MY VIEW

My View: Public school districts affect us all

Donna Brosemer, a candidate running for the Volusia County School Board District 4 seat, writes that all workforces are founded on education provided by the K-12 system.

  • By Donna Brosemer
  • | 4:00 p.m. July 23, 2024
  • Ormond Beach Observer
  • Opinion
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Looking for a good doctor to operate on your prostate? Get rid of your cataracts? Fix your AC? Renovate your kitchen? Cure your cancer? Set up your Wi-Fi?

Let’s hope whoever you hire, first learned to read, write, and calculate. In other words, let’s hope they learned their basics in K-12. My kids are grown, and my grandkids don’t live here. Some think seniors don’t have to care about K-12 because their families are done with it. Are they?

Boeing is bringing 400 new jobs to Volusia County, via Embry-Riddle. Those who transfer here will want good schools for their kids. Boeing and others will expect the county to offer an educated workforce. What else will they expect?

  • Multiple studies show that when residents are educated, crime goes down.
  • When neighborhoods are safe, property values rise. For many of us, our homes are our biggest investment. When the value rises, we are more financially secure, with more equity and a higher net worth.
  • Higher property values draw higher tax revenues. Those revenues improve infrastructure and public safety.
  • An educated community provides a higher level of all services – healthcare, retail, entertainment, recreation, professional services.
  • Social service demands are lower when residents are educated.

We already pay for this. The largest proportion of our property taxes goes to the Volusia County School District. The district has the largest budget in the county, in excess of $1.2 billion. The above benefits are the return on our investment. Or not.

The Daytona Chamber’s 2023 Leadership class chose our education system as their year-long project. Specifically, they aim to bring public attention to our very low third-grade reading proficiency rates. The business community clearly sees the relationship between education and the county’s economic stability.

The school district itself is an economic engine. It employs nearly 8,000. It contracts with a wide variety of vendors — food, transportation, and a myriad of support services.

The district boasts a graduation rate — our future workforce — approaching 100%. At the same time, math and reading proficiency rates at all grade levels still hover around 50%, so how do we reconcile those numbers? How much remediation do colleges need to provide to our K-12 graduates, and what about those who don’t attend college? Are their basic skills strong enough to give them a good employment foundation?

The reasons for low proficiencies are many, and there is no easy fix:

  • Classrooms are chaotic because discipline is not sufficiently enforced. It is not sufficiently enforced because discipline referrals are linked to school grades and funding so instead, ineffective theories such as restorative justice, which is just conversation without consequences, are used to avoid actual discipline. Teachers tell me they spend the majority of their class time just trying to control the class. That short-changes every other student, and cheats them out of the time they need to spend learning.
  • Chronic absenteeism is high — whether it’s because parents don’t get their kids up in time, or at all, or leave the care of young children to older siblings – and kids can’t learn if they don’t attend.
  • Teachers are burdened with testing, not only by the state, but by the additional dozen or more tests the district has added. There is little time to teach, when the results of every test may make or break a school grade.
  • Social service needs are high. Some students are homeless. Some are already dealing with substance abuse in themselves or in their parents.Some live in violent households. Some are in and out of the juvenile justice system.
  • Mental health needs are growing. Social media and social service needs all contribute to the high demand for counseling and intervention. These issues affect a teacher’s ability to teach the class, but teachers are neither social service workers nor mental health counselors. They need a strong referral network of providers who can address these issues, which will in turn allow students the ability to focus on their studies. The district has staff who are responsible for making those connections and referrals, but are often unaware of community assets that are available to them.

The bottom line is that public school districts affect us all, regardless of our age, family status, or economic situation. Our public safety, employment base, infrastructure, social services, healthcare, entertainment, recreation — everything starts with the foundational education provided by the K-12 system.

A healthy education system creates a healthy community from youth up. Our responsibility is to support it — for ourselves, our neighbors, and our future generations. It starts with a stronger school board. We need that now, more than ever.

Donna Brosemer is a candidate running for Volusia County School Board District 4. A former lobbyist, Brosemer has 30 years of experience working in public policy and has served on higher education state boards.

 

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