Columbia Board of Education candidate interview: Ken Rice

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 Rice below.

Mitchell Kaminski: First, I want to thank you for the time. I know you're probably pretty busy on the campaign trail. Why is this a position that you wanted to run for, and you feel passionate about? 

Ken Rice: Well when I first started, I wanted to run because I had a bunch of friends that are teachers.  And specifically, one called me up in tears one day and just said she really couldn't stand being in the school district anymore. And 25 years as a teacher, my heart went out to her. 

She told me, she said that, she wished some people like myself [would run], because I happen to be the director of the Sunday school that she teaches at. I was like, when? And then God put it on my heart. And I said, ‘Well, I talked to my wife and we said ‘No, I'm not going to do it.’ Then she sends me an email that says, 'Oh, you know, the superintendent, which I really didn't like, is retiring.' And I said, 'Oh, that's great.'  Then I was invited to go to the school board, talking about their best scores yet. I go there and it's like, well, he retired. And it's very interesting that the guy who retired and was overseeing the best scores was not there. 

And I thought, that's awfully odd. But OK. And then, the next day or two days later, I get a call from a number of people that, well, that wasn't true what was put out. Now again, this is a rumor. I don't know.  They said he was led out of the building. There was a lot of different things. But he didn't retire in a good way. So, there was a lot of back and forth on it. 

And then what concerned me with that was, how come we were going to double down? I waited, including the Missourian, including the school board, including the administration. Nobody ever corrected what actually happened. At least to say, 'Hey, it really wasn't a retirement.' Apparently it was a joint decision between him and the school board to leave, which OK a joint decision, but a joint decision that we as taxpayers were left on the hook for $750,000. I found problems with integrity, I found problems with transparency. And I found a lot of problems as a taxpayer with mismanagement, in my opinion, of our dear tax money. 

I kept praying on it and, God sort of led me, and this is what got me into it. And to be honest, the more I've learned and the more I've gotten into it, the more I see a need for someone like myself, whether it's me or someone else that has experience dealing with contracts, CEOs and proper communication with the public. Those are things that I can bring to the board that right now that experience isn't there. So that's why I want to be part of the board. And I think I have become more passionate that I think I can help. And I really want to have the opportunity to get on and really help us regain our status as one of the top school districts in the nation. 

Mitchell Kaminski: That actually kind of leads me into my next question. As you're learning more about what this position entails, what is it about your skill set or experience that you think would be particularly valuable in this role? 

Ken Rice: I've dealt a lot of things where communication is break down and we have a lack of trust with the public,  a lack of trust with the stakeholders. And to be honest, the one thing that we really have to repair immediately is getting trust with the stakeholders, specifically the public, specifically the teachers, all the stakeholders there.

There's a lack of trust. And when you have a lack of trust, and I said this at a school board meeting, one of my first ones, you can't lead effectively because everything that's ever done is under a microscope. And if you're not trusted, it's very hard to lead. 

Mitchell Kaminski: As you've been going through this campaign and kind of talking to some of those stakeholders, is there anything that has stood out as far as potential concerns or something they would like to see improved upon? 

Ken Rice: One is just the continued work on transparency. So, I hear a lot that this is more transparent than we've been. But here's what I said to the people who said that: So, apparently, our transparency was terrible. Now it's just bad. Well, I look for true transparency. And what I mean by that is, we're more transparent, well, if we're more transparent, how come under this regime that the NEA was negotiating under an open situation and people were able to see it publicly, and this regime closed that out. The people in the NEA do not represent all the teachers or even all the staff. So now the staff and the public can't see what's going on.

That's not more transparency. More transparency means that, ‘Hey, we have access to all the past meetings and stuff.' Well, now, supposedly because of a computer issue, we only have 18 months. That's not more transparency. We also have a number of meetings that are held under executive session. If it does not need to be held under executive session by law, which there are some things, contracts, personnel issues and stuff like that. We need to demand that it is open session so the public can see everything that's going on. And also when we have stuff, it needs to be easily available and easily digestible to our parents, to the stakeholders, so they can understand what we're doing and we need to be held accountable for that.

Mitchell Kaminski: You mentioned the Yearwood announcement and how that was handled. I know the district received a lot of criticism for that in recent months. Is there anything that you do think, though, just as a taxpayer, that you think Columbia Public Schools is doing well and that you can help build upon that momentum? 

Ken Rice: So just recently, I said that they started something. Suzette Waters talked about with the teachers, how do you how do you find out? How do you get them better? So, she said she did a survey,  and I think a survey is good, but it doesn't go far enough. I was misquoted, actually with your group that  I totally agreed. I gave her credit for doing a survey. I said that in my companies what I do is I do a survey that's every 90 days so we continuously check engagement and we continuously get continuous feedback to make sure that we have all the information and it's anonymous so we can get good information back, so we can do actions that are most relevant to the people that we're serving. 

Mitchell Kaminski: The district recently implemented metal detectors for school safety. What are your thoughts on those and is there any other measures you'd like to see to maybe help improve school safety or improve just the metal detector process?

Ken Rice: Well, the metal-detector process, I think we we maybe used a broad stroke. I think some schools may have needed it. Some schools maybe there was a perception that it helped solve.  The other problem is we haven't got any data from it, so we don't know how effective it really is.

I do know that almost every kid you ask knows how to beat the metal detector by just putting a knife in a cup in like the Stanley Cup and they lift the cans over it. They could put a real sliver of a knife into a laptop and do that.  So it may have been a good thing.

Again, I think it's like a lot of things the school district does. It may have been reactive. We didn't need it. We didn't really think it through. And these are the things that we need to do. We need to take it and take the things and really make sure that we vet this stuff. It's not these things are expensive. If they're not that effective we need to consider that. What can we do more? 

One of the things I truly believe in is creating a parental advisory committee. And what that is, all the schools that are in our district should have a parental advisory committee made up of parents, teachers, students at the middle- and high-school level staff administrators and also taxpayers that pay property taxes there. That group advises the principal. From those groups we take one person from each of those groups and we think about the feeder school. So, we have the feeder school, which is the elementary, the middle school and the high school. And we have one person for each of those. That's a district advisory committee. And from each of those district advisory committees, we take one person from that, and that becomes a superintendent advisory committee.

That way, the people who are actually involved in the schools and know what's going on give advice to give the best information possible so we can do the things that are necessary in each individual school instead of somebody at Aslin painting a broad stroke to thinking that it's going to solve the problem. Each school is different, it's just like one of the things I talk about, every student is an individual. We need to meet them where they're at and each school is an individual school, and we need to meet that school's needs where they're at.

Mitchell Kaminski: As far as that committee would go, would that be volunteer based or would you be picking? How would it be determined who is a part of this?

Ken Rice: Volunteer based on there. But also, what I would do is I've got the broad strokes of how it works. I know that it's worked successfully, at least in Atlanta, Georgia. It's successfully worked in schools in California, and what I'd want to do is if the new superintendent was up to doing that, I'd like to go visit those schools, find out how they implemented it and see what their best practices is and then implement here.

Mitchell Kaminski: Another big thing just around the superintendent search, a topic brought up, was retaining and attracting good teachers in the district. What would you do to help attract teachers to the district and retain some of the quality staff that  we do have? 

Ken Rice: No. 1, and this is the funny thing is everyone talks about: Pay and benefits. I think those are table stakes. You just have to have good pay and good benefits. But that's not what my teachers are telling me that they need. They want support if there's disciplinary problems in their in their classrooms, they want support that they can take care of those disciplinary problems. They want to have good professional development that they have a say in. They've been forced to take certain professional development that they don't think is always helpful for their career and they want more support, especially new teachers coming in so that they are ready to get and be successful at the beginning. And then the other thing is we got to listen to those teachers right now.

We say we listen to teachers, but do we really? We a lot of times we say, ‘Hey, we're listening to the NEA’, but they don't represent all teachers. We need to represent all the teachers. They all need to have a voice. And we need to hear those voices and understand what what their needs are instead of just assuming what their needs are. 

Mitchell Kaminski: Did you get a chance to look at the annual APR scores, and if so, did anything stand out? What were your thoughts on those?

Ken Rice: Well, I think the initial broad stroke was like, yay. But then you look at the disaggregated data and you see, oh, boy, some of the most needy kids, the kids that are a minority student, the kids that are on IEPs, the kids are on free or reduced lunch, for decades, they've been failing and we failed them.

They're falling through the gaps. We're pushing up, up through the school system and they're failing and we're not doing anything about it. We say we are. Two years ago, we had a special education audit.  It was very expensive. And we had a guy. Nothing has been done on that special education audit. President Water said, yes, there have been things, but I challenge you to show me specifics of what that has been done.

So we spend a lot of money to do an audit, and that's what I keep hearing. Well, we need to do an audit. We need to do an audit. Well, in business we do an audit. That's 10% of the thing. Then we take action. And then the other part is we go back and look and see how that action worked. Here's what we're doing. We're doing a lot of audit with a lot of not a lot of action. And then what we do is we also do some things that just look good to the public and don't actually produce results. So if I don't care about doing things that look good to the public, I want to do things that are actually good for our students, our parents and our teachers. 

Mitchell Kaminski: One of the things that has been floated around is a potential cellphone ban or reducing cellphones in the classroom. Do you have any thoughts on that or the people that you've talked to have shared?

Ken Rice: You ask for a positive that they did. One of the things is a cellphone ban. Excellent job by President Waters, the school board. Well, and again, it's not the school board. It was the administration. I totally support it.  There is no need for cellphones in school. I mean, some parents say, 'Hey, I need to be able to get my kid in touch with my child.' No, what you need is making sure your child is involved in the academic structure so they can learn and become great. 

Mitchell Kaminski: Final couple of questions here. Another big one over the winter break was the AMI days. I know they're trying to get that additional funding from that and there might be some changes to state law there. But  what were your thoughts on how those AMI days were implemented? Is there any room for improvement there for how the district handles them? 

Ken Rice: It was a true failure on the district. It was a joke. We have our president of the school board saying, 'I don't care.' An AMI day is alternative methods of instruction, so in other words, that should be a school day. That has to have rigor. Any time you have a class or a an environment where you're teaching,  there should be some academic rigor to have a school board president say, 'I don't care about academic rigor, I care about my million dollars.' That is just a very concerning statement on all point. 

Mitchell Kaminski: Finally, I leave the floor open to you. Is there anything you would like to add I think would be important for us to know or something that we might not have talked about? 

Ken Rice: I just want to say, I'm an outsider here. So one thing I'm not beholding. I'll say the last 15 years, the NEA supported candidate has won. No one is supporting me other than the public out there, people that will believe that I'm a person that's going to go in and advocate for their children, advocate for the best things for Columbia schools. 

I don't want it. People have also said I'm a big proponent of charter schools. That is not a truth.  I am not afraid of charter schools because what I want to do is bring excellence back into Columbia Public Schools. And I truly believe we can do that. But we've got to have the will to do that. I also bring a skill set that currently is missing.

I bring a business background, I bring a I sat on the board of Spalding for Children for over 15 years. I was part of the executive committee that hired. I've held accountable CEOs, I've hired CEOs, I’ve fired COOs. I know how it works in the in the executive suite. I know how to hold a superintendent or a CEO accountable. I also know how to communicate with the public so we don't get ourselves in trouble. And I also when there's problems to make sure that we open communicate to everyone and involve all stakeholders. So we get to that because the biggest thing people want to know is that you care about what they say. Well, another thing that was problematic, how they change the public  address, how they've done that.

You used to be able to say a lot more, I'm going to go on to do public comment and I have to explain myself what I'm doing. That's ridiculous. We need to be able to let people vent, let people talk about what they have, because basically otherwise we're telling them we really don't care what you do. And  I hope that I have everyone's vote. It'll be a vote for change. If you want things pretty much the way they are, elect  my other two. If you want someone who's up for change,  I will fight for the best for Columbia Public Schools, if elected.