Teacher-district relations, growth, funding debated in Deer Park School Board race

A Deer Park School District employee says he’s running for a school board seat to increase communication with teachers and bring more urgency to the leadership. He faces an experienced incumbent who says the district is moving in a positive – and fiscally responsible – direction.

Candidate Gerry Ashby said Deer Park’s growth and the ability of its facilities to keep up with it fueled his decision to run again for the school board seat.

Ashby supports the district’s tax measure for the February ballot which would pay to build a new elementary school, but said with the overcrowding he has seen while working as a Home Link teacher, action should have been taken sooner.

“We got more kids than we know what we can do with and so we’re subdividing rooms with partitions, and that’s just not a good environment,” he said. “It seems like we’re sort of in the knee jerk reaction.”

Home Link is a Deer Park School District educational program that connects home-schooled students to district resources through a parent-school partnership. There are about 600 students enrolled in the program.

Ashby said after the district addresses its current growth it should continue to look to the future.

“This problem of knee jerk, where we find ourselves so pinched that we have to do these drastic measures to accommodate the kids that we have, we need to get out of that. We need to be a little bit more forthright and knowing where we’re gonna go,” he said.

Incumbent Carri Breckner, who also supports the bond, believes the district has done a good job with growth in the past, emphasizing that the board has rarely asked for help from voters. She listed recent and future renovations to Deer Park Middle School as an example.

“We’re not asking for taxpayer money because we were fiscally responsible, and we saved that money so we could do it,” she said.

“That’s probably my biggest priority: to make sure we have safe spaces for kids and that we’re not taking everyone’s money and doing miscellaneous things with it.”

Ashby said if elected he would work to strengthen the connection between Deer Park’s teachers and its school board. One of the first things he would do, he said, is read staff complaints in the complaint box.

Breckner said the board’s relationship with its teachers is good but there is room for improvement.

“I think we communicate well,” she said. “We actually were talking about that and wanting to get back in there and meet some of the new teachers and open up that communication again,” she said.

Additionally, Ashby said the board should do more advocating for its teachers on state-mandated work.

“I hear teachers complain about the overhead that they’re asked to do, in addition to teaching, that the state is levying on them,” he said. “I think as a school board member you have that empowerment to talk to the state legislators.”

Breckner, finishing her fourth term as a member of the school board, is the district’s legislative representative.

“There’s a lot that goes on, and we try our best to advocate for our school district,” she said. “Our focus is always what’s going to be best for kids.”

Ashby said the district focus isn’t on all kids. He said from his experience as a Home Link teacher Home Link students and regular students are not treated equally.

One of his priorities if elected would be “making sure that when we are spending the dollars, that it is being applied to all kids, especially those Home Link kids who I think are not equals to the regular kids.”

Breckner, whose son spent two years in the Home Link program, disagreed.

“It definitely has different aspects to it, but we do offer everything in our school district to all the Home Link people,” she said.

Deer Park’s Home Link facility is older than its middle school, high school, and elementary schools. The district’s February ballot measure to fund a new elementary school includes plans to renovate Arcadia Elementary, which would become the new Home Link facility.