COLUMBIA BOARD OF EDUCATION: Adam Burks

Adam Burks is critical of administrators at Columbia Public Schools.

"We have experienced unaccountable and unconcerned administrators who seem to go out of their way to undermine and ignore CPS parents and teachers," Burks says on his campaign website. "What we and so many other parents have experienced is unacceptable and cannot continue any longer."

Burks is one of three newcomers running for two open spots on the Columbia Board of Education. One incumbent, Blake Willoughby, is seeking reelection, meaning at least one of the novices will be elected to the board.

Should CPS bring back masks if we get hit with another coronavirus case surge?

So I thought long and hard about where we need to go for the future and where we've evolved in this pandemic. Our current plan was developed at the very beginning of the pandemic. It's went through a couple of revisions. But I think when we created that, there was a little bit that wasn't known about the coronavirus. I think what we're at a point where we need to do a complete reassessment of our response plan to make sure that we're making the appropriate plans and responses that are age-appropriate mitigation strategies that should be created for the district.

I think if we do observe an increase in our community that we all need to work together as a community to figure out what the appropriate response is. I want to make sure that we have a proactive approach to infectious disease, not just the coronavirus, but any diseases that we're going to face. That could be the stomach bug, that could be strep throat, you know, a flu outbreak, we need to focus on all infectious diseases, not just the coronavirus. But I think if we have a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach, which I think is what we've done in the past is, "oh my gosh, something has happened, now we've got to do something." Well, to stay ahead of the curve, we need to always be proactive.

The first thing is just really focusing on the three basic strategies that I kind of consider as infectious disease prevention, that's hand hygiene. So there's nothing better than making sure that we're washing our hands on a continuous basis with soap and water. Hand sanitizer is effective but when you really dig down, dig down into when hand sanitizer is truly useful, it's when there's no hand washing available. And it's only effective against certain items, it doesn't basically kill everything on your hands, it's only going to attack certain viruses or germs. And so soap and water is the best effort. So even if you're using hand sanitizer, you're always supposed to wash that up with handwashing. There's some great information on the CDC website that talks about handwashing guidelines, a lot of implementations, that would be easy to put into CPS making sure that we're doing that.

The second thing is staying home if you're ill. There's no better preventative measure than if you're not feeling well, you should not be there. Okay, that's one of the best prevention steps other than handwashing. And then the third item is just making sure that we maintain clean sanitary facilities. No matter what, we have to have a great emphasis on our cleanliness of our facilities. This means making sure that we're using the right chemicals for the right job and that we're using the chemicals the way that they're designed for. So there's some chemicals out there that have to sit for three minutes, there's some that have to sit ... deficit for five. Making sure that our janitorial staff truly understand how those chemicals are effective when they're used in the cleaning world. And then again, making sure that we're wiping down touch services very frequently. Handwashing, stay at home if you're ill, and hand washing.

Masking is just one part of the mitigation process. It only works against the coronavirus, if we're wearing a properly fitting face mask that is always done consistently. And I think sometimes masking gives us a false sense of security. I kind of relate it back to fire and EMS world where sometimes we feel like if we wear our bunker coat or bunker pants, and it's going to protect us from everything. Well, not if you're wearing it correctly. And we're not using everything. And we're not doing it the same way every single time. It's not going to be as effective to prevent as much as that. So really going back to those mitigation strategies of what is the appropriate approach? What is the age-appropriate approach? And what is the best defense against what we're trying to fight against?

Now that we have a large population vaccinated, I think that also plays another piece in mitigation strategies. I personally believe just as a parent and as a school board member, I'm not sure anybody on the school board has medical training and experience to make these types of decisions. So that's where I'm really going to rely on our medical providers, our community partners when it comes to infectious disease, to really take that approach on what is going to be the most effective mitigation strategy that we should use.

How do you think the Columbia Board of Education handled navigating the previous pandemic surges?

I truly believe that the Board of Education and administration was getting so much information thrown at them at once, everything was unknown. We didn't really know what we were doing. Nobody knew what we were doing. And we were trying to make sure that we had a safe place not only for our students, for teachers and staff and our community. I know just doing our response plan in our employer, that was one of my main primary responsibilities is creating a COVID-19 response mitigation plan. And I know how I felt as a community member and as a business member in our community of getting all this information at once and it seems like it was changing every 10 minutes. So you were always having to research you were always having to look at what was best.

And I think no matter what decision anybody made, whether it was masking, not masking, in-seat, not in-seat, we knew that nobody was going to be 100% happy. We knew we were always going to have some upset person. I do believe we were a little too conservative in our approach by shutting operations down for long as we did. We had communities around us that slowly transitioned back into operations. And they were able to do that successfully. And I wish we would have worked a lot closer with our community partners, such as Harrisburg, Hallsville , Fayette, you know, there's other surrounding schools, Sturgeon. And I think we have a lot to learn from that. We should be working together with all of our partner schools, we should be working together as a state and local community.

I think that the board also was trying to make decisions for that moment, and we weren't really thinking long-term effects. So it gets back to what was a risk analysis. What was the risk assessment that was done when we were doing these mitigation plans? Were we thinking things through, or were we trying to make decisions so quickly, that we really weren't thinking the end result? And I think that's where we're at today, we're seeing that end result of what was the risk of somebody getting COVID compared to kids, where we're at today that we're missing two years of school, and we're extremely lagging in academics. And so as a parent, and as a board member, or potential board member, those are the things that we need to be thinking about, we need to make sure that the decisions that we're making, what are going to be those long term effects? Yes, there are going to be some short-term effects. There may be some folks that get sick or maybe get ill. But when you look at it, from a nationwide standpoint, did we make the right decisions, we could always go back and reassess, it kind of gets back into, you get three seconds to make a decision, but you get a lifetime to go back and critique it. I think if we take those critiques, and that feedback, and we look at things that we did well, look at things that we did, right, or that we did wrong, or that we can improve on. I think that's how we move forward. I think we take those learning experiences and make sure that we don't repeat them, because now we're seeing what that is.

Do you support the $80 million bond issue on the April ballot?

Yes, I do. And I'm gonna tell you a couple reasons why I think it's extremely important that we maintain the CPS long-range facility plan. I am hearing some rumbling that some people are for it, some people aren't. I think there's a lot of confusion. And I want to kind of tell you why I am supporting it as a parent and as a board candidate, because my role in my current employer is facility management and safety management. And so I'm ultimately responsible for making sure that our facilities meet the needs of our organization, making sure that our facilities maintain cleanliness and the appearance standards that are set forth by our board of directors. And when you get into building buildings, it's not like you could go out and buy a new car, like you could have it in a couple of days. But today's market might be a couple of weeks. But when you're looking at it, when you're building, and you're constructing large buildings, we're in a supply issue or supply chain issue right now. And so if we get outside of this rotation of making sure that we have the future plan for CPS, and that we have buildings and structures ready to go, if we stop that plan, it can have a detrimental effect on future growth needs of the of the district.

The district has a 10-year plan. If you look at that plan, it shows you know, these buildings take about a year, year and a half to build and construct and make sure that they're ready to go. I think we're even going to see a longer lag time, especially with construction materials and where they're at today. We also have 16 buildings that are 50-plus years old in the CPS district, that's 41% of our buildings are older than the majority of anybody's houses here in Columbia. These buildings are extremely expensive to maintain and don't live up to our standard that our community requires. And when I talk about what the community is requiring, we're talking about, do these buildings meet our ADA access requirements? Are they energy-efficient buildings? Were we not spending so much money on utilities, then we can provide energy-efficient facilities. And then do we have enough space in these older buildings that allow our students to excel in their classrooms? Or are the classrooms a smaller square footprint? Are classrooms overpopulated? You know, so you start thinking about all these different things, and how important the bond issue is. The other major thing is, is this 10-year plan is built into our tax debt service, where if we maintain this plan, the school board should not have to go back and ask for more money. This debt levy that we have, the debt service that helps pay for this bond issue, is already part of the normal budgeting process.

So this is part of that five-year plan that 10-year plan for the district is if we take a look little chunks at a time, and we're being smart with our spending, we're being a good steward with our resources, that will help carry that plan all along. This bond issue is going to help build a new elementary school on Sinclair Road south of Columbia, scheduled to open in 2024 to 2025. So again, it's not opening next year, you know, we've got a little bit of time. We're trying to plan ahead. It's going to be making some major building structural repairs to Columbia Area Career Center. It's going to be adding an addition to Battle Elementary School where I know that they do need assistance. And then just the general maintenance and upkeep of projects across the district, one of those being major technology upgrades to make sure that we're supporting our student learning, especially since we're doing so much learning with technology throughout our district.

Do you support a collective bargaining agreement that will increase starting teacher pay to at least $40k per year?

Yes, I do support the new collective bargaining agreement. I think it's the beginning of a major revision to our recruitment and retention process for great, amazing educators that we have here at Columbia Public Schools. When you look back, when I started going back and looking at what have we done historically, and what are we doing to make sure that we're taking care of our staff and our educators here at CPS, this is the second-largest increase in salary adjustments that we've made. The most recent one was in 2016, it was a little over $7 million, this one is going to result in a little bit over $6 million in salary adjustments.

But what I want people to really make sure that they understand is, this is really a benchmarking across the state of where our entry-level teachers need to be at. So what we're trying to do is CPS is trying to be competitive to attract and retain newer teachers in the district rather than them working here and then moving to another district. It's really important once you start that recruitment process that you do everything that you can to retain that workforce, so that you're not consistently retraining and having to repeat that process over and over again. Even though sort of non-certified staff is not part of this agreement, at the board meeting last week, the administration did say that this will also impact hourly positions throughout the district. Like I said at the very beginning, this is just the start of the entire recruitment and retention process that I see CPS really trying to get a handle on and really take a look at and see where we can make improvements.

The piece that I'm concerned about is that we've addressed the incoming teachers, but this contract, and this bargaining collective bargaining agreement really doesn't focus on the folks that we already have. And so I want to make sure that we're also taking that in consideration as board members -- now we've got the fix to recruit the new teachers, what are we doing to maintain and retain that current staff that we have? Those teachers and educators and staff that have been dedicated to CPS that have been through us with all the things over the last couple years? What are we doing to make sure that we're meeting their employee satisfaction, engagement needs, and making sure that we don't just stop here, that we carry this on throughout the entire year, and over the next several years? And then it becomes part of the process. You know, always making sure each year that we're looking at where we're at as a district compared to local, regional and state districts. Where are we being competitive? And are we maintaining competitiveness?

Is teaching about history, race and LGBTQ issues being done appropriately in CPS classrooms?

First of all, we have a wonderful and amazing staff at CPS. They have gone above and beyond to make sure that not only are we teaching the correct curriculum and teaching the correct things to our students, but that they also work with their peers in the community to make sure that we're always looking at new things.

Currently, I don't have any specific experiences with my four kids that attend CPS. I do have one that is getting ready to enter high school where we're slowly starting to talk about some of these issues. And where I get to this as a parent is making sure that we're going back to the educators saying what do we need to be teaching our students? Are we meeting the objectives and the core items? Because I think we still struggle with just maintaining the core items. We could see that in test scores. We could see that in low student performance over the last few years. But again, I go back as what is age-appropriate? And when is it appropriate to start teaching these type of topics in our classroom. And I want to make sure that we are exposing our children to this and that we are teaching them about these important issues throughout the community.

Again, I go back to I'm going to go back to the educators. What is age-appropriate? And what are the topics and discussions that we think that we as educators need to be teaching and then what becomes part of the parent responsibility?

How accessible do you think the school board is to the public?

I think everybody is trying extremely hard to meet the needs of our community. This has been very trying over the last couple years. We're trying to keep people safe. We're trying to do the right thing, we're trying to follow all the guidance that's being thrown at us at once changing on a consistent basis.

I do think that the board of education could use a little bit more improvement in the area of community relations. If at the end of the day, the school board is elected by our peers, we are elected by the community. And so we are representing the community. And one of the key requirements of being elected by your peers is that you're out there, you're talking to them, you're getting to know what their needs are. As a district, I know a lot of things had stopped that there used to be -- some town halls, there used to be, you know, assign board members to certain areas. And I know that we have to be very cautious about when we gather a number of board members together that wouldn't violate the Sunshine Law. Because we don't want to ever get into a situation where we're trying to do the right thing but we end up causing bigger issues or concerns for the community that may violate some of the Sunshine Law rules about meetings.

But what I would like to see, and I think this is where we are today is, as a parent, I feel like we've lost some communication or that we've stopped communicating. And everybody's afraid to talk to people. And we want to do everything through email. And we want to do things through social media. And so I go back to what are the foundations of most organizations? Doesn't matter what you work, if you work for a public entity, a government entity, a private entity, communication is the foundation of most organizations. And if you don't have a good foundation in your communication program, then you will continuously see those failures time and time again. So I would like for us just to kind of take a timeout, take a step back, let's reassess. And let's really try to work together as a community. And let's make sure that we as community members are trying to support our board members and in return with those board members to also try to support our community.

And I think if we start working on bridging those repairs, or repairing those bridges that we have between the public and the board, then I think we might see some more collaboration with our lawmakers, where they don't feel like they need to, immediately they've exhausted trying to make those contacts, and they feel like they're being shut out. That's how his parents feel. I mean, that's one of the biggest things that I've heard over the last six months is, we just want to be part of the decision-making process or part of your community. We are your support. If you don't have the support of the community, this is not going to be a successful education institution. And so taking a step back, making sure that we're working with everybody, and that we're doing our best that maybe our lawmakers don't feel like they have to go and introduce laws in the legislature to make sure that their voices are being heard.

That's where I think we are today. I think they've tried to exhaust every means possible. And they just feel like they're not getting heard. So they're doing the same thing that we're trying to do as school board members. They're elected by their peers, their peers are approaching them and saying, "Hey, we are not being successful, we need to take it to the next level." And I think that's where we are today. So I would really like for everybody really just to take a deep breath. Let's reassess. Let's reset. And let's think about how we could work together and make it successful for everybody. And let's not work against each other.

Are there any other issues you see as important to CPS?

Well, first of all, I just want to stress that CPS is truly an amazing place. Yes, we do have a few issues. But overall, when you really look at it from a 30,000-foot view, it's a great place. We have great educators, we have great staff, we have great administrators, we just have some opportunity to put some strong leaders in place on our school board that are willing to make those difficult conversations and hold everybody accountable. And I think if we could repair that one piece, I really truly think that CPS can meet its mission and vision of being the best education institution in the state.

Everybody, school board members, administrators, teachers and staff have a part to play in repairing the relationships that have been damaged over the last couple of years. And I don't want it to be focused on one group. It's everybody. Everybody has a responsibility to make this institution succeed. I want to see CPS move forward. And I want to become the best institution in the state of Missouri. I want to be able to tell my friends and family that my kids attend Columbia Public Schools. And the words I want to hear coming out of their mouth is "oh my gosh, that's amazing. We wish that we lived in Colombia so our kids could go there too."

I want to see our students thrive in the classroom and be the center of our decision-making process. That's why public education exists. We exist for our students to develop them for the future. I want to see our great, amazing teachers and educators and staff have the proper tools and supports to do their job. I don't want them to feel like they're out there on a tree by themselves. I don't want them to feel like they're isolated and that nobody's there to support them. We are all in this together. We have to make sure that everybody is working together.

And I want to see more engagement from the district with our parents and community. We rely so heavily on the support of our community, not only from a financial standpoint, but just general support and being there for people that if we don't have that we will not be a successful institution. And I think that's where we're at today. I think we have a lot of people who feel like they're not part of the process. And when you don't feel like you're part of the process, you don't want to be supportive. And so going back and repairing those relationships and making sure that we're working together as a community will have a direct impact on the success of our organization. I really want to truly thank everybody for everything that they have done, and my campaign, supporting it, myself and the other candidates, and I truly look forward to everybody going out and voting on April 5. Thank you.