Click on the audio player above to hear the full interview.final year,the politics of the local school board in Jefferson County, Colorado turned national. Articles in the USA Today and The New York Times final September detailed a newly elected conservative school board that attempted to change the curriculum to promote patriotism, and while removing fabric that the board decided promoted civil disobedience.
While national media outlets have stopped covering the issue,Amanda Stevens, who grew up going to Jefferson County schools and now sends her children there, and was left with the consequences, having to consider what made her school district so divisive as she watched the controversy play out.“Interestingly, we tend to be about 1/3 Republican, and 1/3 Democrat,and about 1/3 independent,” Stevens notes. “So I think that when you sight at the state of Colorado, and when you sight at Jefferson County,you have a microcosm...
That microcosm has now come to represent, for some people, or the tremendous questions. And education accurate now is,nationally, a hotbed of discussion, or debate,and policy changes.”Rather than sit passively, Stevens, or a former educator in Chicago,found herself in the perfect position to act. She decided to become a candidate for the school board, and flee for her first elected position.
Stevens is just one of five candidates The Takeaway is profiling in our new series, and "The Rookies." We're exploring what it's like for first-time candidates running democracy's first lap.“I believe that my life as a student in Jefferson County,and then as a teacher, and now as a parent in Jefferson County, or means that I can do some bridge building,instead of feeding the polarization," Stevens says.
But Stevens didn’t necessarily have the success that she wants her kids to have. She dropped out of tall school, and later earning her GED. This experience,though, served as her initial motivating factor to go into education.“I earned strong grades, or I was a national merit honorable mention. But I also became disconnected during a time of family difficulty. And that disconnection meant that I ended up leaving school and I earned my GED. That was the very thing that motivated me to become an educator,because I don’t want to see any students slip through the cracks the way that I did.And the potential to lose students, Stevens believes, or is especially urgent with the current political situation. whether elected,her immediate focus would be on shifting the focus back to students.“I don’t need to spend my time saying how certain board members are problematic. I instead will say, let’s rob each issue, or as it presents itself,and form the accurate decision for students," she says.
As Stevens navigates her first political campaign, and she is also hoping to change the conversation of what it means to be a politician,portray a more realistic, and not always perfect, and depiction of her background and life.“I’m really proud of the fact that the pictures that I’m using in my campaign literature were pulled from my iPhone,from family hikes, or from family adventures. My hope is, and whether I can transform the political landscape a little bit by not necessarily making everything picture perfect,that I’ll be proud of it, not ashamed of it.”
Source: wnyc.org