The USD 373 Board of Education needs to work on one plan – not seven different individuals with seven different opinions.
I think that our district is too unstable at this time to mess with political topics. Our board needs to seem more like one unit rather than seven different opinions constantly clashing. We need to put our focus on the future and make sure that students are getting a quality education. In the perfect world, I do wish I could be stretched a bit beyond what is served to me in our curriculum by keeping books that talk about uncomfortable subjects. If students are meant to be stretched in their learning, then we should add to it, not take it away.
“The Board of Education is really the governing body behind public schools … responsible for adopting and setting policy, fiscal responsibility, curricular decisions and also operations in terms of hiring and firing based upon generally administrative recommendations,” Superintendent Fred VanRanken said.
According to KSDE, board members are elected and serve four-year terms. Every time I, as a student, hear of the board, it is negative. The board members are voted on to represent us as a district. If we think of the board negatively, then the right to vote can be exercised at the next opportunity.
“Your school board looks every year at administrator contracts, so they’re making decisions on who is running each building, and who is having a direct impact on kids,” former board member Luke Edwards said.
The approval of the new NHS principal took place recently, a process that was done by the Board of Education. This is an example of the important decisions made by the board. This is a reason good board members are important. We want our decisions to be fair because they have a big impact on students.
“We have amazing staff … there are so many people that help the school district function and run, and honestly, a lot of them aren’t making living wages and it’s on us to figure out how we need to do that,” board member Andy Ortiz said. “We’ve got to figure out how to incentivize our teachers, to be able to take care of them too and their goals long term so they can stay with us to help build our students up … we got to make sure we’re supporting our veteran teachers,” Ortiz said.
At this time, USD 373 is struggling as a district with falling enrollment numbers and teacher/administrative burnout. The uncertainty for next year has been a topic on the minds of staff and students. Three different principals in four years make a lot of adjustment periods for everyone. According to Ortiz, keeping teachers can be hard because our district does not pay as much as others. Ortiz said a goal of the Board is to raise salaries for staff, however, the process for that will be a hard one.
“I want to keep politics out of this stuff, it needs to be about what’s best for students. I hate it when they become political decisions and not about principles … we spend a lot of time talking about books, and the name of Lindley Hall, it’s not like those things are not important, but when I look at the overall scheme of things, I want to make sure that every kid has access to a high-quality education that allows them to realize their potential,” VanRanken said.
An English teacher of mine gave an example during class that stunned me, and I know it stunned others too. During our whole time in the Newton schools, we had read only one book that was written by a black author, and there was only one other book that had a black character in it. Give me more teachers that can make me open my eyes like that. Give me more teachers who are going to push me by putting in a zero because I was unexcused. Make me uncomfortable and a critical thinker by giving me more than the baseline provided in our education. The board needs to give more support to our teachers, and they can do that by putting their differences aside and unifying their ideas so our district can be productive.
