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CCSD Candidate Deanna Wright On District A Campaign

With the primary election quickly approaching on June 14 – and early voting starting on May 28 – candidates are gearing up to convince voters why they are the best representative to be in an elected office.

KNPR decided to take a closer look at some of these local races, and we will be talking to candidates over the next few weeks.

Today we welcome Deanna Wright. Wright is running for re-election to the Clark County School District Board of School Trustees for District A.

District A includes Hepnderson, Boulder City, Laughlin, and parts of southern Las Vegas. 

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:

On sex education:

“I think that parents that are teaching their kids and talking to their kids about reproductive sex and sexually transmitted diseases and how to keep yourself safe in a relationship those parents should be applauded to the highest degree, but we also have to remember that we have a large portion of the population that we don’t hear from that are not having those conversations. So it’s really a public health issue. And I would hope that the parents who are having those conversations could say maybe more conversations are only going to be better for my kids, better for their friends, better for the people that they’re going to have jobs with when they start to be working, better for the kids they’re going to college with. And give some validation to those parts of the community that don’t have that support for their child.”

On school reorganization and empowerment schools:

The empowerment model itself is fabulous. I had no problem with it before. I have no problem with it now. What we’re hearing from our principals is: I did not become an education leader in a building to become a financial manager. I didn’t get into education to worry about am I going use the transportation here. Am I going to use a different transportation? Am I going to out service my lunch? Or am I going to use CCSD lunch. Am I going to use CCSD gardeners or am I going to ask parents to do it.

We’re hearing from a lot administrators that that is not what they want to spend their time doing. That’s not why they got into education.

On tackling graduation rates:

One of the big things is Reclaim Your Future, which is when kids either don’t show up for a year, fall off the records, or just don’t come back. We go out and find them. And we find out where they’ve gone. A lot of times they’ve moved on to a charter school or an online school. They are enrolled somewhere but they just didn’t tell us. We have regained hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids, that we say ‘come back! We will help you. We will help you with credit retrieval. We will do what needs to be done. And we will get you graduated. Even if that means a fifth year, which we get no funding for and the school gets dinged for.

Have the schools gotten better in the years since you were on the board?

They have! What frustrates me is the good things that we do and the national recognition that we get that doesn’t get put out in our local media.

We are moving the needle. We are doing better for kids. Do we have work to do? You bet! Are we giving up? Are we saying, ‘oh this is enough’ No way! But if you don’t celebrate some of the steps along the way, it’s really hard for people to continue to push. We’ve got to celebrate.

What I would like is at least minimal funding. National average funding. That’s all I’m asking. National average is somewhere between $8,000 and $9,000 a kid.

Kaufman: And we spend $5,500 a kid?

Wright: Correct. That doesn’t count some of the local things that we get. We get some local revenues, but with our sales tax not doing well, and our property tax flat nobody is getting anything there. We have really been harmed by that… for this next budget.

My mantra is going to be: How about we flip the script and we give the $11,000 we spend to incarcerate a person every year and give that to education. And we’ll give the incarcerated person the $5,500 every year and have that be enough for them. Why is education less important than paying for someone to be incarcerated?

 

Deanna Wright, Candidate, Clark County School Board Trustee, District A

 

 

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Since June 2015, Fred has been a producer at KNPR's State of Nevada.