Katie Stewart, who has four children enrolled in Durango School District 9-R, says she wants to improve teacher pay and increase school funding.

Stewart was appointed last week to serve on the school board. She will represent District D, which includes much of central and downtown Durango, including the The Grid and the South Side.

She fills a seat being vacated by Andrea Parmenter, who moved into District E and is now running for election in that district. Parmenter was also appointed to the District D seat, vacated by Mariana Valdez.

Stewart will serve out the remainder of Parmenter’s term, which extends through 2023. Then the district will be back on a regular four-year rotation.

Stewart intended to run on the local ballot for a school board position, but that election was scrapped after Parmenter moved outside the district. The board was then forced to appoint someone to the vacant seat instead of relying on an election.

Stewart said she is passionate about equity in education, especially given that she has children of her own who require special accommodations.

Stewart has a 10-year-old son who is hard of hearing and has ADHD. He used to attend a private school, but Stewart decided to transfer him and her other children to Park Elementary School because, she said, the public education system could address his specific needs that a private school just could not.

Stewart’s 5-year-old daughter has selective mutism, which Stewart said is what it sounds like: Sometimes, her daughter’s anxiety becomes so overwhelming that she becomes mute.

She has five children total. Her oldest graduated from Durango High School in 2018.

Stewart said her experience with having children emphasizes her understanding of how important and impactful education is, but she doesn’t stop there: She said she believes in equity in education.

"So I know that those (public school) services are in the equity, because everybody learns differently, and (I believe in) trying to meet children where they are and help lift them up and help them with their goals,” Stewart said about the decision to transfer her children into public school.

Student equity is something near and dear to Stewart, not only through her own experiences as a parent but in her various roles within education.

Stewart comes from a family of educators who have lived in Durango since 1906, she said. Her mother and grandmother were born in Durango and both taught at local schools.

Her grandmother taught at Durango High School for 20 years, and her mother earned a teaching certificate and was passionate about teaching mathematics. When she retired from software engineering, she returned to Durango to teach at Fort Lewis College for about five years.

Stewart’s mother still works with the Durango Education Foundation, which rubbed off on Stewart, who became involved with the program as well. Stewart also recently became the president of the Park Parent-Teacher Organization and has worked with the youth advocacy group Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwest Colorado.

The pandemic inflicted trauma on children through restricted socialization and forced online learning, Stewart said, and many of those children might still be trying to process what they’ve been through. Being able to share their experiences with their peers and educators could help with that process, she said.

She thinks the return to in-person learning is a good thing for children and applauded the board’s decision to continue to mandate mask use in school.

Her daughter’s first teacher at Park Elementary was Lynn Stevens.

“Every day after school she goes to find Lynn Stevens to give her a hug and to talk with her, which is a big deal for my daughter,” Stewart said.

Stewart’s daughter struggled to understand why she couldn’t see Stevens in person in 2020.

"Teachers, educators, staff play a huge role in children’s lives that perhaps not everyone was cognizant of until their children were home,” she said.

From Stewart’s perspective, the pandemic was also rough on working mothers. She never imagined just how much time she would spend at home with her children once they were in school under COVID-19.

“There’s a lot of trauma over the past 18 months, two years, from the pandemic, and there’s a lot of pain around that,” Stewart said. “And I think there are times where people just want to be heard. And I’m happy to hear them and speak for them.”

Equity was also a prominent theme at last week’s Durango School Board meeting, where representatives of three schools, Juniper School, Colorado Connections Academy and Big Picture High School, presented ways they are tackling academic equity and student achievement in terms of academic growth.

That meeting was Stewart’s first as a director. She said that while she believes it is easy to enter into a role such as a school board member with a lot of passion, she feels it is important to try to listen and understand the current projects the board is working on before she tackles the objectives she would like to meet.

But Stewart does have at least two major areas that she would like to address as a school board member: Teacher pay and school funding. She noted how in 2019, Colorado was ranked 49th out of 51 states, including the District of Columbia, in teachers’ pay.

According to Business.org, as of July, Colorado remained at rank 49, joining Florida, Arizona, Virginia and D.C. as the four states (and one district) with the lowest average pay for teachers.

She said the housing market in Durango is also impacting the school district’s ability to hire strong teachers who want to move to the area but cannot make the sacrifices needed to do so. She said she’s spoken with staff members at local schools about that very issue.

“We do have teachers that would love to be here in Durango and the surrounding area but can’t find affordable housing,” she said. “I would say we are at a crisis point from my perspective.”

Stewart also said that once she becomes familiar with current school board projects, she’d like to assess whether it is feasible to get an item onto the ballot to increase the mill levy and acquire more funding for public schools.

cburney@durangoherald.com