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School Board Candidates: The Exit Interview Litmus Test

Tonight the RPS School Board will interview 14 candidates to fill the 4th District seat vacated by Jonathan Young. The appointee will be chosen at the May 20, 2024 School Board meeting. (Note: The RPS School Board website says that interviews took place on May 6th. They did not. The date was moved to May 14th to accommodate the large number of candidates).

I have had the pleasure to meet informally with two of these candidates, Garrett Sawyer and Derek Redwine, and look forward to meeting all those who plan to run for the seat in November.

So, this is as good a time as any to launch my own personal litmus test for potential school board candidates:

Will you commit to the following: 

1. Compel/require RPS to ensure that all buildings are in compliance with fire code before the first day of school. 

At present, the RPS website indicates that buildings are to be cleared of fire code violations by September 30 of a given school year.

That's not good enough. In a school system in which not one, but TWO buildings burnt to the ground, I should think it would be obvious that no child should walk into a building with fire code violations.

2. Compel/require RPS administration to adhere to the collective bargaining resolution and agreement.

3. Be prepared to vote “yes” on a policy allowing the designated representative of workers' unions to be on “full release," i.e. to take unpaid leave for the duration of their term as president of their organization, as is provided for in the RPS procedures/policies currently "active" on the RPS School Board website.

4. Commit to working towards establishing 30 consecutive, unencumbered minutes of duty-free lunch for RPS employees and students (minimum 20 minutes seat time).

5. Move School Board meetings to a location that is accessible by both public transport and has parking (ex. MLK Middle)

6. Collect meaningful teacher retention data, disaggregated by school, subject, experience level, and degrees/graduate hours of those teachers. Require RPS to periodically update the School Board and the public re: the numbers of licensed certified teachers in each building as compared to the number of uncertified instructors and instructors without Bachelor's degree.

7. Work collaboratively with the REA to address the teacher retention apocalypse.

8. Explore adding an ex officio member of the REA to the School Board.

9. Require RPS to have a third party review the RPS200 data, ideally an academic.  This is a very expensive intervention; therefore, the public has a right to know if extending the school year impacts academic achievement, or what other variables might be at play, including: RPS200 schools receiving a much greater allocation of tutors than other schools; students on the edge of passing being pulled from recess, music, PE, etc for intense remediation. Also, we need to understand whether or not a given RPS200 school had fewer certified, licensed experienced teachers the year before the implementation?

This data need to be interrogated by someone with no dog in the fight.


More to follow. I'm also reaching out to teachers to ask them to build their ideal school board candidate.



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