Ben Blankley, candidate for 259 school board District 1 in Wichita, KS
Note: Anyone who lives in the Wichita school district can vote in this race.
Name: Ben Blankley
Age: 38
Occupation: Aerospace Engineer, Spirit AeroSystems, 14 years
Previous government service: Incumbent, USD 259 Board of Education District 1
Have you run for office before? (Please list any previous offices sought)
USD 259 BOE District 1, 2017
What is the top issue in your race, and how would you address it?
What learning looks like post-pandemic: the staff of USD 259 developed innovative techniques to capture students during remote learning, and it would be a shame to have to discard all that hard work. We must enable these best practices to be included in a modern in-person classroom. We must also identify learning losses in each student and work to fill in those gaps. The board will also need to deal with an already-declining enrollment projection, and the related decisions that will need to be made in the next decade.
The board’s actions have been dominated this past year and a half by the response to the COVID-19 issue and the policies surrounding it. Please outline what you feel needs to be done to protect our children at this point, and specifically address whether you think a mask mandate for staff and/or students is necessary now. Why or why not?
After the 2021-22 school year started, we saw a rapid unsustainable increase in the numbers of high risk close contacts, which either required daily testing or quarantine at home. The universal mask mandate that we enacted on August 30th allowed, in the following weeks, a large portion of these high risk close contacts to become low risk close contacts instead. This meant that students could continue learning in-person and caretakers could continue going to work in an uninterrupted way. Additionally, cases at the federal court system across the country strongly imply that universal masking is required at this time to provide a FAPE for special education students. Additionally, those students under the age of 12 are, as I write this, ineligible for any COVID-19 vaccination yet. For these reasons, I am a strong advocate for a universal mask mandate in our public schools at this time.
The district has invested millions of dollars during the pandemic to create the capability of equipping students for remote learning. Now, the state Legislature has prohibited school districts from offering that option to parents on an ongoing basis. Do you agree or disagree with that decision by the Legislature? Why or why not and what, if anything, do you intend to do about it?
Remote learning was a challenge for many families, but it was also a success for some families. Innovative educational techniques were developed, and remote families and caretakers, in particular, achieved a closer bond with their child’s teacher than they would have otherwise. Remote learning was a step between in-person and virtual school that a solid number of families enjoyed and miss. It is disheartening that the state legislature has declared this innovation worthless in their action to essentially defund Kansas school districts that would offer the kind of live on-camera remote learning used in 2020-21.
One way to retain some of that functionality would be to advocate for increased state funding for virtual learners, bolstering the staffing available for these kind of remote programs across Kansas.
Campaign website:
https://www.usd259repblankley.com/
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