Five applicants for a vacancy on the Emporia school board presented their thoughts about the school district during interviews Monday night in the Mary Herbert Education Center.
Board members interviewed five candidates — Carol Krueger, Brent Windsor, Amy Scheller, Angela Miller, and Jerry Fair. Three remaining candidates will have interviews beginning at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Mary Herbert, when the board will select an applicant to fill the seat of Homer Garza. Garza resigned in July, citing an out-of-town job commute and time constraints related to work as reasons he needed to leave the school board.
A ninth candidate, Liz Conrade, withdrew her name from consideration.
The applicants on Wednesday had 20 minutes to answer a basic series of questions from the board. Several additional questions were asked of candidates who kept their answers short.
Fair, a certified public accountant who is semi-retired, was the sole candidate who said she did not plan to run for a board seat in the April election. Fair ended eight years as a board member on June 30 of this year.
Fair said she had enjoyed her work on the board, but could not make the time commitment to run for another four-year term.
If she were chosen as an interim board member, she said, she could immediately bring experience that would be helpful to the board until the election winner in April could be installed on July 1.
She said that graduation rates were important, but that the district should not focus all of its attention on emphasizing SAT test results and sending its graduates to college.
“I don’t know if that’s always the most successful school,” she said. “Students do the best that can use their talents.”
The district needs to encourage students to take further training and education in the areas where their talents lie, in order to help them succeed.
Fair said it was important to continue to work toward test-score improvements mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, to prevent intervention by the federal government.
“I don’t believe the federal government can ever take over a school and improve it, so it would (benefit) us to stay on top of it,” she said.
Applicant Angela Miller, chief executive officer of the Emporia State Federal Credit Union, told the board she believed its role should be to guide the district and not to micromanage it.
The guidance would come after the board gathered information from the community and staff members, “to make decisions with students as the No. 1 priority.”
Miller also believed the district should do more with charter and virtual schools and boosting attendance.
Student safety concerned Miller, who described a situation she encountered when she dropped off her daughter at Emporia Middle School last year. Police patrol cars were plentiful and she had no idea what was happening. Police at the time were seeking a high-school student who had a gun in his possession and had taken his brother to EMS.
“There really wasn’t a good notification process, and it really wasn’t good as a parent” to leave a child at the school at a time when safety was in question, she said.
Amy Scheller said she had served on numerous school district committees, including strategic planning and performance-based bargaining committees. Scheller is a treatment coordinator for Drs. Hannah and Oltjen, Orthodontics.
She approaches the district from a wellness standpoint, and said that it was important to know what kind of environment was forming the students.
She said she wanted the school board to be an advocate and to provide balance among the superintendent, administration and staff. She praised the collaborative efforts that have been made to improve learning for local youngsters and singled out professional learning communities and early interventions in education as successful examples of what collaboration can bring.
Scheller also was concerned with pressures and stress on students and staff, and suggested classroom management and stress management training for teachers.
Brent Windsor, group product manager at Hopkins, focused on the board’s need to ensure that students were prepared to succeed in a global economy.
He acknowledged the importance of meeting NCLB goals, but said that learning about geography and sociology, as well as becoming proficient in foreign languages, would be vital for success. That need is not limited to Emporia, he said, it is nationwide.
He talked about his global travels and grade-school children from other countries who are fluent in four or five languages.
“They are so far beyond where I feel like we are and should be,” Windsor said.
Gaining world knowledge and language would give local youngsters the “foundation that will allow them to compete ... with students all over the world,” he said.
Carol Krueger, Realtor with ReMax real estate agency, said that the board’s primary mission “has to be the education of each and every child to his full potential. ...
“You start by establishing an environment that rewards the work, hire the right people, and that would start with the superintendent and the other administrators.”
It is important for the board to be forward-thinking, she said, and to hire teachers who are eager to meet that criteria.
She said students need to be safe at school and not dealing with alcohol or drugs or weapons.
“This is probably one of my pet issues — bullying,” Krueger said. “Bullying is that silent violence in the parking lot, on the bus, everywhere. It’s one of those issues where we can’t say one size fits all.”
She said the board should not set a policy where the victim becomes a victim for the second time. Victims of bullying have difficulty concentrating and learning in schools, in addition to auxiliary effects.
“That’s probably the one thing I see that the district really needs to pay attention to,” she said.
Retaining current staff and hiring quality staff to replace those who leave was a priority for the candidates, and most mentioned the diversity of students both as a strength and as an area that could require more funding, whether for staff or for extra services.
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September 17, 2008 at 6:04 a.m. ( permalink )