- March 14, 2025
Deborah Laury
AGE: 70
FAMILY: Married, one daughter, two grandchildren
QUIRKY FACT: Avid golfer, with personal best of 88
BIO: Deborah Laury moved to Palm Coast in 2003. She earned her degrees from Penn State University and New York University. She served on the executive staffs at Columbia University, New York University, Pace University and St. Thomas Church and Choir School in New York City. She provided professional consulting services to Penn State and PBS Children’s Television. Laury has served on the Grand Haven Advisory Council, been a board member and scholarship fundraising chairwoman Daytona/Palm Coast Chapter, of the Penn State Alumni Association. She was on the Board of Directors of the Greater New York City Better Business Bureau. She was on the Board of Directors of the Palm Harbor Women’s Golf Association
What is your attitude toward high-stakes testing?
I took very serious issue with the position that the board took on that issue. ... I can’t think of a job out there that doesn’t require standardized testing, no matter whether you’re talking about blue collar, plumbers, electricians, or whether we’re talking about doctors or lawyers. Also, in terms of helping kids to get into college and to cope with both the SAT and the ACT, that they start having to face at about 10th grade. Colleen said, “FCAT testing in our house is a swear word.” I think the opposite should occur. I think what we need to do is say to kids, “You don’t need to be afraid of standardized testing.” What I do think, however, is I’m pleased with what Volusia has done with this issue. They took issue as well, but what they also said is, “OK, maybe the rigor of the test is wrong, maybe the curriculum needs to be looked at, maybe teaching needs to be looked at. But in terms of until we make a decision about this, it seems to me we really need to do some serious digging into that issue.” ...
What can be done to reduce the school board budget?
One of the things that is really fascinating to me is the meeting that I had with Mike Judd, who is the operations manager for Flagler schools. He gave me a list of 25 line items which are required to be on the budget, and those are mandated by the state. ... The problem is that the state is not providing those dollars back to us. The way that the game is played is your tax dollars from your property taxes are going to go to Tallahassee, but not all of those dollars are going back to us. ... I think it’s important to make sure that the dollars that we’re sending, we’re getting back. ... Our boards do not have the autonomy that they need. ...
So much of what is going on at a normal board meeting is just basically not known by the general public. So pressures concerning how our money is being spent are not being kicked up to them to say, “Can you please focus on this?” So it’s a really, really complicated problem.
Right now the state is mandating something called Virtual Education. That, in theory, is probably a pretty good idea. But one of the things that’s probably going to happen is all of our children are going to be getting iPads or computers like this at $1,000 a pop. The good thing about this is that iPads are really neat devices, and they have a great deal of power in terms of, for example, if you want to take a look at a rock or an element or some issue in astronomy you can get out on the web because it’s three dimensional and virtual, you can begin to really learn much more about this stuff than you can with a static book. Problem is, however, if you purchase a textbook, that textbook can last maybe three to five years before it needs to be recycled. One of the issues with the iPads is that every time the children move to the next grade, all of the licensing agreements for access to the textual material and learning material have got to be paid again. So that’s a huge cost issue. ...
What is the biggest challenge facing the School Board in the next four years? How would you handle it?
I think board autonomy is huge, I think certainly our budget is huge, I think the whole issue of standardized testing is huge, I think the issue of teacher evaluation is really huge in terms of what happened this year, and I also think there’s another issue that’s floating right under the radar, which is the whole question of common core. Just to give you a little bit of background on that, common core curriculum and testing, if we do nothing to stop this, is going to be probably implemented into our school system within the next two years, in 2014.
The underlying assumptions about common core were at one point, it was a grassroots effort. The objective being, I’ve got a kid in the military, I’m being transferred from Florida to Texas and I want to make sure that a child that is going to school in Texas, when we transfer to Florida, is going to be dealing with the same courses in each state. When this was a grassroots effort that was really good; it made some sense. But in the interim, the federal government has gotten very much involved in this whole issue, and when you really cut to the chase, it looks as though the federal government is going to be deeply involved in telling us how to educate our kids. That is a huge states rights issue.
What is your vision for Flagler County schools in the next four years?
If we could become a top school system, if we could make sure that when our kids graduate they can read, they can handle basic arithmetic, that they can handle a checkbook, they can handle a credit card, and that they can qualify either to go directly into employment in some technical area or that they can go on to the college or university of their choice, and do well in either career path that they’ve chosen.
That would be my objective, to make sure that every kid is given the help and support that they need, and for those kids that are going to be in the safety net for the rest of their lives, make sure again that we try as hard as we can for them.
