Columbia Board of Education candidate interview: April Ferrao
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
April Ferrao is looking for another term on the Columbia Board of Education.
Ferrao, who was first elected in 2023, is one of three incumbents seeking reelection this April. They are being challenged by Dr. Keary Husain.
LUCAS GEISLER: Welcome, everybody, to the ABC 17 News, Your Voice, Your Vote voter guide for April 2026. I'm here with April Ferrao. April, thank you so much for joining us. Would you mind just introducing yourself to our viewers and what it is that you're running for?
APRIL FERRAO: Yeah, so I am actually running for reelection for the school board. My family and I moved here in 2000, and my husband's actually been deployed ... since 2015. He's currently in Arkansas getting ready to head back to D.C., but my kids went all through Columbia Public Schools. We stayed here because of the schools and all the opportunities here, and my oldest graduated in 2021. My youngest graduated in 2023, which is when I ran, and I had spent so many hours in our schools since 2007 that this is what I know. This is what I have passion for, and thanks to my husband's service, I have the luxury to have time to just focus on this. This is all I do.
GEISLER: So why do you want to run for reelection for school board in Columbia?
FERRAO: I love it. Before I was on the board, a lot of, uh, I spent a lot of time kind of advocating for students, teachers, the buildings as the Hickman PTA president. We would actually meet regularly with school board members and district administration. To kind of bring to light, you know, things that we were experiencing at Hickman, and to say, 'OK, if we're experiencing these things, then the other buildings are probably experiencing these things. This isn't just about what's happening to my child or what's happening to this building.' It's about looking at, um, if there's an issue, what is that issue, and how is it affecting the district-wide, because we're not the only ones experiencing something. And so I'd have parents reach out to me, and I just spent a lot of time doing that. I just had a passion for it, and not every parent, you know, parents working 12 jobs, their kids are in 10,000 activities. There's only so many hours in a day, and I like to hope that I'm a resource for some people. I just, I just have a strong passion for, you know, I guess you'd call it public service. I can do that, and I'm here for you.
GEISLER: I know one of the things that the board and the district has really tried to work on in the last several years is attendance rates, building them back up at Columbia Public Schools. Lots of districts took a hit during the COVID pandemic and CPS is slowly building that up over the last several years. I mean, how do you try to keep improving those numbers moving forward?
FERRAO: Well, I think, you know, definitely like you said throughout the country, attendance plummeted, and for high school students and especially my youngest, who was right in the middle of all that, he was a freshman when it happened, what he learned was I don't really need to go to school to do school and so then when we went back to school, it was kind of harder to go, I'm gonna be here seven hours a day. I don't really need to be here seven hours a day. And so some of it is changing mindset with time, you know. Some of it is, it's putting the stress and the importance on attending school because we know that when you are just in attendance, you achieve at a higher rate. So while I understand my students are like, 'I don't really need to be there to get this content,' you get the content, you learn it better, and you develop a passion for learning by just being there. And so I think enforcing that and promoting that is also really important to get across the importance of being physically present to learn, and we are seeing improvements. I think we are above 80% now, certainly we'd like to get to 90%. I think before COVID we were probably right at the 90%, so I think I expect improvements every year from a combination of the shift to importance, the emphasis on the importance of being in attendance, and also just we see some natural changes from getting further and further from the COVID years.
GEISLER: Is this an issue you think the board does have influence on? It sounds a lot of what you're saying is just, you know, over time the mindset needs to shift. Is there anything that you think the board can do in this regard?
FERRAO: You know, a lot of what the board can do in this regard is simply asking questions of the superintendent and asking, you know, for data on what we're doing and how that is impacting attendance rates, and so you know, if we ask for data and we're seeing that OK, you're doing X Y Z, but there's nothing changing with attendance rates, what other path do we need to follow, you know, what are other districts doing? I mean, that is one huge thing right there, and some of that we learned from going to conferences, you know, we go to MSBA [Missouri School Boards' Association] conferences, and we go to all these sessions, and they'll have things. I didn't go to one on attendance this last time. I do think a couple of our board members went, maybe, to a presentation by Springfield Public Schools, but, you know, networking with other districts and kind of taking what the best practices are from all over, to see what can work in our district as well. And so we bring that information back and we're pretty, we're pretty involved board as far as what are we doing, what's the goal, when are we getting there, when can we see results, things like that, just kind of pushing it along.
GEISLER: And I know something that's on the top of mind for lots of people in the school system is safety in schools. What would you support in trying to make schools safer?
FERRAO: So, a couple of things that, to make schools safer, because we're seeing, we're hearing it from the student perspective, we're also hearing it from, you know, it being in the classroom teachers experiencing various levels of disruptions in the classroom, whether that's just minor disruptions like cellphones or violent disruptions like flipping tables, or things like that, and so one avenue that we're currently working on is the bully policy. Bullying is a problem throughout the country. And the board is tasked with creating and setting policy. The superintendent's tasked with making sure it's enforced through procedures. And so we've spent probably, I think we started working on it in September, the bully policy, we wanna get it right. There's actually some improvements that we've put in there that apparently they have in the legislature right now, that they submitted, we didn't even know that was happening, making sure the parents are informed, also making sure that there's resources given to both the victim and the accused bully, making sure that we have data, making sure that if something is reported, it is written, it is documented so we can make data driven decisions on that.
When it comes to students and teachers just in general experiencing some behavior issues that might end up being a safety issue, anywhere from being a physical safety issue to a child having anxieties and stress because 'What's gonna happen in class today? Am I gonna be able to learn today because there's this other disruption?'
That causes mental anxiety and learning loss.I think we're taking, we're starting to take a better look at how are we responding to behaviors. We have this behavior matrix that I'm told should be online next week in the student handbook, but it's also a pretty thick document, and is it something that great document, but is it, really logistically possible? What are some things that we can do to help regulate behaviors and also respond? We want to teach kids, you know, develop those social skills, the appropriate placement skills ... How to appropriately work, be in a different setting, and that ranges wildly from kindergarten to 12th grade, right? So there's lots of different approaches there, so we definitely, um, looking at the behavior matrix and how we're responding to behaviors, is instrumental, and that is something the board has been really focused on getting more information about and asking what can we do differently.
GEISLER: We talked about bullying when it comes to school safety. Anything that you'd like to work on as far as like physical building safety as well? I know there's been some work in the last few years, but anything that you're hoping if you're elected for another term, that you'd like to keep pushing on.
FERRAO: Yeah, so actually I'm the chair of the Long-Range Planning Committee. And we are embarking on the 10-year master facility bond plan. It actually should have been done a couple of years ago, but with the change in our cabinet member that controls that process, it's been pushed off a little bit. It's gonna be heavily, heavily, driven by community involvement. Currently, they're doing a facilities audit, and one of the things that we did just do, we had gotten the money from the Ameren settlement. And so long-range planning had $2.5 million to allocate, and we've allocated a couple of million dollars at least to replacing every security camera in the district. And potentially adding some in places because you got blind spots, whether it's external or internal, so that's one thing that we're working on right now. I think they'll be starting that work shortly.We voted on the contracts and stuff like that, so that'll actually start. This fiscal year might run into next fiscal year, but a few months, we also need to, I think, from the facilities audit will be, you know, we'll be addressing any critical safety needs, those will be top priority. Safety, in my opinion, safety needs, ADA compliance are two of the top priorities because they do impact your learning environments. Do we have all, do all the doors, are they secure? Are they functional? But we've done a lot of the, I guess what you call bulletproof glassing. I think we've done that in all of our buildings. I believe all the buildings have their secure vestibules now, at this point.
There hasn't been conversation about expanding the use of our weapons detection system. I know there was some talk a year or two ago about 'is this something we might want to deploy to middle schools?' We haven't, I don't think we've really had a need to do that, and I think that it's made our schools safer in the aspect of it's a deterrent. You know, it's not like, 'oh, now we're catching stuff.' It's just not coming, so, and it came as a result of Hickman students coming and advocating for that. And we wanted them to. Be in a safe environment, and if that makes them feel safer, and I think it also, like I said, is a deterrent.
GEISLER: What do you think is the current relationship between the board and the public right now?
FERRAO: Personally, I think it's good. I do think it's good. I do talk to a lot of parents and teachers and just community members in general, and we try to be very responsive to them, so I think that has helped. We've tried to address their needs. If somebody, I serve on the policy committee as well, and so I really, that's kind of where my level of expertise is. We've done 225 policies since I've been on the board, and that's just astronomically insane, and some of those were a result of parents or teachers, saying to the policy committee, 'Hey, you know this isn't clear maybe or this needs to be updated or what about this,' and it it sparks us to bring it to a to a meeting. We've had others that we have sent to the board, and for approval, and before we can get to approve it, we get some feedback from the community, and we've sent it back to policy to discuss that feedback, and so we're trying to be really responsive to them. It's not to say that everything that's suggested to us would happen, but you know, we started the special education task force last year -- that was a result of many parents asking for that type of thing for years. And the special education department has implemented many of the recommendations that came out of that task force, so I do feel like in general it's improved over where it was, especially during COVID because that was such a contentious time.
GEISLER: Like most every year, Jefferson City talks about different ways to fund K through 12 education. What do you think about, or would you support the idea of performance-based funding for K through 12 schools and districts?
FERRAO: Right, in general, I would say no. Why is that? Because schools that might be lower-performing need more resources. There's a reason why they're lower-performing. it's not necessarily because it's bad delivery of instruction, right? Do they have the resources that they need? Do they have all the behavior supports that they need to have in place? Do they have the interventionists that they need? And if you cut, you know, if you're not giving them as much, then they're gonna have less to work with. And I just don't see how districts can improve. If they're having trouble, they have less resources than to put at the problem, and I think it'll just create a spiral downward for those districts.
