If elected, what are your top two priorities?
Something that I would like to see happen — and this is kind of a personal thing — being on the school Wellness Committee, we’re kind of focused on revamping school lunches. That’s not necessarily my top priority, but that’s definitely something that I’d like to focus a little more on should there be any extra money ever.
I would like to do away with the chicken nuggets. And I know there are constraints to what we can serve because of the guidelines of the school lunch — as well as the fact that everything is made in the kitchen and then shipped out to each of the schools. So we’re sort of working with tied hands, but it really feels like there’s something we can do.
I would also like to see a decision about what is going to be happening with each school building as we move forward. Obviously, the condition of the buildings is more of a priority than the school lunches. And just working with the unfunded mandates from Albany as well as the focus on high-stakes testing — there’s just a lot of left to be considered.
Max Maurer
Why did you decide to run for school board?
I have a number of reasons. I’ve done some community service before, and I enjoyed it. I found that the folks I worked with were some of the more energetic people in the community. And I just found it fun to work with them. It’s also fun to do things that benefit the community as a whole.
I’d done a bit of that before my kids went to school, but now that they’re gone I thought maybe I should give that a try again. The second big thing that motivated me to run was that I know we’re facing some tough times — economically and we’ve got problems with our schools that have to be addressed.
Our school board has made one attempt at that, and clearly it wasn’t what people were looking for. In my employment, I do a lot of analytics — I work with numbers a lot — and I also have the opportunity of trying to balance conflicting opinions. So I thought that perhaps I’d be able to bring something to that discussion.
What experiences, skills or positions will make you a competent board member?
I do a lot of work with data. My job is to basically mine data, looking for meaningful information. So I thought a skill like that might be useful, simply because if you went through the school work last time, there were so many different numbers and figures around that trying to come to an optimal decision was obviously a very difficult thing. So I thought that the analytic skills that I had would be useful and perhaps help.
Because there’s so many different options [with the proposed school building renovations.] You could do this 100 different ways, but what’s the best way to do that. That’s pretty much what I do in the analytic work I do for my employment.
The second skill, which I guess I alluded to previously, in my business nothing gets done without 100 committee meetings. You’ve got to talk to people. You’ve got to try to understand everybody’s concerns, and then you’ve got to strike a balance.
I think that’s probably the most important skill that’s required on the school board — because everybody has an opinion and you’re trying to satisfy as much of each person’s wants and needs as possible. And yet, you’ll never satisfy all of them, because we don’t have unlimited funds.
I could add that I have a very positive attitude. I believe everybody’s opinion is valid and has a basis. We should take as much as we can into consideration when we’re making our decisions. This is a community school. It should reflect the community. I think the positive attitude I bring will be useful — especially when we know there’s going to be contention.
What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the school district right now?
I’d say facilities has got to be No. 1, because that has to be addressed. It’s not a question of if; it’s a question of when. And the longer we wait, the worse it gets. So I’d say, No. 1 it’s the facilities problem — and what are we going to do about it.
And then No. 2 is how are we going to do that in the current economic crisis. So we’ve got to do it, and basically nobody’s got any money. So what do you do?
We have seen active disinvestment in education at the state and federal level. And our legislators are sitting in Albany and in Washington saying, “I’m not raising your taxes.” But they are. They’re raising your school taxes, and they’re doing it through the back door. And I think that they need to be held accountable.
