State schools superintendent makes stop in Goldsboro
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on July 27, 2016 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. June Atkinson discusses why she is seeking a fourth term and what she hopes to accomplish for schools statewide.
Much has happened in the field of education since Dr. June Atkinson became the first woman named state superintendent of public instruction, in 2005.
"When I was first elected as state superintendent, our graduation rate was 68 percent and then this past year it went to, I anticipate it'll be over 86 percent," she said Tuesday during a stop on the campaign trail.
She is seeking her fourth term in the office and was in Goldsboro to speak at a meeting of the Wayne County Democratic Party.
In the role at the helm of all 115 school districts, she oversees 1.5 million students in more than 2,500 public schools.
Students like London, the spunky first-grader she met while in Winston-Salem last year during "Celebrate Love the Bus Week."
"While I was riding the bus with London -- the cutest little girl with these beautiful brown eyes -- she told me that she was learning to read well and that she had learned all of the words with the sound of 'o' and did I want to hear all of them," she said. "Then she told me she was learning how to add and that she could get the right answers using different strategies. And then she asked me to go to her classroom and I told her that I really did not have time.
"But as we were getting off the bus, she asked me would I carry her Hello, Kitty lunch box."
Mrs. Atkinson obliged, before pausing to speak with the principal.
London disappeared.
The state superintendent asked to be taken to the student's classroom.
"When I walked into the classroom, London came up, gave me a big hug and said that she knew I would come to her class because I had her lunchbox," Mrs. Atkinson said, amused by the strategic ploy.
"As adults we must listen to the lesson she taught me -- when one door is closed, you make an opening for another," she said. "And (another) lesson is persistence. She did not give up just because I said 'no.' She found a way to get me to her classroom."
Mrs. Atkinson has many stories about students and teachers, many examples of how public education has made a difference in lives.
It's a message she parlays into her platform -- to garner respect, and compensation, for teachers, to improve reading skills of third-graders and bolstering technology in the schools. The theme reflects discoveries from travels around the state.
"I do hear quite a bit about our teachers needing more support from communities and from the General Assembly," she said. "I also hear from teachers as well as administrators the desire to have more flexibility from the General Assembly to do new and different things.
"For example, the General Assembly has given a lot of flexibility to charter schools, such as when you can start school and when you can end school, but that same flexibility has not spread to our public schools."
She says she considers working with the General Assembly to be an "extremely important" facet of her role, advocating for such things as calendar flexibility and improving student achievement. There are also some laws, she noted, "that have no purpose any more, that are really holding us back from making improvements in public education."
In addition to submitting budgetary requests for education, this past year she was asked to present her ideas about a comprehensive teacher system.
She took what she called the "wedding cake approach," she said.
"The first layer would include a 10 percent increase for all of our teachers. We want to be competitive with South Caroline, with Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia, where our teachers go," she explained. "Since we haven't had substantial raises over the past five or six years, I believe that we need to have a 10 percent raise across the board.
"The second layer was for paying teachers for extra responsibilities and leadership roles. I proposed that that be $10,000 for each teacher. The school districts would determine which teachers and what they would do and then the General Assembly could do the appropriation based on the percent of teachers they would want to have those roles."
The third layer provided a $10,000 bonus to teachers willing to work in hard-to-serve areas, with the potential fourth layer being bonuses for schools and teachers for exceeding growth of students.
While the General Assembly did not comply with a 10 percent raise, they did come back with a 4.7 percent raise.
She is not giving up, though, which is why she remains in the running for another term.
There is still much to be done in the field of public education, she says -- changing from a traditional way of providing education into a digital format -- all in a quest to prevent what she calls the $1 million mistake.
"Because we know that each student that drops out reflects a $1 million mistake," she explained, adding, "Seeing the graduation rate increase has been very gratifying and it has increased while the state Board of Education has raised graduation standards."
She said she also would like to see schools move away from the End of Grade and End of Course format to a less obtrusive method.
"Many of our children love video games. Well, all video games have testing. They just don't call it testing," she said. "But they move from one level to another. They work really hard to move from one level to the other.
"That's the way I believe that instruction in many areas should be designed. You move from this level to this level as soon as you demonstrate 'X' and then you go to the next level and the next."