UCA students registered to vote on-campus in time for the March 5 primary election will have a school board race on their ballot.
Both candidates implored college students to vote.
In Zone 4, former teacher Ruthann Curry Browne, 67, is vying to unseat the 10-year incumbent of the Conway School Board, Trip Leach, 43.
Curry Browne said, “Students, get out and vote March 5. You can vote here at the Welcome Center. Early voting starts Feb. 20. It’s for judges, and school boards too.
“Vote. Period. Students need to exercise their voice. From the time you turn 18 and can vote, vote.
“A strong Conway public school feeds into what you’re gonna get at UCA, and that’s really important. The pipeline is important so that students who come here already understand the value of community, the value of a strong public education and the value of service to the community,” she said.
Leach said, “I encourage the students at UCA to take an interest in their school, just because it is important to the community.”
“I know when you’re young, you’re just kind of thinking about your future because you’re still building it. But there’s a generation right behind you guys that will be working with you and living with you in your community, and so we want to make sure we continue to invest into the people who are behind us.
“To have a vibrant community with people that respect one another and encourage one another, we have to invest in them and take interest in them,” he said.
Both candidates outlined what they believed were the primary responsibilities of a school board member.
Leach listed four primary roles he has: “One is to hire and evaluate the superintendent. The superintendent and the administrators and the teachers are the ones that actually run the schools.”
“School board members do not run the day-to-day operations. They more set the goals with the superintendent and evaluate the overall performance of the district,” he said.
“Number two, they manage or steward the finances, so they are fiduciaries. They’re responsible for managing the very large budget,” he said.
According to the Conway Public Schools’ website, the district’s budget for the 2023-2024 school year is $105,771,329.
“Number three, they’re a policy-making body. So they do make policies for the district. And then lastly, they are the final authority in disciplinary issues for the kids and teachers or staff members,” Leach said.
Curry Browne said, “Day to day, a school board member is responsible for the financial health of the district, but the superintendent is the one who brings us a budget. We look through it, approve it, make changes we need to, but we don’t actually build that budget.”
“We do all the business work of the district, hiring and firing of teachers, administrators, staff, and there’s a lot of staff. Facilities, we’re responsible for making sure the facilities are taken care of,” she said.
Curry Browne also highlighted a school board member’s responsibility to maintain the district’s relationship with the community.
“The other is community connection. Strength in community connection. A community thrives when the schools thrive. When UCA does well, when the Conway Public Schools do well, when Hendrix [College] does well, the whole community is lifted up.”
“Our third responsibility is curriculum and academics, and we can look at new courses to be offered. It takes a while to build a curriculum. That’s really important, to see what we have that is outdated and old, and shouldn’t be taught anymore. Look at new ways of visioning for the school district going forward,” she said.
Curry Browne said planning for Conway Public Schools’ future is important.
“Where’s Conway Public Schools 10 years from now? That takes input from the community, from the teachers. I think we kind of forgot that the teachers need some input in all this, too,” she said.
Curry Browne said both teachers and students need to be listened to.
“Classrooms are overcrowded. There are too many kids in the classrooms. That already makes stress on the teachers and makes it hard to reach every single one of them. We can do something about that. There are ways to mitigate that,” she said.
“Our special ed teachers are overworked. We don’t have enough paraprofessionals in the public schools at all, and students need to be able to talk to any board member at any time about their concerns,” she said.
“We need more mental health in our public school systems. We need better counselors. We need more of them,” she said.
“We’ve come a long way in the last year and a half on the school board, but there was a time when students were dismissed, as their voice not being important, and I think their voice is our voice of the future, and we better be listening,” she said.
“We need to adapt new ways of reaching students,” she said. “My fear is that if we keep the board the way it is now, things are going to slip backward into some of the things that they had to deal with two years ago. We’ve got to keep moving forward,” she said.
Leach said while he was president of the board during the COVID-19 outbreak, he learned a lot about leadership.
“I do have a better perspective now of how to manage a crisis,” he said.
“You can’t lose your compassion when leading people, especially through a crisis, because what I found is, some of the loudest, most angry voices were because people were hurt, or they were afraid,” he said.
“Number two, I would say that you gotta stay focused on the goals because what I found is, we all have the same goal,” he said. “We all wanted kids to be safe, and we all wanted kids to be in the classroom, where it’s the best place for them to learn.”
He said while people disagreed on the process of how to get there, ultimately, all stakeholders wanted kids to be educated.
“What I would try to do more effectively next time is just keep people centered on goals that we can all stand behind,” he said.
“As a board member, you can’t take things personally, right? They’re not attacking you as a person,” he said. “And then you have to seek to truly understand, not just rebut.”
Curry Browne said her experiences teaching greatly instructed her goals for Conway Public Schools.
“What I bring to the table is 30 years of seeing education at a granular level. From a teacher perspective, from a student perspective, from a parent perspective — I had two kids go through the school system — from an administrator perspective,” she said.
Curry Browne said, “When I am elected to the board, I’ll make it two out of seven that have education experience for a public school board. That strikes me as an imbalance.”
In October 2022, The Conway School Board unanimously passed policies to restrict students’ bathrooms and overnight trip arrangements to students’ sex assigned at birth.
Board member Linda Hargis traveled to the state capitol Jan. 26, 2023, to ask the House Education Committee to support Rep. Mary Bentley’s, R-Perryville, bill that would make those policies apply to all Arkansas public schools.
There, she said Bentley’s bill “mirrors exactly” the bathroom and overnight-trip policies handed down by the Conway School Board.
In May 2023, the Conway School Board received attention from the nonprofit publication ProPublica, which covered altercations and protests at board meetings, including the three UCA students who were arrested for chanting “trans lives matter” at a Nov. 8, 2022, meeting.
Governor Sarah Sanders signed Bentley’s bill March 21, and it is now Act 317.
Leach said, “I’ve been on the board for 10 years and most of my term, we’ve not had controversy. And I try to certainly avoid controversy. But I think that’s where it’s important for students to understand, is how the school board works, because a decision that’s made doesn’t necessarily represent everyone’s feelings on the board.
“It’s a majority that controls the final decision. So some of the things that I’ve learned, I would say, is just communicating not only to board members but to the public, or educating them better on how their representative government works,” he said.
“One of the other things that I learned is that we have to, as board members, get more opportunities for conversation,” he said.
Leach said, “The other misnomer is that the board meeting is an open town platform where people can come and share their grievances and have a meeting with the board and that’s actually not what a board meeting’s for. A board meeting is school board members conducting business of the school in public view, and I don’t necessarily like that because I’d rather sit down at a table and have a conversation with someone that disagrees with me or disagrees with the action of the board.”
“We’ve done this thing called Champion Circles, that is open to the public, and it is a conversation where people can come in and share if they have grievances or concerns,” he said.
According to the Conway Public Schools’ website, the next Champion Circle is Feb. 27 at Simon Middle School at 1600 Bill Lucy Drive.
Curry Browne said if she had been on the board at that time, she would have handled the community’s concerns differently.
“First of all, I’d be talking to each and every parent and each and every student. Second of all, all the culture wars are only pulling us away from the task at hand. We need to refocus: reaching every student and educating every student is not hard,” she said.
“We need more diversity. We need more inclusion. We need to bring everybody to the table and listen to their voices,” she said.
“The whole issue about, ‘What are we gonna call students? What bathrooms are they gonna use?’ Good grief. What does that have to do with what they’re learning, whether they can take Chemistry II, whether they’re passing English I. It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“But I think things can change, and they will change on the board,” she said.
Leach said he also values diversity.
“I think it is very important for this district to take consideration of what the child needs, and then be respectful of whatever background. Because my mom immigrated here from Korea. So I grew up on chicken fried steak and kimchi, so I have a very diverse perspective,” he said. “That makes me really value cultural differences, learning differences.
“Children and their backgrounds are a big part of who they are, and all that should be respected and treated with kindness,” he said.
He said he knows from experience that every child has different needs.
“For example, I have a child with autism. I have a child who has dyslexia. I have three boys and one girl, and so I understand just the various needs that each child has and they’re starkly different, even within my own family,” he said.
Curry Browne said the district has made great strides in transparency, but more could be done.
“I love that we are now recording and filming school boards,” she said. “You can go back and see a school board session anytime.”
She said Conway Public Schools could do more promotion and community outreach.
“I think perhaps we need to have more of a public PR person,” she said. “We do have a communications director in the Conway Public Schools.
“I think the public would love to hear what’s going on. That kind of transparency,” she said.
“The board is a lot less contentious and divisive right now, but they’re not looking at, ‘Where are we going in the future?’” she said.
Curry Browne said she supports the Freedom of Information Act and thinks “all emails should be open.”
At its December 2022 meeting, the Conway School Board addressed its policy of deleting emails after three days.
School board member Jason Sandefer said during the meeting, “The policy was changed to three days because of the harassment we were, and still are, getting via FOIA requests.
“It was a reaction to the harassment of the media. No other reason,” he said.
Curry Browne said besides personnel matters, “everything else should be done in front of the public.”
“We’re funded by the public. Why wouldn’t information be open to the public?” she said.
Curry Browne said, “School board members can go into the schools and talk to teachers and students. They can now, and they should. I don’t think many of them do. I know two do go in and check in with teachers.”
Leach said he believes that in terms of transparency, what the school board’s doing now is working.
“I’m certainly a big, big supporter of transparency. But to be honest, I don’t know what I can do to make things more transparent, because one, we can’t make a decision without releasing it to the public and letting the public know about it,” he said.
“I’m certainly open to any more transparency. I just couldn’t think of anything because it’s already so open,” he said. “Any type of issue that we deal with has to be spoken about in that board meeting, or workshops that we have. Anytime we’re gathered together, discussing school business, it is already open.”
He said Arkansas’ Freedom of Information Act bars members from discussing non-personnel school business during executive sessions.
“I do think there’s the public that thinks that the board can go behind closed doors and talk about normal business, and that’s not the case,” he said. “If board members were doing that, they would be breaking the law.”
Arkansas voters can check their voter registration and polling sites at voterview.ar-nova.org/voterview.
Early voting starts Feb. 20 and the election is March 5.
Polls are open from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Election Day.
UCA has a polling site at Donaghey Hall in the Welcome Center for voters registered in Faulkner County.
SGA’s Bear Advocacy Group Committee will host its Party at the Polls event March 5 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at The Green at Donaghey Hall.