Self-described “typical mom who got involved” Amy Lockhart is poised to become the newest member of the Seminole County School Board after winning an August 14 election against incumbent Sylvia Pond by a two-to-one margin, according to the Orlando Sentinel. She will be sworn in on November 20 at the Educational Support Center (ESC) to begin a four-year term.
Lockhart has two children enrolled in Seminole County Public Schools and has considerable experience with local government and in the county’s schools.
“I’ve been a member of the School Advisory Council at both of my children’s schools—Idyllwilde and Sanford. I was chairman at the Idyllwilde council for many years,” she explained. She even volunteered to chaperone the mud walk field trip, “both the wet and the dry day,” she joked.
Lockhart will join a school board that will face many difficult challenges, including issues of budget shortfalls, rezoning, transportation, and teacher pay, which reached new levels of tension last year.
Transportation is especially touchy at Seminole High School, which has two magnet programs that attract students in from all over the county. Junior Lauren Rodriguez referred to transportation as an issue that matters to her with the next school board: “Transportation is a big issue for me since I’m in a magnet program and don’t live close to the school…I’d like to see some discussion concerning a different way to spend less on buses, because [SCPS’s] current resolution doesn’t make school any easier when you have a cramped bus and an even longer trip than usual.”
Lockhart also realizes that transportation is a tricky issue, closely tied to the current zoning plan. Lockhart explained the problems she sees in the current zoning:
“In the northern third of the county we have something called the northwest and northeast elementary clusters, so what happens is that you have a choice—in the northwest cluster, for example—you have a choice of five elementary schools you can attend. So even if you live in walking or biking distance of your closest elementary school, if you choose to go to a school on the other side of the cluster, the district will pay for your transportation. So in our neighborhood, right by Seminole, we have four elementary school buses come into our neighborhood every morning to take students to four different elementary schools, when we live right by Idyllwilde.”
The solution, she said, involves being “a lot more judicious about how many choices we’re going to offer people.”
“Choice is a good thing if you can afford it, and in the good days, we could afford to do that. But we can’t just afford to do that right now. Of course people like choice, but when you’re talking about cutting teachers and not giving them raises, or cutting programs, or giving people their choice about different elementary schools, my opinion is [that] you want to cut back on the number of choices and keep the quality teachers, quality programs, and quality schools,” Lockhart explained her position on the often-painful budget cuts the district has experienced and may continue to endure in the coming years. Yet she qualified her position when it came to magnet schools, saying that “magnet transportation would be on the very bottom of the list of things I would like to cut.”
The school board also grapples with the perennial issue of teacher salaries, which came to a head last year with teachers’ demonstrations at the ESC over a demanded three-percent raise. Despite the protests, which even made it into the classroom at times with teachers’ “I am not a zero” buttons, the school board only gave the teachers a $500 dollar one-time bonus.
History teacher Mr. Robert Ash explained his take on the situation: “Often, we as teachers seem as if we’re defending ourselves at the expense of the students, and the board kind of played into that last year, [when it] almost made it seem wrong for us to advocate for ourselves.”
However, he now feels that the relationship has evolved from that, and said that “the school board values the teachers as much as the students…As a whole, our board supports us, and recognizes that our working environment is the students’ learning environment.”
Lockhart said the resolution of the issues surrounding teachers’ pay is “critical,” and that the board should recognize the increasing requirements placed on them. “You know about the introduction of Marzano and all those learning goals they have to deal with. We’ve asked them to do a lot more with a lot less, and we need to look at that,” Lockhart said.
Senior Nirali Patel said, “I think teachers should most definitely get a raise. They put so much effort into their jobs. They’re always concerned about us learning and doing the best that we can, and they deserve to be rewarded for that.”
During their campaigns, many school board candidates, including Lockhart, have questioned the power of the superintendent over the district. Lockhart said, “My concern in the past has been that the school board members seemed to allow the superintendent and his staff to take more of the brunt [of leadership]. Not because the superintendent was overstepping his bounds by trying to take over, but because of a void of direction, he had to step in. I don’t fault prior superintendents for any leadership role they took. I think that in some cases, they felt—and this is my perception—that if they’re not getting clear direction from the board, then they have to step out and take that leadership role.”
“It’s my view that it’s my responsibility as a board member to be very clear as a leader about what direction I think it is that we need…so that our superintendent and his staff aren’t in a position where they need to stick their necks out without necessarily having the backing of the board.”
The school board could also face difficulty with revenue sources. The previous penny sales tax, a quarter of which went to schools, has been phased out, and some on the school board are counting on a new property tax proposal to be put to the vote in the November elections.
Lockhart said about her future colleagues: “I think we have some wonderful leaders on our school board, and am really looking forward to working with all of them. They’re a great group of women and they’re very intelligent, and each one of us has a different gift…that we bring to the table that I think will make us work really well together as a team.”