SWGA Politics

Full disclosure up front: I am actively working with the Kira Willis for State Superintendent of Schools campaign.

Kira Willis, a 17 year veteran classroom teacher from Roswell, has entered the State School Superintendent race and is seeking the nomination of the Libertarian Party of Georgia.

Kira is running on what she calls the “ABCs of Education”: Accountability, Budget, and Community.

As a classroom teacher, Kira knows that accountability cannot just mean more regulations on teachers and schools, but that each stakeholder in education should be held accountable for their own products. These stakeholders are students, parents, teachers, schools, and communities.

From her website:

What was once a partnership between the school and home has become a disenfranchised blame game. Parents have been disregarded by the schools and the state as irrelevant to their children’s education. All parents have both a right and a responsibility to their children’s schooling. I can’t think of any parent who does not want his child to succeed. As State School Superintendent, I want to help mend the bridge between the school and the home. This means having parents accountable for their children coming to school ready to learn. It means that parents must help the school in teaching their young people.

Kira wants to eliminate to as much a degree as possible positions that have little to no contact with students. This means minimizing the bureaucracy of the State Department of Education and making it a servant of the local schools rather than a tyrant over them. She will also work to encourage local school systems to follow her lead and eliminate much of the central office bureaucracy that serves as little more than patronage and cronyism. This will help ease Georgia out of its budget crisis as well as help local school systems avoid having to furlough teachers.

Finally, Kira stresses community. Again, from her website:

We need to give the schools back to their communities! What’s best for students in Atlanta may not be best for students in Rome or Valdosta. Our job as educators is to ensure that we are teaching students to reach a specific standard of learning, not to ensure that we teach them exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Who knows better how to teach students: the state or the teachers within community itself? Taking away the community school was a disservice to the students and to the school community.