Richmond 2nd District School Board Race - 2024

Teacher retention. I’ve seen the impact on our students when we don’t have teachers in the classroom. It sets them back. It’s hard. And then we’re constantly trying to catch up our students.

I also believe that teachers are a life-changing force for a child. I became a history teacher because I had an amazing history teacher. So I want to continue to advocate for new paths to licensure. I want to explore new avenues for teacher recruitment. I also want to ensure that our mentoring and our teacher education programs are strong.

It makes no sense to me that we hire incredible young teachers right out of school, then they leave us two years later. That’s our fault. We have not supported them, and that is something that I will work to do as your representative.

The biggest challenges are low academic performance, outdated facilities and community engagement.

Fixing low academic performance is what the board is doing right now. We are evaluating and researching the different resources. Right now we have math coaching, reading intervention, and reading coaches to bring up the scores. We also have a new curriculum for our K through second graders, which has been off the charts this year. 

We have a facility management system in place so everyone can actually see what buildings need to be repaired.

I have broken up fights that have started because kids have planned it over phones. So the phones do need to go. I agree that we need to work with our teachers and educators to come up with a plan on how to do it.

We all know if we just lay down a plan and there’s no clear policies and procedures behind it, it falls apart.

But the final thing is, I’ve talked with teachers where their schools have done this, and there is so much more instructional time available to them. So I want to say: It is worth the struggle. Because our teachers are now having to create new things to teach, because there’s more time, because they’re not telling kids to put away their phones. There’s no distractions, and they can spend that extra time remediating and all the other amazing things that can come from this.

Executive Order 33, which is what it’s called, will go into effect on January 1. And what we need to do as a board is to ensure that we have an enforcement policy, because that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

We have to make sure that there is accountability for our kids, as well as our teachers and staff.

But we also need to know that our children are addicted to phones, and that’s also a part of mental health, therefore there will be mental health needs when we take the phones away.

We had a big conversation about this (as a board). On January 1st, the policy will go into effect. Teachers will get to weigh in, as well as parents, but we want to make sure we get that communication out to parents, because parents will be the first ones to say they spent a lot of money on their kid’s phone. So we need to make sure that communication gets out.

I would evaluate my teachers every year, and we would look at what they have done to move the arrow on student success. So I think about that with our superintendent. Under his leadership, how has our students’ arrow of success moved? And it has. Chronic absenteeism is down. Our SOL scores are up and the graduation rate is up. That is success.

The other thing I would comment on is that removing a superintendent creates more instability in schools as we go through a transition. Once again, if we are having success, is it worth the instability of a new superintendent? I would say no.

To me this is really sort of a sticky question, because the new ones don’t know what to evaluate on. As (Dr. Shonda Harris-Muhammed) said, this is closed door. Closed door means closed door. When you’re on this board, you do not come out and speak on behalf of your employee.

The superintendent works for this board. We can’t just come out and say, oh, we’re going to keep him or we’re not. We’re going to decide that as a board, and we’re going to evaluate him on the things we need to evaluate.