GISD Trustee place 3 candidate Bret Deason says bullying prevention should be in the school safety plan

Election day is Tuesday and early voting is in full swing, so we interviewed the Granbury ISD trustee place 3 candidates about how to compromise with board members, combat bullying, support teachers and more.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview with Bret Deason.

Susan Wood's interview can be found here.

Melanie Graft declined to answer.

How do you manage all the different needs and opinions (parents, teachers, other board members) and mediate disagreements?

I think it’s a matter of respect. You have to develop relationships with the people that you’re working with and you also have to be able to listen. I think one of the big mistakes people make is they come in with their own agenda.

We can always disagree, but disagree respectfully.

I’ve made a career out of building relationships with people. I’ve been in the sales-based industry. I’m not particularly a great salesperson, but I’m great at building relationships. And that allows you to work with people who have different opinions.

Every once in a while you’ll find that something somebody said might change the way you think so you’ve got to be willing to swallow your pride.

How can you support our teachers?

You know, my wife’s a teacher. We need to listen to teachers. And not only teachers-- our bus drivers, our substitute teachers, all of our support staff, they all make the school go forward and they really need to know their voice is being heard on what needs to be done.

One of the biggest mistakes a CEO of any company can make is to do it strong armed and not listen to their employees. Everyone wants to know that they’re being heard.

When they know their opinion matters, it makes a lot of this go a lot easier.

How can you ensure that the Latinx members of our community are also being represented?

I grew up in a community in South Texas that was probably 50 percent Hispanic and 50 percent Caucasian and now it’s probably more 70/30. So I understand a lot of where a lot of that community’s coming from. A lot of them have migrated from Mexico. I worked alongside people from Mexico growing up. In fact, my best friend was born in Mexico before his family immigrated here and I think currently-- I saw the numbers-- we have a little over 700 kids who are in the ESL program, they come from more Spanish-speaking families. Granbury ISD is trying to make sure they do understand English because English is the more predominant language in America.

As they become more proficient in English it actually gives them a leg up, in my opinion, being bilingual.

The Hispanic population is going to continue to grow at a faster rate. We want to continue to focus on those kids, especially because knowing that a lot of them don’t come from English-speaking families. It’s-- they’re kind of behind when they start. We want to make sure we have all the resources available, teaching-wise and get as many ESL-certified teachers as we can.

What about their parents who care very much and are invested in their future? How can we communicate with them and make sure they’re being heard?

I think we need to have opportunities available in Spanish for them to read and have interpreters available as well too so they can communicate with us.

Unfortunately, when I moved away from South Texas, I quit using the Spanish language as much as I used to. I still understand quite a bit, but when you don’t speak it on a regular basis you kind of lose it sometimes. But I think having people who can interpret or sending out information in Spanish to them whether it be email or print stuff.

A lot of Granbury Moms are voicing concerns about bullying. What can you do as a trustee to help stop bullying in our schools?

I think bullying should be in the school safety program. A lot of people focus on recent school shootings and protecting kids from that, but there’s a whole host of things that I believe goes into school safety for students and bullying awareness is one of those things. Bullying affects kids physically sometimes, but also mentally, psychologically too which can lead to other things.

It’s very important that we’re focused on activity that sometimes may just be considered joking around, but to that kid it’s not a joke anymore.

I think it’s important that our teachers and our counselors really focus in when they see that behavior is going on and not just dismiss it. Because you don’t know what’s going on with that kid.

That stuff can also go on off campus and I think a child needs to know that they’ve got somebody they can trust who they can go to, and let them know who it is. Without retribution or anything like that, they need an adult they can turn to.

Especially in those Middle School kids. It’s really intense at that point, so we definitely need to focus on that and that awareness for all of our educators and counselors as well.

Video cameras in the school I think can help. If we have security monitoring, they can actually see some of that activity going on as well so I think they could help relieve some of that.

How will you support our special education students?

I think funding is a big part of that as well. We also need to recognize some kids are labeled special education, maybe they’re dyslexic or have certain learning disabilities, but they learn how to overcome that.

We want to have enough special education teachers, but also those kids who do overcome their disability that they’re not always labeled "special education."

We don’t ever want to give up on the kids and just classify them in that way because a lot of them have the ability it’s just once they overcome that disability they need to be able to be challenged the same way we would challenge any other student.

There has been a lot of debate on what history should and should not be taught in the classroom. Do you think it's okay to teach that slavery was wrong?

The Texas education code right now, I’ve read over it and it actually defines everything that you’re allowed to teach. I think what the law is trying to prevent is these theories that denigrate a certain race over another one. But they clearly outline that you can teach about slavery.

We learned about the period in US history, not only slavery, beyond that where people of color were required to drink from different water fountains or have to enter through back doors. That was the ugly part of our U.S. history that we’ve come out of. There’s just a lot of divisive rhetoric that doesn’t really accomplish a whole lot.

The Texas Education code clearly outlines that slavery is one of the things that should be taught. And there’s different books from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, all these African American authors they say should be taught so there’s no dismissing of that in the Texas education code at all. I firmly believe we should teach our history the way it was and not gloss over it.

But I also believe there’s been many examples of people standing up for people of other races. I dismiss this theory that we’re inherently racist because we’re not.

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Thanks to Bret Deason for graciously sitting down to answer questions.

Early voting continues Thursday from 7 a.m. - 7 p.m. and Friday 8 a.m.-5 p.m. in Annex 1 on 1410 W Pearl St, Granbury, TX 76048. The next opportunity to vote will be 7 a.m. - 7 p.m. on Nov. 2. For more information on where to vote on election day, go here.