Jammie Esker Schaer: Elmhurst D-205 School Board Candidate – Excel

Mrs. Jammie Esker Schaer, a candidate on the April 2023 ballot for the District 205 School Board position has a simple message: seek academic achievement and a return to excellence.

We asked each of the nine candidates listed on the April 2023 ballot for District 205 School Board positions to answer the same set of questions, so that voters could get a sense of their goals, priorities, and how they would handle issues facing the district.

Esker Schaer was clear that as “a school board member, my goal is to ensure our students and teachers are the main priorities of any decisions faced by the board. If parents want to be involved, they will be invited to join in restoring excellence to D205.” Esker Schaer decided to get involved based on what she experienced as a mother to five boys educated in D205, and the constant downward decline of standards and skills.

Esker Schaer gives as an example how she watched with her children over the years, how writing in cursive moved from required, to optional, to not taught at all. Across this same time period, the district’s reading and writing scores fell. Some recent educational research suggests that cultivating handwriting skills helps students improve information retention and comprehension, engages the brain on a deeper level, and helps with fine motor dexterity. She shared the example of her fourth son, for whom Esker Schaer states that spelling was neither taught nor required as a learned skill. “How does someone learn how to read well if they cannot spell?”

Esker Schaer wants a full review of the D205 writing programs, including whether “back to basics” fundamentals need to be restored into the curriculum. Relatedly, she pointed to the books read and discussed in higher-level English classes: they “need to be grade level appropriate.” She explained that it is not acceptable for York to be using books at a “6th grade Lexile score,” when they should be at 9th grade or higher. She wants the district to also “bring back final exams, bring in reading and math interventionists and align the curriculum between all grades” so that students are encouraged to succeed, and not stymied from reaching their full potential by needlessly low expectations.

Esker Schaer also reiterated the importance of the school board “hiring the administrative team and holding them accountable. The administrative team is responsible for setting the curriculum and achieving goals set by the school board,” and she is concerned that the past leadership has taken the district backwards, not forwards.

On the question of social emotional learning, Esker Schaer noted that the organization pushing for districts to use their consulting services on the topic, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), has been used to push politics into the classroom under the guise of “social and emotional competence,” and that their “transformative SEL” programs state that they are designed to facilitate “critical examination of individual and contextual factors that contribute to inequities and collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community, and societal well-being.” Esker Schaer noted that this is a lot of talk, but with “no focus on the basics. Most parents send their children to school to learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic. We need to return to the basics and bring our test scores back up,” and let parents decide what values will best serve their child’s well-being.

As Esker Schaer also has an accounting degree, it is also not surprising that she has focused on the D205 finances as well. “Our current school board doesn’t have a good grasp on the financial impacts of their decisions.” She gave as an example the board’s decision to first pass a 5% property tax increase, and then (after public outcry) voting to abate a portion of it. At the League of Women Voters candidate forum, she pointed out that the board blindingly accepted administrative positions on finances that were not actually backed up by the financial numbers once the math and supposed cost increases were factored in to the equations. She also noted that because property values and assessed values automatically increase during periods of high inflation, “there should be no” automatic increases in the “tax levy in high inflation years. The school board must be good stewards of its taxpayers' money."

When asked her highest priority for the school board, she reiterated: “academic achievement” and a “return to academic excellence.” Esker Schaer explained that both “students and teachers are the main priorities of any decisions faced by the board,” along with keeping “the focus of education on learning age-appropriate subject matter that not only meets but surpasses mandatory academic guidelines.”

Esker Schaer states that she is “motivated to do whatever is needed to improve reading and writing scores,” noting that the district’s children are “more than just test results,” and that “they deserve to graduate from D205 with the necessary skills that will help them flourish in their future endeavors.” She also seeks to “facilitate successful classrooms” in which teachers can “concentrate on educating students” and not have to deal with “matters that do not pertain to each teacher’s content area.”

The questions, posed to all nine candidates, including Esker Schaer, are as follows:

Question 1. As a school board member, how will you work with parents to further their children's education?

Question 2. Describe what you consider appropriate oversight of curriculum and role you envision parents having in that oversight?

Question 3. Do you believe the current board has adequately enforced its controversial issues policy? What would you do differently?

Question 4. What is your understanding of transformative SEL and do you think that it has a place in District 205?

Question 5. In November 2022, District 205 admitted to falling SAT scores. A year previously, in October 2021, the district laid the blame for drooping academic performance at the feet of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the district's test scores have been plummeting steadily downward since 2014. What would you do to improve this chronically unsatisfactory situation?

Question 6. In November 2018 Elmhurst voters approved a $168.5 million bond issue for District 205. In May 2021, drastic overages were reported, to the tune of$400,000. As of March 2022, the overspending had risen to $18.1 million, and in May 2022, the total over budget had dropped slightly to $17.7 million. That is still more than 10 percent of the referendum budget. What remedies do you propose for this enormous project that is obviously over budget and reportedly behind schedule?

Question 7. If reelected to serve on the school board, what is the number one objective that you will pursue and seek doggedly to accomplish during your term?