During Thursday’s Chamber of Commerce candidate forum, the three candidates for the Board of Education spoke of the importance of teachers. On Friday afternoon, one of the teachers in the district was reciprocating.
Patrick Roach, an English teacher at Thunder Mountain High School, urged people to vote in the Oct. 3 election because of the effect the board has on the Juneau School District.
“If a community member has a family member in a Juneau School District school, they should definitely inform themselves about the School Board candidates and get out and vote,” Roach said, “because who is sitting on that school board directly affects their child’s education.”
Roach is also the chair of the Juneau Education Association’s (JEA) Political Action Committee Education (PACE), a group registered with the Alaska Public Offices Commission looking to help elect pro-education candidates in Juneau’s municipal election. He said that so far, teachers have liked all three candidates for the board — incumbent Brian Holst, recent Thunder Mountain graduate Kevin Allen and newcomer Jeff Short.
[Board of Education candidates emphasize economic effects of schools]
All three have fairly distinct approaches and priorities, Roach said, but they all bring something good to the table. He and other teachers will find out more this coming Friday as JEA PACE holds a private candidate forum open to teachers and their families. JEA has also submitted questions to the Central Labor Council and AFL-CIO, which collaborated to create a questionnaire for School Board candidates several weeks ago, Roach said.
The three candidates went on record Thursday at the Chamber of Commerce saying that communicating with teachers is essential for the board’s success. Holst said he’s worked to get the board to talk with the teachers more (which Roach said he and others have noticed) and Allen said his teachers in Juneau were “amazing.”
Short in particular has been vocal about talking with teachers and being more receptive to what they have to say. Short even proposed adding a teacher representative to the board, just as the board currently has a student representative.
“Our current budget climate is not going to allow us to pay teachers a whole lot more,” Short said, “so about all that’s left is to start being nicer to teachers.”
Roach said he’s noticed how much Short has worked to talk to teachers and learn about the major issues facing schools. He also said that though he never had Allen in class, he’s heard all good things from colleagues who did have Allen at Thunder Mountain.
While the School Board election is one with which the teachers are intimately familiar, Roach said it’s also important to reach out to the Assembly candidates as well. The biggest role the Assembly plays in schools is choosing whether or not to fully fund the district in its annual budget process. Municipalities have a limit on how much money they can give to schools, as they also receive a certain amount of money from the state, based on a formula.
Historically, Juneau has fully funded its schools, and Roach said JEA PACE has been closely monitoring what Assembly candidates say about how dedicated they are to funding the district.
“We, of course, want to hear Assembly candidates commit to funding to the cap, to the legal limit,” Roach said. “That’s a big point.”
Top priorities
At Thursday’s Chamber of Commerce candidate forum, the three Board of Education candidates were asked to list their top two priorities. Their answers were as follows:
Kevin Allen
– Revamp the mathematics curriculum, possibly with the ALEKS (Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces) Program, a web-based teaching tool.
– Implement more Alaska Native history and language classes in the district.
Brian Holst
– Encourage student achievement with a focus on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Program, which promotes creative thinking.
– Continue to form partnerships with other organizations in the Juneau community, including partnering with the Juneau Community Foundation to get free breakfast for students and with STEM professionals who come talk to students.
Jeff Short
– Give teachers a formal advisory seat on the School Board.
– Implement statistical methods to get reliable quantitative comparisons from student testing.
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at 523-2271 or alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com.
