Columbia Board of Education candidate interview: Board President Suzette Waters
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
ABC 17 News is speaking with candidates for the April 8 election. Three people are running for a pair of seats on the Columbia Board of Education: Board President Suzette Waters, Erica Dickson and Ken Rice.
Reporter Mitchell Kaminski spoke with each candidate about a number of topics. View the interview with Waters below.
Mitchell Kaminski: Joining us now is school board candidate Suzette Waters. Thank you so much for joining us and taking time out of your campaign schedule.
Suzette Waters: My pleasure.
Mitchell Kaminski: To start off, why is this a position that you want to run for? I know you've kind of already gone through it once, but why is this something that you're passionate about and that you want to continue doing?
Suzette Waters: I want to continue doing it because I am passionate about it. I think public education is the most-critical part of our infrastructure as a society, and being on the school board allows me to advocate for public education and put my energy into ensuring that CPS is the best place to educate all students.
Mitchell Kaminski: During your tenure on the school board, is there anything that you've learned or picked up that's given you the experience that you think would help moving forward? Or something that you think you can do better now that you've kind of gone through it once?
Suzette Waters: Yeah, so a lot of things. It takes a lot of work to learn the system that makes up CPS. There's a lot of departments, there's tons of buildings, there's a lot of processes that I've had to become familiar with to understand how to make change. So that experience coupled with the work of the rest of the board, which, is a nice cohesive governance team. I'm looking forward to continuing work if I should be reelected, because we're firing on all cylinders now.
Mitchell Kaminski: That kind of leads me into my next question: Is there anything particular that you think is going really well for CPS, that you'd like to hang your hat on and continue, that positive momentum, and one thing that you would like to see improved upon if you were reelected?
Suzette Waters: Sure. So I, I'm not going to take credit for any of the great things happening at CPS, because it takes the work of the thousands of people that work there. But one thing that I think CPS does exceptionally well is prepare secondary students for life beyond graduation. So, we have between college preparatory opportunities, we have AP courses, we have dual enrollment, we have early college, and that allows a lot of students to get an associate's degree or take college-level courses and earn credit in college while still being in high school.
And then we also have a career center, which is a state-recognized program that assists us in our efforts to promote workforce development and gives give our students the skills that they're gonna need to be competitive in the workforce and earn a career wage, not just get a job. So, those. That is something I think we do really well.
Something that we need to focus a little bit more on is better attendance overall and those are conversations that have been ongoing. But we're starting to get to drill down into the root causes of absenteeism, and I'm looking forward to developing some solutions for increasing our attendance overall as a district, because that does drive student achievement.
Mitchell Kaminski: You mentioned attendance there. Is there something that you've heard either at these candidate forums or just talking to people on the campaign trail, as far as like an issue that stands out to them. Maybe it overlaps with attendance, but what would you say has been people's biggest concern, and what would your plans be to address that?
Suzette Waters: A lot of the forums have asked questions about achievement gaps. I don't think that's a new conversation; that's certainly not new to this campaign. It's been an ongoing conversation across decades of education. But it continues to be a focus of not just the Board but of the CPS administration because we do see a disparity in achievement among our subgroups. So the conversations that we've had as a board with administration have been focused on drilling down into the data to understand is that at the student level, how can we address achievements so that that we're focusing on the growth of every student, not just the growth of a population at large or the the the district in aggregate, but student growth at the individual level.
Mitchell Kaminski: Moving on to school safety, I know you guys have made some strides there, the implementing the metal detectors. How do you think that rollout has been? Do you think that's been a good investment for the district? And is there anything else that uh the district is looking at as far as school safety is concerned?
Suzette Waters: Yeah, so I do think it has been a positive result overall. I think the rollout was, as expected, a little bit bumpy, just like in putting out that whole new process of getting students, thousands of students in the door through a different, you know, a different door and with a different process was a little bit, was a little bit overwhelming those first couple of weeks of school, but we've managed to smooth it out.
The administration at the buildings has been able to smooth it out.
We could use a few more building safety and security aids. Those conversations about the hiring of people depend on budget, and those are, you know, we're having to decide between, we have A, B or C options and we don't have the budget to fund all of them. So those are tough conversations. There's a lot of need. Do we hire a learning specialist? Do we hire another kindergarten teacher, or do we hire a couple of BSSAs? So those are the types of conversations that happen at the granular level that affect some of these allocations of our full-time employees.
Another thing that the district is looking at, or the Board is looking at -- in regards to student safety -- is we had a preliminary discussion about a public safety announcement regarding safe storage of firearms as a measure of prevention. So the weapons detection system helps downstream to prevent weapons that are brought to school from entering the building. But if we can keep weapons out of the hands of students in the first place, then they can't get to school, and nobody wants their child to come across a firearm and harm themselves or somebody else. So, I think that is a conversation that was well received, but nothing has been put in place yet, and those conversations are ongoing.
Mitchell Kaminski: I know there's been a lot of talk about cellphones in schools and floating around potential cellphone bans. If you were reelected, where do you see the future of cell phones in the classroom?
Suzette Waters: The district currently has a procedure that bans cellphones in educational spaces at the secondary level. So in high school, it's during the learning environment, and in middle school, it's out of sight from bell to bell. So don't have your cellphone out at all during school time. And then, of course, they're not allowed in elementary schools. That is a district-wide procedure. There is actually legislation currently in the state that would ban cellphones in all learning environments in every district in the state of Missouri. So that would give some kind of backup or administrative procedure. In a way that would make it more consistent across the state and not just single out CPS.
But we are certainly not the only district that does that. Moberly does that, and that is something that has been well received by students. The feedback I've heard from students is that they really like it and certainly is preferred by teachers who no longer have to compete with social media and Netflix and that kind of stuff when they're trying to teach content.
Mitchell Kaminski: That's interesting that the students are on board with that. Has there been anything reflected as far as test scores or grades that you have seen any improvements? I know it's only been like one year of rolling it out, but is that anything to show any benefits from that?
Suzette Waters: Not yet, we just implemented it in the fall, so I guess tracking the growth at the high school level, we have the end-of-course exams, which haven't happened yet. So that would be interesting to see how those scores maybe compare with last year or the year before. And in the middle school level, we have the MAP test, but that hasn't been taken yet and our internal assessments we are showing growth there, but I don't know yet if that can be attributed necessarily the cellphone procedure. But anecdotally, there has been a decrease I would say in just drama overall. You know, social media escalates everything, makes everything immediate and now there's no longer the pressure to keep up with all that during class because otherwise you're going to be the only one that doesn't know what's going on cause nobody knows and they're the better for it.
Mitchell Kaminski: What were your thoughts on this year's APR scores, and was there anything in particular that stood out to you?
Suzette Waters: Well, I'm very happy with the scores. A lot of our increase of our current score of 86.5 came in the area of growth, and how that growth compared with the other districts in Missouri. So we're in the top 20% of districts in Missouri with that score now, the challenge will be to maintain that pace of growth, because you you can't have a 16-point increase in growth every single year. At some point, you're going to outpace the scale. So the challenge will be to maintain growth in the students that have appropriate growth, but what we really need to focus on is improving growth and in the students that are underperforming, and making sure that they are making more than a year's growth in a year's time. And if that leads to a better APR score, then wonderful, but it's really about the appropriate growth of individual students that drives the work we're doing as a district.
Mitchell Kaminski: There was a lot of talk during the superintendent search about retaining and recruiting good teachers in the district. If you are reelected, how does the district continue to attract good teachers and keep good ones in the district?
Suzette Waters: Yeah, so teacher retention is one-of-the-three main focuses of our continuous school improvement plan and is something that during the superintendent interview process, we considered heavily. That was, was one of the main points of feedback we got from the community about the qualities desired in the next superintendent, and that's one of the reasons we chose Dr. (Jeff) Klein. It was because he was able to demonstrate a track record of developing professionals and empowering staff to to pursue their professional craft and make it better. So that's one of the reasons we chose him.
One of the ways that the board has engaged in teacher retention pursuits is to partner with MNEA to do a workplace conditions survey. That was done at no cost, and feedback was considered from all teachers, not just members of the union or members of MSTA, but everyone in the teaching unit, regardless of group affiliation. And those results are, they've been compiled; they haven't been shared with the board yet. So the next step in that process, of course, is going to be to review the results and then develop an action plan, implement a couple of those strategies, and then go back to the teacher unit and say, did this help? Is this what you were looking for? You know, so closing that feedback loop, and keeping that going. I think it will be a great step towards improving teacher retention.
Mitchell Kaminski: I know this is the first year the district had implemented AMI days, and it was kind of fluctuating just because there were some changes in the state legislature. One of your opponents was criticizing the way it was rolled out. They didn't think they were very effective. I'm just curious on your thoughts on AMI days and if there's anything the district would handle or do differently, next year when making that school calendar or planning for potential snow days?
Suzette Waters: Sure. So I do want to preface the entire discussion by saying that AMI days were considered in the first place due to a legislative change in the number of calendar days that had to be incorporated to qualify for a boost in funding to be given to teachers. So CPS has always had more than enough instructional hours to meet state requirements. We're still above the number of instructional hours. What we were trying to do was add another couple of instructional days to the calendar to qualify for that additional state funding, and we were allowed to use AMI days as part of that plan. That was approved by DESE. So the parameters of those days have fluctuated since being approved by DESE and even now in the legislature, there is the House Bill 607 that's sponsored by Representative Ed Lewis out of Moberly. He is proposing legislation that would clarify some of the language about those calendar days and if they can include inclement weather days or not. So there's, there's a little bit of confusion at the state level, which is why we've had to revisit our calendar multiple times this year to try to pivot based on changing information from the state.
That said, we did do a round of feedback after the first couple of AMI days, both with teachers and with families and with students to get their feedback about how did it go, what went well, and what should we change? The feedback was mixed. So, the AMI days were positively received more by elementary families and students and teachers and then at the secondary level, they didn't like it quite as much. They wanted a little bit more structure. The students that I talked to about it, wanted it to be at the secondary level anyways. They wanted it to be a little bit more rigorous. They wanted some more options for like enrichment or challenge, and so that is feedback that we're incorporating, and if we can if we continue to use AMI days next year I think that feedback will be incorporated, and then we'll continue to review it.
Mitchell Kaminski: Finally, I'll leave the floor open to you. Is there anything you would like to add that you think would be important for people to know, or just something that we might not have touched on?
Suzette Waters: Sure, so part of my role as the board president has been to be a fierce advocate for public education across the state. So I've been in Jeff City multiple times. I've interacted with legislators, I've interacted with other community leaders to always keep public education part of their conversations and to advocate for funding to come to traditional public districts. I believe in that because I believe that there is no other way we are going to succeed as a society than to educate all of our youth, and that is the mission of CPS and that is what I believe in and that is what we do well.
Mitchell Kaminski: Thank you so much for your time.
Suzette Waters: Thank you.
