GISD trustee place 3 candidate Susan Wood says teachers are our greatest assets

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 Susan Wood.

Bret Deason'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 starts with trust. It starts with understanding that we’re all here because we’re trying to work towards the same goal.

We have to be able to trust that we all want what’s best for our kids. So I think that’s the first part. The trust and relationships. You can’t have one without the other.

We have to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and everyone feels that their voice is heard and rephrase things in a way that the other person can hear.

Because if your goal is to fight and win an argument that’s different than if your goal is to solve a problem. For me, my goal would be, as school board trustee, to solve a problem, not to fight and not to win an argument.

How will you support GISD teachers?

What concerns me right now for teachers is frequently, they don’t feel heard. I think they catch it from all sides. They’ve got the administration saying, 'we need you to do it this way,' we’ve got parents saying, 'we want you to do it this way,' then you have their kids who have their individual needs.

And teachers are saying, 'listen, this is how it’s going to work. I know you want me to do it this way and I know you want me to do it this way, but I know this child. I am a master at my craft. And I know what I’m doing. I know the best way to teach the child is this way. '

So how do you make sure everybody’s voice is heard and everybody’s concerns are heard?

I think a big part of teachers feeling valued is for them to know that they are our biggest assets. I think sometimes people treat teachers like liabilities, and they’re not. I think that we need to make sure teachers know that they are our biggest assets and that they are treated like our biggest assets.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t need training or that they don’t need extra support or that they don’t need to be corrected if they’re doing something that needs to be done in a different way.

It means all that should happen with the understanding that the foundation of it is: you are our biggest asset and we need to help you grow and help you thrive– not just survive-- as we throw things at you.

Because right now I feel like they just get stuff thrown at them, and how much stuff can you catch when you’re getting twenty different things thrown at you at once? So that kind of quality of life, knowing that you’re valued, knowing that you’re heard.

I would like to hear more from them and hear more about the challenges they face and what would make their job better.

How can you support the growing Latinx student population?

We need Latinx representation. We need that voice to be heard. And that voice is not being heard at all, I don’t think.

We don’t want to set something up that makes them feel more alienated, we want to set something up that will bring them together.

If I’m drawing from my own experience as one of the first women in the corps, one of the things that was really important was allies. So making sure that they have allies. You need allies from the inside to give you a hand to help you get where you want to get.

I would like to see more teachers who come from different backgrounds because I think it’s important for kids to see themselves. When they’re looking for role models, they want to see themselves. They want to see people who have similar backgrounds to theirs. It helps them feel less isolated and alone.

But I also think when I’m talking about allies, I’m talking about people who come from different backgrounds. For me, my allies were not only the young women-- though they were hugely important, don’t get me wrong, I would not have made if my upperclassmen hadn’t been-- sometimes literally-- going to bat for me-- But also the men who had our backs. We wouldn’t have gotten our foot in the door without them.

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

We need to teach our children how to resolve everyday conflicts and disagreements in a constructive way, starting with easy discussions when they are young like, “do you prefer Coke or Dr. Pepper,” and teach that those differences do not mean you can’t be friends.

Teaching kids the difference between a fact and an opinion is also critically important (and surprisingly difficult). Every parent should advocate for their child if he/she is being bullied by talking to the teacher first to try and help resolve the conflict. If that doesn’t work, then take it to the principal to complete the necessary paperwork to create a safety plan.

How will you support our special education students?

Special education is legally required and you are legally required to provide services. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got the money or not, you’re still legally required to provide those services for those students. So you have to sometimes be very creative. Like find a way to pay for a handicap-accessible playground.

A way I could help is that I do understand the law about Special Education requirements. And I understand the needs that special education students and parents have.

I have not only been a special educator, I’ve been a special education administrator. I’ve been the one to lead the team and to say, okay, let’s look at this child’s profile and let’s figure out how this child works best. Let’s figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are. This child does not work well visually, can we address his needs by teaching him through auditory means instead of visual means? Is this a kinesthetic learner? Do we need to do it that way? Is this child autistic? How can we meet his needs in the classroom to where they don’t get overstimulated. Or give them breaks throughout the day so they can continue to access the curriculum. All of those kind of ideas and thoughts are things I think I can bring to the table.

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

I think that it’s important for us to teach history and it’s important for us to teach real history and what really happened. I think history needs to be taught with sensitivity because there are tough issues.

You want to create this dialogue and help kids understand where the other kids are coming from without necessarily beating them over the heads with it. You don’t want, ‘you’re bad people because of what your ancestors did,’ to be the message. What you want to be the message is empathy. And I don’t know when or how empathy went out of style, but I’ve always thought it was very important to teach empathy and try to understand where someone else is coming from.

There’s a whole quote about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. To me, that’s what history is about and that’s what teaching history is about. If our kids can kind of understand where we came from and how we got here, that’s how we come together to understand each other and move forward.

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Thanks to Susan Wood for graciously sitting down to answer our 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.

After Friday, 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.