Returning to the board

With her 31 years as an educator as her tutor, Pamela Cort understands that teaching is about finding a way to reach individuals than about teaching one-size-fits-all curriculum. It’s a core part of what she wants to continue to see after being re-elected to the Las Cruces Public Schools Board of Education.

“One of my big things is that we create growth targets for kids, we want kids to be at grade level, and of course we want kids to be beyond grade level,” Cort said. “But sometimes there are students that it's going to take way longer to get there and so in our strategic plan one of the things that the board thought was very important is that 100% of our students are achieving some kind of growth.”

Cort notes that some kids in special education classes or for other reasons may never get to the point of being measured at “grade level,” but the goal of making progress and learning is exciting for those students and gives them a reason to keep going.

“We should be celebrating that instead of saying, ‘Well, you know, you didn't meet your growth target.’” Cort said. “The district is moving to concentrate on that, that our kids are showing growth. We are no longer, thankfully, doing that one test that determines your everything. As a teacher I would see kids with massive anxiety, I had kids throw up on their tests, I've had kids who won't show up. I totally get it when this one thing that's going to place my value in the educational system is this three-day or five-day test that's grueling and awful.”

She’s happy to see more of what she calls “scaffolding” or “differentiated instruction.”

“You are required to teach your multiplication tables, but not all kids are going to get it,” she said. So, as a teacher with 30 kids in a classroom, or at elementary school you're looking at 24 or 25 kids in the classroom, you are really individualizing your instructions to make sure that every kid learns. How we can best support that for educators is giving educators time within the school day and there are creative ways to do that.”

Cort is one of three retired educators on the board. She says they bring an understanding of what teachers go through every day.

“There's more and more stuff that gets piled on teachers and more blame gets piled on teachers,” she said. “It shouldn't be that way. We should be taking things off their plate. It should be a work smarter, not harder kind of thing.”

The former teachers understand what teachers need, that when you put 25 kids in a classroom that you are going to have to teach. You teach one concept, but you teach individually to make sure that every kid gets it.

Like Cort, recently re-elected District 3 board member Robert Wofford, is a retired Las Cruces High School educator. He believes that provides a perspective to the district that holds teachers in high esteem.

“I think one of the things that the retired teachers on the board bring is a respect for the educators in our school district,” Wofford said. “At different times over the course of my career, it seemed the central office administration and leadership did not look upon teachers as partners, but almost adversaries sometimes. We look at teachers and support staff in our district as partners in trying to do the best job we can with kids. It's not adversarial, it's cooperative.”

That said, both Wofford and Cort are grateful for the viewpoint that comes from board members who are not lifetime educators, who look at education with a different lens. Patrick Nolan, who ran unopposed in being elected to his first full term on the board from District 1, brings that kind of background to the discussions.  

“As a school board member, I’ve learned to look from a 30,000-foot level to really see what we need to do to improve our schools,” Nolan said. “I've learned that schools are incredibly complex and the solutions are oftentimes hard to identify. It’s a big lift and I'm finding is the best way that we can work to make schools better is look at the big picture ideas we're implementing.”

Addressing absenteeism

One of returning board members’ biggest concerns in education, part of their focus on the board, is chronic absenteeism.

“It's a huge problem across the country, not just here,” she said. “Our attendance was going down before COVID, and then with COVID it really shifted. It isn't just students who aren't wanting to come to school, it's parents who aren't sending their kids to school. We have a really huge problem with all of the transition years kinder and first grade, sixth grade, and ninth grade. With kinder and first that's not the kids saying they don't want to come to school, that's parents just not wanting to take them.”

What can the school board do?

“To address that you create opportunities at the schools where kids will feel motivated to come and to learn,” Cort said. “We have a lot of project-based education, we're working on our career and technical education center.”

Nolan is mindful of students whose ultimate educational goal isn’t a university education.

“I think fully diving into career and technical education will be a big piece of what I want to do,” Nolan said, “so that we have another pathway for students that may not want to go to college. We need folks in the technical fields, so let’s make sure that we have an opportunity and a curriculum here in LCPS, and that those opportunities are fairly distributed so students at every school have the same access.”

It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing,” Wofford added. “It’s very hard for young people to know, ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ until they've had the opportunity to explore things.”

Wofford says the board is focused on the very real reasons for chronic absenteeism. It may not be what we think it is.

“We have worked for grants to try to make sure that we can get social workers more into our attendance solutions,” Wofford said. “People who are focused on home visits, on calling parents, on trying to figure out why kids are gone and address those needs. It's not that kids are just skipping school and frolicking. There are real social problems that are keeping them from school, and addressing those issues is a community concern as opposed to just a school concern. You cannot increase student achievement until you have the kids in the classroom focused on learning.”

The district’s family support center is another point of emphasis for the board, and these three recently re-elected board members are focused on helping the schools continue to improve on after-school programming.

“After-school programming is something that's near and dear to my heart,” Nolan said. “We know that it helps. We know that it's impactful. So how are we at LCPS at being a good partner around after school programming? It can be anything. I do outdoor education in my professional career, but it could be tutoring, it could be robotics, math, book club, just making sure that we have a wide variety of options for after school.”

Nolan notes that part of supporting after-school programs is to make sure teachers who stay after school to run them are well supported as well. It’s about creating a system that is well managed.

To that end, one of Cort’s hopes is that the board can do something, perhaps in partnership with the City of Las Cruces, to provide better transportation options that allow students to more easily participate in extracurricular activities.

“We lose a lot of equitable opportunities with transportation,” she said. “Kids who can participate in sports and after school activities and get tutored after school and all of those things have to have transportation.

“If we could have activity buses that would leave each of the high schools and middle schools at 5:30, so kids could participate in all of the things, or they could stay at school and study, or they could get tutoring or whatever. When you have buy-in with the kids, when the kids have something that they want to go to school for, they'll come to school.”

Mobile technology

One area on which this board will continue to focus revolves around the use of mobile technology.

“We’re giving little kids this amazing device but we're not telling them how to use it,” Cort said. “All of a sudden we had all of this power right there and look at all the things that we can do, but just not thinking ahead about all the pitfalls that can come with the use of smartphones in schools.”

The legislature has passed legislation that attempts to control the use of smartphones on campus, but it’s still a local issue to enforce those policies.

“We've passed a no distraction policy for cell phone usage in schools, and the report that our student advisory committee students who sit on the dais with us at school board meetings have given is that kids are no longer glued to their devices,” Wofford said. “When they have free time in the class period there's a lot more interaction between students.”

The official duties of a school board are actually more narrow than people think. The board approves budgets and hires a superintendent, but this trio of returning board members is focused on the more subtle role the board plays in influencing the improvement of education.

“I think the broader thing that we can do as a school board is really be good advocates and supporters of public schools,” Nolan said. “Leverage our relationships in the community with elected officials and other organizations, to make sure that we're all on the same page when it comes to doing the important work of educating the future generations.”