lot of pressure to go to traditional college, seeing this as the only possible path forward, and sometimes, those students' gifts are simply not in the traditional classroom.  Vo-tech and other career education programs help all students achieve their potential while giving them the confidence they need to succeed outside of the traditional college track.  Over the years, I have often encountered students that either don't have a lot of life skills or who wished that they had courses in high school that better addressed the life skills they would need as they entered adulthood.  They feel that traditional academic requirements are so tight that there is not enough room for courses that provide practical skills: budgeting, how to pay taxes, understanding insurance, etc.  Students benefit when we have curriculums that give them a wide array of options that can help to eventually shape them into responsible adults.  

Teacher Shortages

Nationwide there is a teacher shortage due to a combination of retirement and more people leaving the profession.  In order to address the teacher shortage, our district needs to create an environment where teachers can thrive.  We need to work harder at making this a district where teachers are respected and their expertise is valued.  We also need to create conditions that would draw talent to our district, and it isn't simply paying more.  If we could give teachers classrooms that are a manageable size, access to innovative materials, freedom to use the classroom practices that they know work best, we could attract teachers to our district.  From my experience, teachers and educational staff go into education because they want to serve others and to help children succeed; we need to foster an environment that both encourages our current teachers to stay and future teachers to want to come here.

Special Education

As I spoke with parents and guardians during discussions about the middle school consolidation, I began to notice a trend.  So many parents/guardians believed that the consolidation would negatively impact their kids in the special education program or that the special education programs in general were not supporting kids in the ways that they need.  Many mentioned a shortage of personal care assistants as well as a lack of space needed for support, like sensory rooms and spaces for physical therapy.  Others also mentioned that their kids did not get the required least restrictive environment (LRE) that requires students to be in the same classrooms and activities as much as possible with other students.  In addition, the amount of special education expenditures has gone up significantly over the last decade and the number of students with IEPs has increased.  The least we can do is find a way to foster a more inclusive environment for students with disabilities and those in special education programs by promoting more awareness about and respect for the experiences of these students. 

Safety

As a board member, I would be committed to our students' safety.  When we discuss safety, we tend to drift toward the largest concern: active shooting situations.  Like many other parents, every time there is an active shooter event, we worry endlessly about the danger our kids might be in just by simply going to school, and I know the hard conversations that we have to have with our kids in order to make them feel safe in school.  It is important that we have trained school security personnel, and I was glad to see that the district has been able to obtain additional funding for increased personnel.  In addition, the modifications to the high school as part of the revitalization project will help to provide a more protective entryway for an active shooter situation.  These are necessary steps that we must take in order ensure the safety of our kids.

Mental Health

We must prioritize the mental health of our students in order to help them to succeed.  As an instructor, I've seen a steady increase in mental health issues over the last ten years; however, the pandemic caused an even sharp increase in the amount of mental health care students need.  Also, death by suicide is one of the leading causes of death in teens and young adults.  We need additional staff to increase intervention practices and to help students get the accommodations that they need.  These students have had a profound disruption to their emotional and social development as a result of the pandemic, and we need to make sure that our school system provides a safe and supportive environment.  

Bullying

One of the comments that I hear most often from parents is that their kids are being bullied at school.  Despite many programs that have been directed at bullying, it doesn't seem to be enough.  One of the reasons that this is the case is again the class sizes in school.  Teachers and staff are overextended, and as a result, they cannot be aware of everything that is happening in a crowded classroom or in the hallways.  Lengthy, overcrowded bus rides also contribute to this problem and give students no reprieve from these damaging situations.  Like teachers, our dedicated bus drives cannot monitor every child on the bus when their attention needs to be focused on driving safely.  Finally, we need to hold students accountable for their actions when they engage in this type of behavior.  

Funding for Music and the Arts

It often seems like when districts need to tighten budgets, the curriculums that get cut are often those in the arts.  In fact, it was just announced that Hempfield Area High School will be losing a number of its music courses (although there are three new elective music courses).  The arts are important for a well-rounded education, and they provide numerous benefits for kids.  For music in particular, there is a correlation between musical training and mathematical aptitude.  When the district is put in the position of cutting courses, I would like for there to be better communication about those cuts to the students, parents, guardians, and community members with the possibility of collaborating to find other possible solutions.  

Opting Out of Curriculum Texts

I would continue to support the practice in the district of allowing parents/guardians to opt out of a text in a class that they do not want their child to read.  I have already encountered this with one of my kids.  Whenever the teacher assigns a book, I am given the option for my child to read an alternative text.  I believe this approach respects both the expertise of the teachers and the wishes of parents/guardians.

Library Book Policy

If I were to serve on the school board, I would always seek common ground to provide the best education for all students, and I feel the same way about the current discussions surrounding the library book policies.  I respect the perspectives of the many voices in our community as well as the fact that parents should be involved in their kids' education.  I also do not feel that one parent should dictate what another parent's/guardian's child should read and/or have access to.  In a policy meeting, a district librarian said that a system could be put in place that would allow parents/guardians to opt into notifications regarding the books their children checked out.  A librarian or staff member would then contact the parent/guardian for approval when their child checked out a book.  This is a solution that could satisfy the needs of different families while respecting parents'/guardians' desires for their kids' education as well as the expertise of our librarians.  

Literacy Levels in Elementary Education

I am actually of two minds on this subject.  Working under the fact that curriculum is tied to assessment in PA and other federal programs, I think that the easy answer is to provide more help to our students in terms of early intervention and getting more people in classrooms to help kids.  The other option is to try to lower class sizes so that teachers have more time to spend with kids on reading and writing.  Both approaches, though, would require more funding to provide what kids need.

However, I often think about my kids’ experiences in kindergarten.  When my eldest was in kindergarten, I was able to regularly volunteer in the classroom.  That experience really opened my eyes to the frustration that many kids felt when they struggled with reading.  I sometimes wonder if a “less is more” approach might be better for kids.  Many education systems in the world have play-based education through the age of 7.  The reason is that developmentally, many kids level up; they have longer attention spans and what we consider “deficits” at an early age often disappear for many students.  Our current system often makes kids hate reading as a result of being forced to read at an age that isn’t right for their development.  When kids do read at this early age, they often read the words but don’t have strong comprehension, which is something I encountered with both of my early readers. 

If we focused more on language immersion that expands kids’ vocabulary (for instance, simply spending more time reading and talking to kids), our kids’ reading levels might fare better in the long run as that approach tends to increase reading comprehension, which is more important than simply learning to read words.  This type of approach, though, is complicated by standardized testing as an assessment mechanism.  In an ideal world, I would love to see us better recognize what research suggests about childhood development and its relationship to reading success.  At an early age, good readers are not created by requiring them to read at a certain level but rather by exposing them to language through play, sound, image, and word.  Honestly, to improve literacy rates, we would need to completely rethink reading instruction from the bottom up and give back classroom design to the expertise of teachers who know best how to help our kids read.