Q: why are you running for school board?

A: I’ve been in education for 45 years and I’m not counting the years in which I was a student. I’ve been teaching for a long time both at the high school and the university levels so education is in my blood, not been teaching, teaching writing. I’m serious. Seriously invested in education. Education is what I know about. I’m an expert at it. I’m really an expert at assessment theory, how to assess reading programs, and also in getting students to do personal writing which is what I really, really focus on. And I retired and came here so I live in this community. And just think about what’s the best way I can contribute to the community so there I am. Aside from the fact that I have three grandchildren here who are going through the public school system. And I am obviously invested in trying to help create the best public school system that we can get here.

Q: What are your plans for HHS2?

A:Oh, you mean for the second high school, I don’t have plans for that. The. I’ve just been here for two years. Although I’ve been visiting here my daughter teaches at JMU she teaches biology. So I’ve been visiting her so I’ve been here for like I guess since 2006 so I’m pretty aware of the community but I really had don’t know an awful lot about what’s going on in the creation of the second High School, other than it’s needed, it’s going to cost money as high schools do I, I’m very familiar with the creation of high schools I taught high schools for 13 years in California and I was involved in the development of our second High School in the town that I was in so I certainly know what got what’s going on, but I haven’t developed plans for it. And in fact, I don’t think it’s really the school board’s function to develop plans. It’s the administrators administration’s function to develop the plans and the school board works in concert is basically an in between. In between communicating with parents and the administration. I was president of the teachers union, our first teachers union in California, so I’m very familiar with the function of how teachers unions faculty, and parents and administration interconnect. So I don’t have the specific plans. I’ll wait until I’m elected. If i’m elected.

 Q: Do you support HHS2? 

A:Of course, of course there’s no question about it, you know, education is really one of the most important functions of the community. I personally think particularly in light of the pandemic. And what is going to be the consequence of the different ways of educating students as a consequence of the pandemic. There’s going to have been a lot more money invested in education, a lot more money invested in, and teachers and teacher training to move them into really understanding functional ways of working with hybrid education in home. Working with person to person. For the last, I guess about 10 to 12 years at Louisiana State University and later at Drexel University which is the last place I taught. I’ve been working with hybrid education. I’m very aware of it. I’m enthusiastic about it. I know how it can work well, but it really takes a lot of training and it’s going to take a lot of equipment and money invested in that. The second high school there’s some part of what’s going to have to go on. If we want to really seriously invest in education.

Q: Um, what are some important aspects of your job, or would be some important aspects

A: Yeah, well I can’t really say too much about it because as I said I’ve not been on the school board I’ve been more or less on the other side of the equation as president of the teachers union and of course as a faculty member. Let’s see, I’ve taught in three different universities and one high school. So I know it from that and I’ll be introduced to the function of the school board. This particular school board, if I’m elected [I will] basically see how it operates. The school board I know, really functions by listening to the administration, evaluating evaluating the plans that they have a lot of attention to the community and the input that they get from the community and particularly from the parents. Then on working with the school board and the parents and the community to come to an agreement as to where you go for how you go forward.

Q: What are your main interests?

A: My main interest is that it depends on what you’re talking about. I mean I’ve got quite a few main interests as far as education is concerned. I think, like we wanted to learn about like main interest for going forward if you were a school board member, what would be your main interests. My two main two main interests, well actually three, are the development of writing programs. I know we have a lot of writing teachers but I spent 45 years teaching writing so I’m going to want to contribute to the development of writing programs, particularly as we work with hybrid hybrid programs. And as I said, I’ve worked with hybrid programs and virtual learning for a long time. So I’m and I know that that’s going to be the consequence of this pandemic so I’m going to be very interested in helping as much as much as I can to develop those programs, and my other interest beyond that is really an in program assessment. I’ve written an awful lot. I’ve written quite a few articles and one book co-authored one book on how you successfully

Assess writing programs without casting. I’m very much an opponent of testing. But I’m very much, but I I believe in and developed quite a few different ways of using assessment as a, tool that works with students and teachers together to assess the program and to get to learn how to move forward and improve the project and improve the, the instruction so I’m very much involved in assessment.

Q: What is your platform?

A:I don’t have a platform, you know, and I don’t know if I can really respond to that. I’m a community member. I know about teaching and education. I know about writing assessments and I know about teaching a variety. So I’m just free to be a member of the school board to help with whatever expertise.

Q: Do you have any points where you think the school system could improve?

A: I really can’t answer that one, I haven’t been here long enough to keep mine on the school board, I will have to say I’ve been distracted by a presidential election, to say the least. I have to wait until I get there and really interact with both the administration and the other school board members and then receive input from the community. Let’s just put it this way, I know better than to go into a position with preconceptions of what it is before you get there to me.

Q: How do you think that the pandemic has affected the school system?

A: Well, I know that pretty intimately from the firsthand firsthand experience because I’ve been watching what’s going on with my grandchildren. One of them is six and the other two are eight, twins. So, watching what, my daughter and her friends are going through as they try to interact with the new reality of this system. So, yeah, but that there are so many different problems with the consequences of a pandemic. The first one is really creating workshops for both parents and teachers to work with hybrid education. I have seen what the teachers are doing. I’ve been very impressed with the way they do it but I also just from a lot of experience myself from hybrid education isn’t something that you just kind of weren’t summer, and then slam into it with pandemics so that’s the first thing. Second thing that I do know that there isn’t going to be any going backwards. With this educational system, there’s going to be new experiences, people are learning new ways of learning students are learning new ways of learning, and we’re not going to go back to the old face to face, face to face dominantly face to face model of education, we’re going to actually take what we learned as a consequence of what we’re doing here now, and use that experience to improve education I’m not fully believe that just haven’t experienced what we did. I was at Louisiana State law, teaching, when the administration, and that was mostly the administration. I really resisted to use the hybrid education and I was involved with some other people and moving forward. I saw how it worked and how it improved education as a lot of us, embraced this new model of education. So that’s the first thing the other serious consequence of this pandemic and new model of education is basically what you call educational inequality. Well extra I do know a lot about educational inequality. The other, I specialized in assessment theory, when I was an academic and also specialized in social class, social class stratification which really means social justice issues and applies to race issues as well as economic inequality. We’re now moving into educational inequality and as a consequence of the different,

I would say benefits of being in the upper income as opposed to lower income, you have better access to, to internet education, you have better access to computers in the home computers, you have better access to knowing what to do with this kind of virtual education. If you don’t belong in the middle classes or the upper middle classes if you are in our, I don’t I don’t really know the right word for it but if you don’t have the advantages of that, the higher income and higher education in your home life. You’re going to hear a family it’s going to have educational inequality as I mean, basically this is, this is not news. So that’s going to be a major, major, a major problem to stop. I think that this pandemic. Plus the new way of teaching is increasing educational inequality, and that’s going to we’re really going to have to work hard against that. And I don’t think that people really experienced it and really thought that thought that through carefully. We’re still just coping with the new reality of virtual education.

Q: how do you think students should start in person learning?

A: In part, I’ve already answered it. We’re not, if the educational administration and parents and I don’t think that we’re going to return to the old way of education, just person to person. That’s kind of like faulty thinking. We’re going to have new experiences so that’s that. It’s going to be gradually going from person to person education. I think that it’s not going to like it and also this again, it’s not going to end anytime soon we all know,  I assume, we know that we’re spiking or going up, then it’s going to be a long winter, it’s going to be a long spring so I can’t imagine, I wouldn’t be surprised if it took two more years before we actually start going back to really serious person person education. When we do, we’re going to use what we know about Virtual Education. The other thing is happening or at least I think that I see happening. Certainly most months to parents that I know is that parents are grouping together and creating support groups for their students for groups of students. Oh, that’s a very very good thing that I hope that continues. That will be a very, very useful way of enriching the educational experience. I’m all in favor of more involvement of parents and parents have gotten more involved and I don’t think they’re going to stop.

Q: Why are you running for the school board?

A: I am very committed to public education and in general k-12, higher education, is critical to the future of the country. I think you have to have people who really care about public education serving in these roles because I think it’s very easy to dismiss public education and disregard it.

Q: What are your plans and thoughts for HHS2

A: I am very conscious about how much things cost, I also think about systems and so when you think about our k-12 system and how that comes out in Harrisonburg we’ve got a school that’s designed for 1300 students, but there are around 1900 students occupying the building on a normal day, so you’re over capacity by 600 students. Considering all of the courses that we want to offer, which I think are very critical, everything from basic math to advanced math to super advanced math, from basic theatre to super advanced theatre everything we want to offer to our students in our public schools are compressed because we just don’t have space and time to do it. It takes longer for students to go from one class to another because the hallways are completely clogged with people. It takes longer for students to eat, you come to school at 7:30 you’re eating lunch at 9:30 by 3o’clock you’re starving. And so all those things come to bear on the overcrowded nature of Harrisonburg high school. And we have a responsibility to our community and our students that are there to fix that problem. We have looked at everything from doing nothing, to building an addition onto the school, to building an annex, and then finally a new high school. I’ve been a part of all that while it was being developed, and while I looked at the cost and benefit of each plan the only logical option was HHS2. There are some people who still latched onto the idea of an annex, but the reason they latched onto that is because they heard the price tag of 55 million, and the price tag of the highschool by itself is around 80 million, but what they don’t realize is that that is just the count the additional cost for the land and everything else that might come into the play. And the 55 million dollar solution only accommodated 600 students. If you’ve got 1300 capacity and you add 600 students and now you’re at 1900 students, by the time you’ve got it built you’re already at max capacity. iIf you look at the growth trends in harrisonburg which have been mapped out and the data supports well be at 2200 to 2500 students at the high school by 2025 so we need to build for that solution, not for a solution not for a solution much less than that just because it costs less

Q: What are some of the important aspects of your job on the school board.

A: The role of a school board is to be the advisory and the sounding board for the superintendent, the only person we actually hire is the superintendent, and the superintendent becomes the CEO of the school division, all the other employees are really higher be the superintendent and his staff. So our job is to be the sounding board, so when there’s an issue that comes up our job is to make sure we are doing that senior level management, looking at the requirements, looking at the community and what they want, what our ability to afford, what the requirements are. And just balancing that out and serving as that oversight board for the superintendent to give him six sets of ears that are really thinking about things a bit differently and able to advise and approve plans as a representative for the community.

Q: What is your platform?

A: Supporting public education is fundamental to what i’m about. And from that I get the support for Harrisonburg High School and the HHS2 project. And I think also we need to consider the responsibility and the role of our teaching staff. That’s probably the biggest part of my platform is the support for teachers. If you’re a Virginia resident and you go to a university like JMU and you get some help from your parents, and get some small scholarships, then you borrow money. Students are graduating with somewhere between 20,00 and 60,000 in debt. If you’re gonna pay that off in 10 years how much are you going to have to pay each month to eliminate that debt? And while your doing that you are probably not able to buy a house because the bank or whoever’s loaning you the money says ‘your not a great risk if you’ve got this huge student debt that you’ve gotta pay off and since your not a great risk we won’t loan you the money to buy a house. So now you spend your first 10 years out of college paying off your student debt, and then you can start saving money, so then you save your money to make your first 20% down payment on your house, so now your 20 years out of college when you’ve finally gotten to buy your first house. And I just think that’s wrong, I think the mark of a profession is that you are treated as a profession and I think being a teacher is a profession so your income should not be counted on incremental changes from the last year or comparing us to other communities. We should figure out what it costs to live in our community because I think our teachers should be able to live in our community, and they should have reliable transportation, and should be able to take a vacation periodically throughout the year. 

Q: How do you plan to help the school system

A: Not just advising the superintendent we also have a role as school board members of advising and building support in the community. About half of the school’s budget comes from the Harrisonburg taxpayers so we advocate for support among our constituents. The second thing our responsibility is to advocate for public education at the state level and the national level, I think those are areas where we’ve seen some decline, state funding for public education has really been significantly reduced in terms of inflation adjusted dollars since about the mid 80s and it’s never really recovered. Luckily there is fairly strong support in Harrisonburg for public education. When the state does not provide the city has picked up more of the tab, but that’s not fair for the communities that don’t have the resources to supplement state funding

Q: How do you think COVID19 has affected the school system

A: Some school divisions have been much more affected than others, if you compare Harrisonburg to Rockingham County, Rockingham County has people spread out into all sorts of nooks and crannies around the county into places where it’s very difficult to get wifi. In Harrisonburg although we have some neighborhoods which dont have wifi access, we’ve been able to out there with hotspots powered in a bus and set them up around the city in places around the city in places where we can provide that supplemental bandwidth so folks can have wifi. I think Harrisonburg has been able to accommodate virtual learning better than some areas. You also have to look at virtual learning and assess that and i’m certain that virtual learning is just not as good as face to face learning. I think that’s particularly true for the younger kids. There are a lot of kids who are not able to do that who will log in and have their camera turned off and they’ll do something else. One of the things I’ve been pressing on is the after COVID plan, how do we access where you are other than just an SOL.

Q: How should students start in person learning?

A: I think for students in the transition period from when you transition from middle to high school and elementary school those transitions really haven’t happened yet, although students have already been in high school/ middle school for 3 months you really haven’t transitioned to high school. I think the biggest change will be for the little ones maybe going to pre-k or kindergarten for the first time and that normally happens in august and that normally happens in August and were in October now and it still hasn’t happened. 

Q: Why are you running for school board?

A: I’m running because I want to continue to give back to my community [and] I want to continue to be a voice of reason.

Q: What are your plans for HHS 2?

A:My plans are to try to keep the costs down.

Q: Do you support HHS 2?

A: I do. Originally, for voting for the school was because if we were to do the annex or the addition, those two would have been filled up, and because of the rapid growth of Harrisonburg, It would just make sense to go ahead and build a second High School. Now with COVID, I know there are some concerns with people doing school online, then I’m wondering if building the second High School would actually take place, but that’s just a question.

Q: What are some important aspects of your job?

A: My job is to govern or to oversee the curriculum, to oversee policies, [and] to oversee safety for the students and for the staff.

Q: What are your main interests?

A: My main interest is actually having a board that is balanced. That represents

the different parts of our community because our community is diverse.

I want to see the board represent the diversity of our community.

Q: What is your platform?

A: My platform is that I want to continue to be a voice of reason and to continue to give back to my community. Also I just want to see the board be balanced.

Q: How do you plan to help the school system?

A: I want to communicate with the faculty and staff, [and] I want to

see that our classes are functioning properly.

Q: Where do you think the school system could improve?

A: I will say it in their communication to the community.

Q: How do you think the pandemic has affected the school system?

A: It has affected it tremendously with our students, parents, and staff. Everyone has had to change their lifestyles, their schedules, and their way of scheduling things. I mean, we basically had to start from scratch. Everyone had to start from scratch knowing how the students are going to be learning, how you are going to take care of the younger students, or care for parents that have small children. Same for the teachers and staff, how are they going to receive care for their children, as well, and to do it safely.

Q: How do you think students should start in person learning?

A: I think it should start out in small numbers and gradually increase. As long as we’re monitoring our COVID numbers, I think that’s the best way to do it.

Q: Is there anything else you want the readers to know?

A: I want to let them know that I have enjoyed my time on the board in these past four years, and I would like to continue that.

Q: Why are you running for the school board?

A: There are a lot of things that I wanted to do when I ran the first time four years ago, and some of them I thought we were a lot closer to in January than we are now, in particular, getting the HHS overcrowding situation resolved with the second high school. I was chair last year, and I was chair the year before. I was the one who signed the contract in December after the city council approved funding for the second high school. I set the groundbreaking, gave a speech, [and] did the shovel-in-the-ground thing; it was exhilarating after so much work. I would like to get that back on track, and I would like to do what I thought we would be doing this year, which would be figuring out the programming for HHS one and HHS two. It didn’t get finished, and I want to finish. That was the big reason I ran in the first place, and that’s definitely one step forward [and] hopefully one step back. The second thing is that with COVID, I would like to figure out ways to get everybody back safely. I’m talking about the littlest of little ones pre-K and K, all the way up to HHS, [granted] is going to be the most challenging thing for us to do over the next year than anything. [HHS] was crowded; it was crazy. [HHS] got so crowded, before COVID, and to think about following CDC guidelines and trying to keep everybody safe in that building. That is going to be so very difficult, and I want to be a part of helping that, in part because [of] my job right now. I want to say I’m the only one on the school board right now who has this experience. I teach at Blue Ridge Community College and adjunct at EMU. I am dealing with a lot of what your teachers are doing right now. I am doing in-class, hyflex, which is teaching to people in front of me and people on Zoom at the same time and I’m doing synchronous distance and asynchronous distance. So I think it’s a really good thing to have a person who is doing what your teachers are doing on the board and knows from personal experience what it’s like to talk with students, to try to help students learn and to work with students in this particular environment. Nick Swayne is a school board member who’s also a teacher right now. I don’t think he’s doing what I’m doing. I don’t think he’s physically in a classroom teaching. I don’t think he’s doing synchronous distance and everything because [he’s] doing asynchronous distance. This is so hard. I’ve had students in Zoom office hours that have been in tears, and this is just so hard, and I know it’s hard for me. 

Q: What are your plans for HHS two? 

A: As of right now, a big thing to do is to get back on track. We pressed pause on the contract, and we have till next May to press play again. So that’s going to be a conversation between school board members, the city and the contractors to figure out how to restart. That project, again, it is hard to know what COVID will have done to the construction process [and] what [happened when] leaving the site untouched for some period of time will do to the plans. It’s hard to know what it’s going to do to the timetable. While we have to figure all that out, we still have students, for the next year, two years, three years, four years going to classes in a high school that remains vastly overcrowded. The first thing [I want to do is] that. The second thing, well, I’m teaching economics; and I know that parents being able to send kids to school is important for parents being able to go to work. I know that opening up the whole school system is hugely important. It’s [important] for students for a whole bunch of reasons that we all know,[and] it’s important for the local economy. If the local economy does better, we could get HHS two back.

Q: Do you support HHS two?

A: I signed the contract, [and I was] chair for the two years we negotiated it so absolutely.

Q: What are some important aspects of your job as a school board member?

A: The thing that surprised me most when I became a school board member was understanding the lane of a school board member. I had, in some way I think, expected it to be a little bit more hands on with the day to day operations. The one thing that became pretty clear early on was that the school board does policy, and they do oversight. We hire really good people to run the schools. We hired the superintendent, and then the superintendent hires administrators and principals and all the rest of that, so our job is not to micromanage. Our job is to hire really, really good people and help set the big direction for where policy goes. I think that’s the most important thing. I should not be calling a principal. I should not be calling the teacher. Students should be talking to me only to help them figure out where in the organization they should go to get their problem solved. There is a tendency for some board members to think that they are the problem solver when that’s not the case. Those are the folks that we hire.

Q: What are the main things that you want to solve in your next term as a school board member?

A: [I want to] get everybody back to school in a safe way as quickly as we can, and that doesn’t mean that I want people back to school tomorrow. Maybe November, maybe December, but just to get everybody back that [is] the top priority. [We want to] get everybody back in the buildings because the loss to students in high school all the way down to the young ones is just accumulating day by day. That’s the first thing. Second thing, [I want to] finish the school system strategic plan, which includes the high school. [I want to] get that back on track. We should have voted on that in June but couldn’t. Everything has been coded. It feels like we should have voted on that in June. [I want to] start that up again and start up the high school along with it. The last thing [I want to do] is engage in the community conversation that we’ve been promising about the memorandum of understanding between the city school system and the community. [I want to engage with] the students, of course; they’re obviously part of the community, but that’s such an important part for this particular thing that it’s worth seeing separately. I was the chair when the Parkland shooting happened, and I was in that seat when the community pressure was [for a greater] security presence in the school buildings. I even got some letters back then saying that we should have an armed presence at every door, every main door. Folks were interested in a whole bunch of stuff that now, the community pressure is the exact opposite direction. There is something in the middle there that we have [to] talk about, and that’s what I would like to do. We haven’t had school shootings in the United States this year, but that’s because schools have been largely closed. I do not pretend to be a pretty optimistic person. I do not pretend that those things have gone away. When schools reopen and attendance is more normalized, I don’t expect [school shootings] to return, but I don’t expect them not to return either. I mean, I know that that’s something that’s still present out there in society. So, I think our community needs to have a conversation that reflects both the concerns and fears that I heard back right after the Parkland shooting, and the concerns and fears and worries that people have been expressing all throughout the summer and fall, about the role [of police in schools], we have a memorandum of understanding with the police. We have committed ourselves to talking with the community about what should be in that memorandum, those are the three big things.

Q: What is your platform?

A: Well, I would say that [it] would be associated with the three things that I’m most concerned about. That is, [first] getting kids back in school safely as quickly as we possibly can. [Second, I want to] restart HHS two and finish our strategic plan to get all of the things that are locked into that going. There’s so many pieces of what you could say through my individual platforms, but that strategic plan is a big guiding vision document with action steps and measurable outcomes that we can say. We said we wanted to do this, and we wanted to do that thing in order to do that. I want to get [this] started because that’s the vision, goal, action step, and measurement benchmarks that we can figure out if we got it done. That final platform is to have a conversation with the community about the role of the police in our schools. We want that to happen sooner rather than later.

Q: How do you plan to help the school system?

A: Going back to something I said towards the beginning, I think that my experience as a teacher right now [is beneficial]. In these circumstances, [I am] teaching [on] some of the platforms you guys are learning on [and] teaching under some of the conditions that students in our system are learning [and] under that staff are teaching with me. I teach on Canvas, I have my phone right here getting ready for my three o’clock class because I do Zoom. I have my iPhone. I do like to have all my work here ready to go to class at three o’clock. The thing that I think can help us is [being] that person who’s experiencing that right now until our system gets back to something that looks more like normal.

Q: Where do you think the school system could improve?

A: I would have had a different answer to that, pre-COVID than I do now. For me, I think COVID overwhelms everything. If you would ask me that a year ago, I would have talked about things like teacher salary to help retain and attract the teachers. I would have talked about things like diversity, equity, opportunity, access and discipline. [However] today, my answer would be to get people back in the classroom in a way that feels safe and is as quickly as we could do it under those conditions.

Q: How do you think the pandemic has affected the school system as a whole?

A: Everybody’s harmed. There are different sets of harms I think that go to kids at the high school level, the middle school level and the elementary school level, especially down to the littlest ones who have no experience or very little experience in school. I think as a system, we are improving the way we deal with it every day. Days after our crash [course] for distance [learning] in March, we got food distribution that kids at our schools rely on for meals, and [there were] no hiccups at all. We’re still doing that. Tonight is meal distribution, and my husband and I have been helping out at Spotswood. Second thing is distance [learning] has affected, getting [wireless] access to the schools that need it. We’re doing better [because] Wi Fi access is improving throughout the city, and that’s been good. The other thing that I think we’re improving on is the tools and techniques that we have to lift our curriculum from the classroom to a distance format. That’s improving all along. [In the] last few school board meetings, we’ve had presentations from people in various departments [about it]. The next one I think is how that’s been working for those particular teachers. I have said to our superintendent that I would really like all this to be kept very real in the sense that I know from my own personal experience that this is the hardest year I’ve ever had teaching. The fun parts of it are squashed down to almost nothing, and the hard parts are many many times harder than they ever have been. Let’s not pretend that things are going [super well]. Some of them are going okay, but there’s just a balance of harms that we’re trying to minimize at every single level along the way. I’m not pessimistic, but I am also not sunshine and flowers. I’m trying to be realistic.

Q: How do you think students should start in person learning?

A: I suspect that we’re gonna be dealing with the virus, all the way through [until] possibly next fall. I hope not, but I think realistically that’s probably neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic. I think the CDC guidelines for masks and social distancing will need to be met. [This is] mostly challenging in the high school [and] less challenging as we go to schools that have a little bit more space and a little bit more room. So if that’s what you mean by how, then, I would say by following those guidelines, we can look to other countries [and] their public school systems that have done this and in many cases have been successful. We can look at some private schools within the United States. In many cases that have followed these guidelines with bringing kids back and have also been successful, and we can steal all the good ideas that work.