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Although I have two biological children, in my mind I have hundreds.  That is because every student I have had the pleasure of teaching becomes one of my kids.  No matter that child’s race, religion, gender, financial background, or home life, they are all part of my heart.  I strived to provide them with the best education I could give them every day.  That might not be about mathematics each day; it might just be supporting them and listening to their problems.  As a school board member, working for every student is critical. From our gifted students to our special needs students, supporting and helping every student in this county is the most important job we have. 

As an educator, I do understand the necessity of assessments, but the amount of testing that our students are subjected to is getting out of hand.  The endless number of benchmarks and standardized tests we require of our students takes a mental health toll on them. Test anxiety has increased over the years, and it does not take a statistician to see the correlation between it and the increased amount of time testing. As much as politicians would like to be able run public schools like a factory, printing off production line growth rates and test scores, public schools are not a factory. Students deal with different situations in and out of school, different emotions, family situations, and different levels of hormones.  Any one of these things could cause a student to lose focus on testing days and not perform their best.  

As teachers we understand these things and feel for the students.  It is why our amazing teachers provide remediation, credit recovery and re-takes on assessments they give. To do all these things for the students as well as cover the material and give the dozens of county required benchmarks and state test takes time. Time teachers do not have. Cutting down on benchmarks gives back a significant amount of time that teachers could be using to do more hands-on activities, differentiated instruction, and reviewing material students are struggling with.  

It is time to re-evaluate how we evaluate our students, give our teachers back time they need in the classroom for instruction, and stop worrying more about test scores and growth rates than the mental health of our students. 

As a small business owner, I know that essential financial planning is imperative.  If you don’t plan ahead, spend your money wisely, and balance your checkbook, you’ll end up in debt and scrambling to make ends meet.  Our school board seems to have forgotten these core principles and needs to be held accountable for how they spend your well-earned tax dollars.  Too often, the concept of “other people’s money” seeps into the decisions our board is making.  We need to be good stewards of the tax dollars we receive, plan ahead, and make smarter choices with how we budget.  

In teaching, we have a fancy term called differentiation, which just means that every student is different.  As parents we see this in our own children. Some kids are strong in math, while others are better in English.  Some students are strong in the arts while other flourish with technical skills. As each student progresses through the public school system in Fayette County the teachers, counselors and parents work together with the students to plan out the best path forward for that student. Our county has always had a variety of pathways to choose from for students’ math and science courses.  That is until recently.

Until this year, 8th graders could choose to take high school physical science to earn high school credit and prepare them for AP science courses, or they could remain in 8th grade science.  As a parent and a teacher, that makes perfect sense.  Some students need and/or want to excel in science fields while others do not. Giving students these options allows them to find the best path for their future. 

For reasons unknown to me, our county has decided to throw differentiation out the window and force all 8thgrade students to take high school physical science.  It seems our school board have been out of the classroom for too long.  They forget that our job is not to force students to be ready for Ivy League schools, but rather to prepare each student for their goals and interests.  

As much as our world is changing with every ear, there are some things that do not change.  Food, for example, still feeds our bodies and is grown on farms.  This means that we still need farmers.  Although much of our district is suburbia, we still have some rural areas in the county where the students are raising chickens, growing tomatoes out back and seeing cows on their way to school.  If those students are the only ones exposed to farming, then we as a school district are failing our students. Students need to understand where their food comes from, and be exposed to agricultural courses.  Just as we provide courses to prepare students for healthcare, teaching, and flying, we need to expose students to agriculture.

The green energy jobs sector is rapidly increasing in Georgia.  As of 2022, there were over 280,000 green energy jobs in the state. Salaries for these jobs start in the $70k’s and quickly grow to over $100k per year. Preparing students for these types of jobs in the solar, battery, and electric vehicle industries will set Fayette County apart as the best place for people to raise their children and give those students more opportunities for their future. 

Any teacher knows that students pay less attention, perform worse on tests and quizzes, and behave worse when the school schedule approaches lunchtime.  A study from the non-profit group No Kid Hungry showed a 76% decrease in student academic performance when a child was hungry.  We offered universal free meals to our students during the COVID pandemic, and we should continue to do so now.  We are very lucky to live in a relatively affluent area, but not all of our students come from wealthy backgrounds.  By offering universal free lunch to ALL our students, we remove the stigma of rich versus poor, offer what could be the only hot meal of the day for some, and shrink the performance gap between hungry and full students.