The League of Women Voters of Northern Arizona and the Greater Verde Valley Chamber of Commerce held a forum at the Cottonwood Recreation Center on Oct. 7 for five of the six candidates running for three seats on the Mingus Union High School District Governing Board: James Ariola, Taylor Bell, Rev. Frank Nevarez, incumbent Carol Anne Teague and Joe Wegwert, Ph.D.
Candidate Ashley Koepnick was unable to participate.
Capital Bond
One of the first questions asked by event moderator Mary Chicoine dealt with the previous capital bond and a potential future bond.
The three board members who rejected the bond are leaving the board.
“I would have also voted no,” Nevarez said, differentiating himself from all of the other candidates, saying that “the bond that was trying to get passed, they didn’t have all the details.”
Nevarez later offered alternative funding suggestions for the district, such as monetizing the public school district website through private advertising, looking at creating new community partnerships and crowdfunding.
Teague, who voted in favor of the 2023 bond election, reiterated her position at the forum.
“I walk through those hallways and when it’s raining … there are buckets there,” Teague said. “We’ve got 30-year old fluorescent lighting that we now know is very bad for humans. We’ve got a cafeteria that cannot handle the need of all of these kids. They can’t get fed. We can’t feed them all, and this board murdered it. They didn’t even send it to you.”
“I would have put it to the voters,” Bell said. “Was it perfect? No, but, but I think that bonds are very valuable, and I think there were a lot of things in there that would have greatly benefited the school. So I would definitely be open to helping to create another one.”
Four-Day Week
All of the candidates said they would be receptive to discussing the proposal for the district to move to a four-day instructional week, with Ariola, Teague and Wegwert expressing support for the concept.
“The teachers overwhelmingly told us that they wanted the four-day school week,” Teague said. “The parents overwhelmingly told us that they wanted the four-day school week. The students were not surveyed. It would have been better if they had been, but you have to understand, a four-day school week does not mean less time in the classroom.”
“I would be in favor of a four-day school week provided that Friday could be a day where we can bring the students in, or make it a teaching day, or do something to help the student, maybe even throughout the summer,” Nevarez said.
“The school that our younger kids go to right now [as a parent] is on a four-day school week, and initially it was very hard, because when you have younger kids, it’s difficult to know what to do with them on Fridays,” Bell said. “I would be open to it if we were very intentional about how we set it up.”
After Graduation
Candidates were asked how they would provide leadership and improve achievement for students who start vocational education programs, as well as for the college-bound.
Nevarez discussed raising proficiency scores through program creation to improve student and teacher success.
Bell emphasized the role of the administration and school board to set supportive policies, like limiting classroom distractions, such as phones, and advocated for more focus on practical life skills, such as preparing students for job interviews.
“I’m thinking about what are we offering students that they can be excited about. In part, this is a curricular question [and] an engagement question,” Wegwert said. “How do we draw students more deeply? Let me give you an example: When LGBTQ students do not feel safe in school, when they cannot identify … faculty members who are supportive, their lack of attendance increases, their GPA drops, the statements they make about whether they’re feeling like they should or could go to college become much more dark. There are cultural things that we can do in school that draws students into their learning and into the culture of the school. We need to make sure that the culture is inclusive and that it’s engaging.”
Ariola said the answer was encouraging parental involvement and “secondly, to simply provide more help to the people that need more help.”
“First, we have to feed these kids,” Teague said. “Hungry kids don’t learn. Fifty-one percent of our students at our school are on the free and reduced meal program. I think that every single kid at our school should be able to eat breakfast and lunch without worrying about … if mom was able to pay for this week.”
Finances
Chicoine then asked the candidates to address their expertise in school finance and give specific examples of how that expertise will be beneficial to decisions.
Bell, Wegwert and Nevarez did not answer the question.
Teague cited her long tenure on the board and institutional knowledge, while Ariola mentioned his experience in restaurant operation and managing cooperative housing corporations in New York, adding that his 35 years as an engineer trained him in problem-solving.
“One of the differences that I want to raise is I see coming from our opponents, a more punitive, a more surveillant, a more judgmental and a more normalizing response to what we consider problems,” Wegwert said. “I think when we talk about the behavior of students, we always have to think about the word and the concept of context. What’s going on. How do we find out what’s going on? How do we help. We believe in guiding students into sophisticated, complex and accurate understandings of the social world, and this requires a recognition of the lived context of students and their families.”
“Our job is to give them the facts, and our job is to prepare them for the next part of their life, no matter what that is, our personal political viewpoints, our personal opinions, on things that’s not for the kids to deal with,” Bell said before Nevarez defended his use of the slogan “back to basics.”
