Kerin Explains
Candidacy
Why I want to be on the Royalton School Board:

Recent reporting on academic achievement in Vermont schools has shown we need to look at better ways of providing education to our youth. It is particularly frustrating to examine the costs of education today. In Royalton, we have gone from $4,400,237 in 2004 to the proposed $5,687,150 for 2009. That is a 29.64% increase in five years. Yet, in that same time frame, Royalton has dropped from a total student enrollment of 518 to 426, a mere 82% of the 2004 student body. While I am friendly with all the current school board, I think some new ideas to increase performance and decrease costs can be had.

I make no claim to being an educator as it is defined today, but by training as an engineer, I am a problem solver. I see the problem from the perspective of students I have interviewed who claim they hate school. Analysis indicates that some are not given enough challenge and are bored awaiting the class to move on to new material.

In short, the pace and choice of subject material moves at the pace of the slowest students. I propose to bring innovation in several ways to meet the needs of the entire student body.

There are a number of programmed instruction packages available in a broad range of topics. Some folks are familiar with the "Rosetta Stone" program for languages. It would offer the opportunity for a huge number of languages beyond the Spanish and French offerings currently available.

The value in our international trade is immense and most wonderfully, it could be utilized at much younger ages in grade school. There are other programs in economics and mathematics that could allow students to move ahead of the class and take equivalency tests to provide proof of learning. Many science, history and geography programs also exist for students’ diverse interests.

The idea is not to replace teachers, but rather to allow gifted students to move at their pace, while more traditional students continue in the regular routine. But that solves only the problem for the gifted students, so we need to help students who are not academically gifted, but seek other interests. Here, a mentoring program would work well.

If a student is interested in being an aircraft mechanic, finding a mentor in that area would lead to opportunities to stimulate student interest in learning allied materials in furtherance of that career. The same thinking would apply for any skilled trade outside of the subjects the trade schools are teaching. Our purpose is to educate our young folks for the future, not to maintain a system that is not meeting the needs of the 21st century, by providing an equally inadequate education.

Karen Kerin

Royalton