Joe Graves has left Mitchell for the greener pastures of the political knife fight that is state politics in Pierre. Dr. Graves is now the Secretary of Education and has traded the headaches of being a school superintendent for another set of woes entirely. When Joe Graves was Superintendent and Joe Childs the Principal of Mitchell High School, staff used to refer to them as “Joe Sr.” and “Joe Jr.” – behind their backs of course. Now Joe Childs has been offered a two-year contract to be the new Superintendent of the Mitchell Schools District 17-2. I say “Good Luck” to both Joes.
Education is a tough business. That’s because those in education deal with the two things most dear to people – their children as well as their tax dollars and I’m not sure, based on my almost four decades in education, that people care about those two things necessarily in that order. It’s also difficult because everyone has been to school and based on those experiences think that they know best what and how to teach.
Dr. Childs has a number of challenges facing him as he formally takes the reins as Superintendent later this April. The most obvious one is what to do about a new high school. The Daily Republic had three front page articles, all in the same recent paper; one about Dr. Childs’ elevation to the superintendency, another about the School Board setting the date for the bond election for the new high school and property taxes going up in Davison County. That juxtaposition summed up the challenge for the bond election. The options for the high school range from expensively bad to expensively good. If we don’t build a new high school, then significant funds will go into repairs and renovations of the current building that is fast approaching seventy years of age. If something terrible should happen, like an explosion that occurred in Plankinton many years ago or a high school falling down – it actually happened here in South Dakota on a weekend, thank God (I can’t remember the exact location – it was a couple of decades ago), then people will be saying that the School Board should have built a new high school etc. If we don’t pass the $17 million bond issue (of a total $62 million building cost – the Board has squirreled away money and capital outlay capability for the other $45 million) then we will have a “double” high school. We will have most of the operating costs (heat, lights, custodial etc.) of the existing MHS building in order to have access to gyms and other athletic facilities while also paying $45 million for new classroom space in an entirely new building across the street and with the operational and maintenance costs for that new facility as well. That scenario is the worst of both worlds. The best alternative is also expensive – a brand new, all-encompassing high school following a successful bond issue and subsequent property tax increase.
Dr. Childs also has the challenge of managing the future of education. What you remember about your high school experience isn’t the norm anymore. There aren’t dances and other social functions, not really. Pep assemblies, except for homecoming or the occasional reception for a state championship team, are a thing of the past. Traditions like the Prom and Baccalaureate are falling by the wayside. There are scores of “full time” MHS students who don’t darken the halls of good ole MHS at all because they are taking on-line classes or attending in person classes at Mitchell Technical College or Dakota Wesleyan University. There is much less personal interaction in classrooms with more and more work done as solitary individuals, alone on a computer. Perhaps this is the wave of the future but there are many advantages to kids of all abilities being together in the same room interacting with each other and a teacher. There are numerous students who need that environment, who learn best in that environment and who would benefit from less computer time and more face-to-face instruction and active learning.
As education changes, staffing needs will change as well. If the Board decides to go “cheap”, then classes get bigger and go on-line. I was in the Legislature when Bill Janklow won his third and fourth terms as Governor, his second go round in that office. Governor Janklow’s vision for education was six teachers in Sioux Falls teaching the entire State via satellite technology. I’m exaggerating but not by a whole lot. Will teachers be replaced by on-line services that offer up a prepackaged educational product? To some extent that happens now at Second Chance with the computer instruction service called Edgenuity which provides the bulk of the curriculum for the subjects students take at Second Chance.
Dr. Childs will likewise have to navigate how blatantly political education is getting. From the Woke Wars over pronouns to the Radical Right’s desire to only have the fame and glory bits of our history taught to students – leaving out things like slavery, the near genocide of Native-Americans, the Civil Rights Movement, the internment of Japanese-Americans without due process during World War II, etc. – to the fight over what is “appropriate” literature in school libraries and English classes, etc.; education has been politicized like never before, with educators in the middle. We saw a microcosm of this in the recent debate over Social Studies Standards where one out-of-state retired professor from Michigan rewrote the entire work product of South Dakotans and substituted his standards with Governor Noem using her political influence to muscle them through the administrative process.
School violence is another threat. There has always been “school violence” but it used to take the form of fights on the playground and bullying. Recently there have been stories, from other states, of teachers shot in the classroom by students, some as young as kindergarteners to tales of high school teachers beaten within an inch of their lives for trying to get students to concentrate on their course work instead of playing video games in the classroom. Of course, there are almost weekly school shootings now of one type or another tied to the school itself or something that happened in school that spilled outside the school day resulting in violence. What kind of balance can there be between “safety” and the “regular school environment” so that kids feel like they’re getting an education but not in some kind of penal facility, even if it is for their own protection? That will be an ongoing debate and challenge for Dr. Childs going forward.
And then there are the mundane, everyday problems of budgets, policies and irate parents, conflicts with the School Board and the occasional noisy person trying to make a point in public. I’m sure there are other things that a Superintendent Childs will have to face. Better him than me, that’s what I say. Good luck and God Bless, Joe.