VOTE411 Voter Guide

I am a retired English Educator with experience teaching Middle, Secondary, and Community College Education. In my 37 years of teaching, I served as Chair of English for a large urban High School, and I served as Professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College for the last 25 years. There, I led important college committees, designed academic degrees and certificates for the State of Virginia, oversaw the English dual enrollment program, and served as Assistant Dean of English at the largest campus of the largest college in Virginia.

I believe that all students should be taught equally, and we should prepare young people to face the realities and responsibilities of adult life in our Democracy. The goal of education should be to assist each individual student to discover his or her individual potentials, skills, and talents. We should empower them to pursue their dreams, and everything we do in Education should be arranged to this achieve this end.

I am running for School Board because I am certain that my experience in Education could be helpful in making our education system as good as it can be.

My first goal is to "de-technologize" the classroom. Wherever possible, we must return to hands on learning, and move away from a purely academic-biased curriculum and towards a more humanistic model rooted in self-reliance and independent, creative thought.

I also want to strengthen vocational opportunities in this county. Recently, Kalkaska HS brought Shop class back into the building, and I would work to broaden these offerings.

I would also like to broaden the scope of the School Board to include adult education and arts education. We might create an Arts and/or Education Center downtown to respond to these needs. In addition, we might consider working with the Medical Center to design and build the infrastructure to offer medical certificates or even consider a long term goal of building a nursing school.

Most importantly, it is clear that Kalkaska county will be growing in the coming decades, and we need to begin preparing now for future education demands. One day, this county will need and want a community college. The county should set land aside now for a future community college campus, one that could be integrated into village life, rather than being placed in some remote part of the county.

I think the schools are as safe as they can be in a general way. I've substitute taught in the system, and I didn't see anything that I would consider unsafe. However, mental health is the responsibility of the parent to address, not the responsibility of the schools to redress. The school system already has in place those mechanisms to contribute to the well being, both physically and mentally, of the students. It's goal should be to help each individual student learn and grow as well as he or she can. Students who are growing and learning and discovering, who are curious and imaginative, will also be mentally healthy and happy; they will engage in the human process, and all the problems we encounter today will disappear. So let's do that.

There is no reason that AI should be in the classroom at all, except in the context of a specific class in something like coding, for instance. Students do not "learn" from AI; they use it "complete" the work and "pass." But, completion is not mastery. All students should master concrete, critical thinking skills and behaviors that foster independent and creative thinking BEFORE encountering AI in an education setting.

If we allow AI into the classroom now, it will only be a matter of time before the human teacher is replaced by the AI teacher completely.

First, we must address the misunderstanding that all students should go to college and disassociate our system from that authoritarian model. It's simply not true: many young people have been harmed because they believed it.

Then, I'd revamp the Dual Enrollment program, expand it, and offer select college classes in the High School.

As I said above, we need a balanced system, with not just an academic pathway, but also vocational and artistic pathways. We need to design a vocational program of study, or an apprenticeship program, that integrates our local trades and artisans and produces skilled workers who have fulfilling jobs.

We also need a mechanism to assist the adult learner. There are many people who don't do well in high school, or who are uninterested or unready for college or vocational study when they are teenagers. Many of these citizens, now adults, may now want or need an education. But here in Kalkaska, we don't have the programs to capture these "late-bloomers" and help them transition to new, productive pathways. So, we can work on that.

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