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Our Dripping Springs community is in an exciting, yet difficult time. We face the challenge of meeting the demands of a continuing population growth without compromising our friendly and familial sense of community that has been in place here for more than 100 years. Our public schools are on the forefront of this reality facing our community. It will take strong leadership to navigate both meeting the demands of new schools without losing sight of the current challenges that we are facing today, including teacher / administration turnover, retention, transportation, aging infrastructure, classroom sizes, just to name a few. I welcome the opportunity to represent this community in working with the district administration to solve these complex challenges in a way that our kids have every opportunity to excel today, tomorrow, and long into the future.

RESPONSIBLE GROWTH STRATEGY
We must acknowledge the growth challenge our community faces. In as early as 2024, the district administration estimates enrollment across all schools will exceed capacity. Our district must meet these facility challenges through both expansion of existing schools and the construction of new schools. I am in support of funding design for schools before bonding construction. So much of a project can change during the process of design and the price changes nearly 100 percent of the time. The board owes it to the community to go through this due diligence process before asking the community to take on debt or a potential higher tax burden for school construction to accommodate population growth. It also owes the community an opportunity to see the building plans before we proceed. That process fosters accountability and also helps to generate excitement over how we are all moving forward together with community input. I am well skilled in both the design and construction process and will bring this expertise to the board to ensure we do projects right the first time... everytime!

CLASSROOM SIZES & STUDENT/PARENT ENGAGEMENT
Every year it seems class sizes for our kids get larger. For those who grew up in Drip years ago, class sizes generally weren’t much of a problem. As our community grows and our teacher shortage and facility constraints linger, class sizes go up. A natural consequence of this circumstance is less one on one instruction time for each student in the class. It also results in more parents the teacher needs to communicate with on the progress of their student. The result... a million emails a week. Of course, I am exaggerating here, but I don’t believe e-mails are the most effective way to communicate with parents outside of general information. With the exception of a couple of parent teacher conferences a year, how much are we directly communicating with our teachers on our kid’s development progress? Anyone else missing the days where parents had to sign report cards? It would be my goal to re-think parental engagement. How can we enable parents to better support their child's learning outside the classroom? In order to do that, we need class sizes that afford teachers a chance to be able to partner with us on this goal. Accomplishing both will be a priority of mine for our district.

I do believe parents are ultimately responsible for their children's education and decide what is best for them. Parents already make decisions on where to live based up public school districts so school choice is actually already in existence, just in a different form than is being proposed. Regardless of what the State Legislature votes to do on this issue, it is my goal is to ensure DSISD is one of the top public educations a child can get in the State of Texas so that when a parent does get a choice, they choose to make their kid a Dripping Springs Tiger!

Parents have this ultimate authority!

No, that statement does not represent the values this country was founded on. The preamble of our founding document directly contradicts this idea: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

I may be a little old school on this but I prefer reading, writing, science, history and mathematics. Educators are to teach the subjects that are critical in our child's academic development. The above topics are not applicable to that academic development. Parents should choose if and when any of those "other" topics would be introduced to their child.

A focus on fundamentals. Kids must get back to mastering topics that are introduced before simply moving on to the next one. This is where I am seeing many kids are getting left behind. We must evaluate mastery of skills and concepts and kids who are failing in that need to be re-taught until this happens. This is where interventions and extra instruction time becomes crucial.

Safety starts with good order and discipline in schools. If kids are following the rules of the class and the school, discipline problems go down and safety in schools goes up. Girls should feel safe in and around the school at all times.

Specific to opportunities for girls in athletics........not generally. If school districts begin to open up girls sports to young boys "identifying" as a girl, then yes, this would put some the principles of title IX in direct contradiction with why it was created.

Endorsements are coming and will be announced on my webpage and social media.