More School Board Members Should Be Parents With Children In Our Schools

By Jayne Chaffin

I was surprised to learn that only one of our current five school board members has children attending our schools. Our board members will be more vested in our schools when they are also parents of children attending our schools. I am a parent of a child in our schools. My son is a 3rd grader attending Ashley Falls School and he will be attending the new school # 7 next year.

I encountered a huge amount of feedback from parents as I walked door-to-door to almost every parent in our school district. I know what's on parents' minds and when I'm elected my email and telephone will always be available to parents so we can keep the communication lines open.

It is very difficult for me to imagine how board members who do not have children in our schools stay connected to what's really going on. That's why I believe it would be better for all our children if more board members were parents with children in our schools.

As parents, we want the best for our children. We need and deserve a school board that has certain principles that we all agree with and that the school board sticks to them in consistent and fairly predictable ways. One of these principles must be that it highly values input from its parent community and takes its input seriously in a respectful, and not defensive, manner.

We need to know that our school board will always welcome and highly value the parental community's input and know it is a highly valued component of the best decision-making process - one that is deliberative, accurate, dependable and accountable for reaching the right decisions for our children's education.

We want our school board to be hard working and careful in doing its homework, coming up with its own solutions after listening to a wide variety of sources to become fully informed on what the impacts of its decisions will be; and, not hurry to decisions that may not be right. We need our school board to always be listening, dependable, deliberative, accountable - and, to walk in our shoes as parents who want the best for our children.