Nancy Jester Republican Georgia State Superintendent Official Campaign Site

Ashley Bell
I appreciate serving with Will Wade on the County Commission. I know many of you personally. I'm from right across the pond. Our school systems are the same and we have many of the same problems. We are a charterd school system also.

This is my first day in the race. Fitz Johnson's consultant already sent me an email attacking me.

When it comes to education, I want to echo what a lot of people have said. You've got to understand where a person is coming from. When I was a law student, my school superintendent asked me if I had any ideas to keep minorities from failing out of school. I went to young professionals and asked them to look at the kid's grades online. I was given 48 kids. We split the kids among the young professionals and we called them and talked to them and we worked with them. Many of them had problems outside the classroom. Some of the kids we had to take to school ourselves. In 8 weeks, we took 48 kids that were failing and none of them were failing anymore. Failure is not an option

Nancy Jester
I'm thankful to have Mr. Bell and Mr. Johnson in the race and Richard Woods. They all care about kids and have organic reasons for wanting to be here. But, anecdotes and platitudes are not going to solve the problems we have in education in Georgia. They are not scalable across the 1.6 million students, over 111,000 teachers.  Education is the single largest expenditure in our state budget.

Before I was involved in education, I was an actuarial consultant. So, I'm a numbers gal. My undergraduate degree is in economics. We have to realize that we have two education systems in our state. We have some places like right here in Dawson County that are getting it right. I'm quite proud of Dawson's graduation rate. Every state that borders Georgia has a higher graduation rate than Georgia. The State School Superintendent has to look at the aggregate. We are responsible for the big picture. People like Mr. Wade have to get it done at the local level. Mr. Wade has a hard job, I know. I served on a school board. I found $54 million dollars in deceptive budgeting that wore away the accumulated cash reserves of the 3rd largest school district in the state. Every state that borders us has a higher graduation rate and spends less per pupil to get it. I'm not advocating for slashing the budget, but we need to realign how we spend our money. It's not being used for direct instructional purposes.

There's a study by Ben Scafidi. From '92 to '09 we had a 41% increase in student enrollment in Georgia. At the same time, we had a 74% increase in spending on administrators and non-teaching staff. If you were to hold the growth rate of administrators to the growth rate of students, each teacher could have almost $8,000/year. Dawson is one of the few counties that hasn't seen the explosion in administrators.

My plan is called FOCUS. That stands for 'F'- financial integrity, 'O'-opportunities and choice, 'C'-consequences, 'U'-upgrade our funding formula, 'S'-strong standards for Geogia which is not Common Core. We must reject Common Core.

Fitz Johnson
One of my consultants sent an unfortunate email on the way up here. I apologize to Ashley and Linda here. I'm passionate about education. I grew up in Northern Virginia. I have a masters in education. I started a business with my father and my brother and it grew to 1,700 employees. I'm a community coach. I've been around this business for a while. What I think is transferable is my leadership. The D.O.E. has over 700 employees. They need to be managed efficiently. The DOE, legislature and Governor need to be on the same page.

I'm not a rocket scientist. I work hard. I was one of those kids that needed the extra help. We need to take care of our educators. They need to be trained and well paid and we need to pat them on the back. We educate our kids on the front ends so we don't have to jail them on the back end. The economic impact goes right back to the community.

Richard Woods
I'm from Southern Georgia. I was a social studies teacher for 14 years. I coached various sports for 17 years. I was an administrator for 8 years. This has given me pre-k through 12th grade experience. I've been dealing with these issues. I work with kids in my spare time as a youth director.

Common sense over Common Core. I spoke out against Race To The Top grant. Education is your right at the local level. We have to have the very best standards. We also need to concentrate in the class room. Education happens in the class room, that's where change is going to take place. Cut the paper work and testing. Those things take away time from actual instruction. Reading needs to be on grade level by 3rd grade and math needs to be on grade level by 5th.

I want to make sure Georgia is the number one literate state in the country. We need to have community outreach. We need to work with non profits. Parents need to read to their kids at least 5 minutes every night. We need to do a better job of teaching our country's history.