1.When hiring teachers, some administrators consistently prioritize athletic coaching over teaching ability. How would you react if our school superintendent did that? We hire teachers if they can coach, great. I don’t hire someone to coach if perhaps they can teach. We have a hard enough time hiring teachers.
2. Relative to other schools, does our public school have trouble hiring and retaining good teachers? This is an endemic problem throughout the state. People are getting out of the education field, and perhaps the lower salary schedule does have something to do with the issue. We do hire people with emergency certificates and provisional licenses. We are working on temporary teacher housing. Housing is a big problem for personnel coming into Roundup.
3. An improvement plan means a teacher must get better or get out. Many districts have zero teachers on improvement plans. If that happened here, what would you tell the superintendent?
WE do have improvement plans here in Roundup. It is a last resort to get a person out of their position. A non-tenured teacher can be let go for cause. A tenured position has a more complicated case. A teacher has tenure in their third year.
5. Do other schools do better than our school on student achievement, or on closing achievement gaps? If so, what should we do about it? Student achievement on some levels is above average. Typically most are average. The standard reading average is down. We saw a decline after the COVID pandemic.
6. Some Critical Race Theory supporters consider teaching high-level mathematics to be racist—do you agree? Critical race theory is not practiced here. We don’t award a participant’s trophy. We don’t practice DEI. There will be no drag queen story hour here.
Tom Vandeberg was the ONLY candidate to answer our survey.
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