Ignacio School District No. 11 JT held its school board candidate forum Monday night at the Ignacio High School auditorium, where five candidates answered questions submitted by students and community members as they walked in the door.
Town of Ignacio Mayor Clark Craig moderated the event. About 30 people attended the forum.
This year’s candidates running for Ignacio school board include acting president Allen McCaw, acting board member Jay Dee Brunson, founder of GLS consulting Gina Schulz, former table games manager at Sky Ute Casino Sheryle Hunter and network engineer Ross Melton.
The candidates are running for one of the three spots on the school board, which will be decided on in the Nov. 7 election.
Candidates gave a short introduction before Craig started firing away questions at the prospective school board members.
All of the candidates have strong ties with the town of Ignacio. Many of them worked at some point within the school district or have children who attended an Ignacio school.
One of the questions submitted for the candidates was what they thought the district’s most pressing issue was.
Melton was the first to respond, saying that Ignacio school district had limited resources.
“Our students have lower incomes, not all of them but some of them. And so we’re trying to work with these resources and maximize them,” he said.
The estimated budget for the district is about $16.8 million compared to Durango School District 9-R, which has been near $60 million in recent years.
Melton said the district could also focus on bettering its reading, writing and math skills.
McCaw responded to the question by saying that division’s one of the most pressing issues facing the district.
“We have a divided society, no matter which way you look at it. You have people who are intolerant of others beliefs and other systems,” McCaw said.
McCaw said the solution to this problem is education and understanding different perspectives, which comes from the classroom.
“We can all have different viewpoints. It doesn't necessarily make us wrong. It just means (we’re) different,” he added.
Hunter was adamant about improving test scores in the district.
“If you don't have that, how are you going to get a job? I look at it as an in a common sense way. My children are successful. And I think that’s because I pushed them to do their homework,” she said.
She said tolerance and understanding different cultures is important, but that shouldn’t be the district’s top priority. The district should instead focus on what’s going to provide students with a bright future, she said.
“I think everybody should be tolerant, I don’t think there should be a question on it. But we do need to teach them to read and write, and that’s what we’re here for,” Hunter said.
Brunson said the emergence of technology in society is atop his concerns for the district.
“I feel that they’ve lost maybe some skills in communication, and how to address their other students and teachers,” Brunson said.
Brunson acknowledged that students have experienced turmoil in recent years because of the COVID-19 pandemic and how that impacted students learning.
He said he would like students to feel comfortable reaching out to the district staff and board members. He also noted that attending school is different from when he was growing up in terms of career pathways.
“It's tougher, whether they want to go to college or they want to work after they graduate. It’s different from when we all grew up,” Brunson said.
Brunson attended Pagosa Springs High School, but his kids have gone through the Ignacio School District and he is a coach for the high school’s wrestling team.
Schulz said the issue the district needs to address on paper is academic performance and behavior. However, she said the area where the district could most improve is identifying career pathways for its students.
She said she has been working with the Southwest Education Collaborative to help identify pathways for students.
“We recognize maybe not all of our students are college bound and maybe they are more career oriented,” Schulz said. “We’re going to make sure that they have certificates and are able to do it right when they graduate.”
Another question presented to the candidates was about how they would make budget cuts if needed to help stabilize district finances.
Candidates were quick to say that they would not cut staffing or anything that would impact the student learning environment.
Hunter said she didn’t have enough information about the budget to make a definitive decision.
Brunson said he would likely cut spending on operations and maintenance, shifting spending toward things like addressing bus transportation.
He indicated that budget cuts are something board members really have to investigate to ensure they’re making the right decisions. But with the teacher shortages already an issue, cutting staff would not be an option.
Schulz took a slightly different approach to the question, saying that she would want to pursue grant funding through the state to increase the budget rather than making cuts.
“One of the ways that we help bring more money into our budget is we bring more students back into the district, we’re still losing students,” she said.
Losing students to out-of-district institutions harms the district’s per pupil cap, which plays a factor in education funding through the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
Melton advocated for making cuts to district purchases rather than cutting staff. He would also like to evaluate the cost bond used to build the high school.
“With the current change in bond prices from whatever the school originally wanted to build these schools, that overall cost of the bond is way down,” he said.
Melton later said he’d “like to calculate that because from original bond prices, whenever school finance has changed, the interest rates are three or four times more.”
“So that means that the price of bonds is a 20 to 30% loss,” he said.
McCaw said that budget cuts are a dynamic question that does not have a static answer.
He said it depends on if the cut is a small amount or not.
“We can absolutely sharpen pencils and find a way to tighten our belts without using this gigantic budget cut,” McCaw said. “The first thing that the school board needs to do is go to our local state legislator and have them work on getting the Budget Stabilization factor reduced.”
tbrown@durangoherald.com
