Garfield Re-2 School District board member Tony May, a 25-year resident of the county, is facing a recall election on August 27. KDNK's Amy Hadden Marsh sat down with him to talk about his ideas and experience as a school board member, some of the issues facing the district and more. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
AMY HADDEN MARSH: You resigned as president of the Re-2 school board in December 2023, and now you're facing a recall. What is it that keeps you invested in your position?
TONY MAY: I would say that I'm 100 percent invested. And I mean, witnessing that disaster of exclusively going to online teaching and seeing that out of the, I think it was, 23 kids in my wife's class and eight were there consistently and no one showed up, I just personally [felt] there's something I can do to help, to improve, to elevate, to make an exceptional educational system. I mean, I'm just all about it. I stepped down from the board presidency to lower the political climate brought on by the activists that came in. I mean, I'm not rolling out any kind of agendas.
My agenda is elevation but I'm not sitting there being political about it. A lot of these people have moved in from other areas to this area. It's a great place to live. I get it, but they [brought their politics with them]. So I wanted to keep focused on elevating our children's education. And that's the reason I stepped down.
I'd say what I could do differently has been done. I'd like all voices to be heard rather than stagnating on our differences. I think the decision to step down was selfless and effective. I also think it's really time to get back to work.
What is the role of a school board and what is your role as a school board member?
Basically there are three things. They take care of policy, they take care of finances, oversee finances, and then, uh, they also take care of the kids. They look at the welfare, the education, the academics, and making sure that, uh, the kids have a safe and fair place to learn. We have one employee and that's the superintendent.
So school boards are traditionally set in place to have governance over a school district. And there's been less and less influence from a school board directly and it's more influenced by state and federal regulations, which is fair. I mean, those are things that happen and those are the governing bodies.So, getting into the school board, my themes were looking at being more of a person that has a vision, looks into the future. And what I want to accomplish is to elevate the education threshold of our students. So, I am looking at a way to raise that bar in our area. You raise that bar and you [and] other school districts around you, they see what you're doing and you work with those school districts and the entire region lifts up and we can provide a much more in-depth and overall education process that parents can be proud of for their children.
Achieving that measurably higher quality of education is strategic in how we need to view our school systems and look into the future.
In your statement,Tony, that appears on the ballot, you wrote “Our community shares issues that resonate with communities across our great nation, including teacher pay, state underfunded preschool programs, school safety and security and trust in our schools.” So, my question is, during your time on the school board, how have you addressed these issues and what impact or progress have you made on these issues?
One of these hot items right now is this Pre-K preschool. So the issues that we have [is] how they're funding all the Pre-K.So they're making steps in order to allow that to happen and to nail that down. I implore Governor Polis to take a good look at helping out these Pre-K kids and getting them educated because what we're seeing is if we have a better education model on the whole shot with these kids coming into school being integrated into learning with other kids and learning some of these basics, it increases their chances to be more successful year over year.
What do you mean by “trust in the schools”? What kind of impact or progress have you made on that issue in Re-2 since you've been on the board?
The overall consensus that I'm finding right now is that people are not real happy with our school district. We're not happy with the test scores. They want to see that changed.
You know, this year, we've implemented a new math program to increase our math scores. We're also building relationships with [Colorado Mountain College] and Mesa. State to get kids in line to work on accreditations, to work on their licensing, to work on courses that give them the experience to be an integrated part of our community, to be able to hit the road running if they have to at high school.
That doesn't mean they're gonna go out and be a master plumber. It doesn't mean they're gonna be a master electrician, but it does mean that they have the propensity to be part of a program that they can start learning those types of life skills and job skills.
Let me hit teacher pay for a second. That's a great one. So, the way that the district gets their money is through taxes, mill levies per seat. We get money from the state, grants and federal programs. So that's a finite amount of money every year. And so we try to operate within that budget and not overextend because we can't overextend. We don't we don't have a line of credit.
We want to pay the teachers more money. We want to pay staff more money. That's a consensus across this board and we wish we could pay them more. The problem that we have is we are, I think, 167 out of 172 on the list of receiving money from the state.
What does that mean?
So the state allocates money to school districts by seat. In October, we have a seat count, which I think we're around 4500 to 4800 [students]. Then the state says, okay, we're going to give you - and I don't know what the exact number is, but it's $10 or $11 [thousand dollars] per student per seat. So, you take that and you times it by 4500 and you get a number. Then you add in numbers, like the other grants and federal funds, for the total per seat number that we get.One of the things from the state is that they also have a finite amount of money and they have to allocate here and there. So, when we have an opportunity to spend some money in the state, I implore the governor to look at allocating more money towards education.
It's about teacher retention, and they’d love to stay. They love this area, but it's hard for them to stay attached when they can't pay the bills. One of the things about being a teacher, it's the love of this occupation that drives the teachers that I talk to on a daily basis. They're not here for the money just to let you people know.
But, love doesn't pay the bills.
Unfortunately, it does not. Yes, indeed. And so that's the main story that we get from a lot of people around here.
