CEDAR CITY — Incumbent Dale Brinkerhoff, who is seeking a second four-year term on Iron County School District’s school board, is up against challenger Stephanie Hill on the November ballot.
Iron County’s District 4 race is one of four Board of Education seats that will be decided this election, the others being District 5, which features candidates Tiffiney Christiansen and Billy Davis, and the newly created Districts 6 and 7, where Lauren Lewis and Megen Ralphs are respectively running unopposed.
Three of the four candidates for school board Districts 4 and 5 recently appeared in a public debate sponsored by Southern Utah University’s Michael O. Leavitt Center for Politics and Public Service. Only Brinkerhoff was not in attendance. To watch the video of that Oct. 5 event, which was streamed live on Facebook, click here.
Prior to that event, Cedar City News spoke to each of the candidates by phone.
Brinkerhoff, whose political experience includes serving on both the Iron County Commission and the Cedar City Council, spoke of what he believes to be some of Iron County School District’s biggest challenges.
With more than 10,000 students and 1,100 staff, the district operates with an annual budget of $114 million. Brinkerhoff described the district as “financially solid.”
Thanks to the passage of the most recent series of general obligation bonds, the district is now moving forward with several construction projects, including the building of a new elementary school, the renovation of multiple secondary schools and other capital improvement projects. In order to keep up with projected growth, another bond election will likely be needed within the next few years, Brinkerhoff said.
Another budgetary priority, he said, is the ongoing need “to attract and retain good personnel.”
Nevertheless, he said, the district shouldn’t get carried away in its spending.
“Realistically, the district’s sole goal and responsibility, in my mind and also by statute, is simply to provide and offer a top-notch educational opportunity for the students in the county. That’s it,” he said. “That doesn’t mean everything for everybody. It doesn’t mean anything by anyone, it just means we look at the broad view and we try to make a program that fits.”
“Sometimes I think people expect us to put on a banquet, when that isn’t needed anymore,” he added.
Brinkerhoff said he also will continue to push for better security systems and safety protocols in schools.
In addition to automatically locking doors and single-point entrances, Brinkerhoff said enhanced surveillance cameras also are being planned.
Meanwhile, Hill, who lacks political experience but has an extensive educational background as a teacher, said she isn’t convinced that the housing market is going to continue to boom in Iron County and Southern Utah.
“First and foremost, growth is difficult to project,” she said. “ And things have changed. We’re now at a 6% interest rate on housing. And I think that is going to hotly curtail an influx of people moving in. Not entirely, obviously, because we’re (still) getting a lot of people from California.”
Hill said she taught in Las Vegas during a time of tremendous growth, when the population grew by more than 1 million people in a decade’s time.
“When I first started my teaching career, there were schools that were on double session,” she said. “We need to be open to that.”
Nevertheless, Hill said she thinks the rapid pace of growth in Southern Utah will taper off.
“I think it’s going to cool down enough that we’re going to be OK for a few years,” she said. “The tax base can’t support bond after bond. Vegas is different. Clark County is different from Iron County. So that’s where we are.”
When asked to share what she felt were some of the district’s most pressing needs, Hill cited a few areas that require attention, including school safety, early phonics-based reading instruction, and better training for special education teachers and aides in order to ensure they are compliant with regulations.
Hill said the statewide standardized curriculum and testing procedures are also in need of an overhaul.
“As you know, we didn’t revamp Common Core in 2017, when everyone admitted it was a failure. We’ve slightly tweaked it,” she said.
“I want to return to a detailed curriculum,” she added.
One example of a teaching standard that makes little or no sense, Hill said, is the kindergarten social studies objective that states the student will be able to make an analysis.
“They’re babies … they don’t analyze,” she said. “You can show them analysis. But they’re not producing real analysis until middle school probably, and then it’s kind of shoddy.”
“The standards are horrible,” she added. “They don’t they don’t align with cognitive development in the slightest.”
Hill also said she doesn’t agree with demolishing East Elementary in Cedar City and building a new school on that same property.
“I don’t think we’re in a place where we have the luxury of tearing down schools,” she said. “I subbed last week at East. I don’t know anything about the boiler. But that’s a decent workspace. Those are classrooms.”
Had she been involved with that, she said she would have crafted a more open-ended bond.
“We can’t go back on it, because that’s what the community voted for, a fairly specific bond. It needed to be not too big, not too small, but just right,” she said. “But we promised the taxpayers that we’re going to level that building. I don’t agree with it. It’s classroom space. And depending on the kind of influx population that we get, we’re going to have to go in double sessions. That’s an incredibly unpopular idea, but that’s what it comes down to.”
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