Ames School Board Candidate Profiles

Name: Rodney A. Briggs

Age: 32

Family: Wife, Heather, three children ages 7, 6 and 4. My 7- and 6-year-old daughters attend Edwards Elementary.

Occupation: Detention Officer, Story County Sheriff's Office.

Education: I graduated from the South Hamilton Community Schools in Jewell in 1997. I was a non-traditional student at Des Moines Area Community College where I received an Associates of Science degree in Criminal Justice in December of 2009.

Previous Elected Experience: None.

Why are you running?

In the fall of 2009, when my oldest daughter started kindergarten, I started realizing that I needed to pay more attention to my children’s education. I began to follow the school district more closely and in the spring of 2010 I became concerned with the school board and its decision making process regarding the budget and reductions that needed to be made. A meeting agenda was posted five days before a board meeting to approve cuts that named programs the board had considered cutting. One of them suggested cutting kindergarten from full day to half day only. I had concerns about the impact on families and children’s learning as a result of this. Childcare in the district was hard enough to find and many of the families had two working parents in the home. I looked into research studies that had been done over the past decade and found that there were three federal studies that all showed that children of low socio-economic status benefited greatly from this program being a full day. I felt that the community was not made aware of this issue and made it a point to bring it into the light. Ultimately we were able to save that program. In January the facilities question started to peak. I really believe that academic achievement will not suffer by going with the five-school model based on research studies that have been done that look at a better defined breakdown of school size. We need to ask ourselves why we are making the decisions we are making and are they fiscally sound. In some cases personal feelings have been allowed into the decision making process. I believe that we need to try to keep feelings out of decisions that are made and look at logical conclusions formed from solid information. I'm someone who looks at things fairly and can bring a logical approach to decision making when critical choices need to be made.

What issues are most important to you?

Providing the best environment for kids to learn in and being able to provide the best programs and putting the best educators in the classroom. We need to be able to mitigate any fluctuations in the budget that are within our control. In the last six months Superintendent Tim Taylor has derived a list of itemized programs that are necessary, secondary in educating and programs that are nice to have so we can best determine what programs to cut from if the need were to arise once more. I wish we had that two years ago. One of the resources we lost was having educational assistants in the elementary classrooms, which is something that I would like to bring back as they aid the teachers and students in the learning process enabling them to give better small group and one-on-one instruction to students.

It has been said that the cost of construction inflation has not been accounted for in the current $65 million bond project for six elementary schools. If it's approved, how will you ensure that all projects are completed and that buildings are built to last?

Construction costs are difficult to accurately predict over a long period of time with multiple sites. From what I understand StruXture Architects came up with a plan that considered the estimated costs with inflation and asked for maximum size in everything just to give a better idea on what it would cost to build the schools. Those plans can be reduced or redeveloped as needed to meet the real cost. We must put a plan in place that has a structured time-line and then meet the time-lines as established to reduce the possibility for an under estimate of costs.

How much of the SILO (School Infrastructure Local Option sales tax) funds are you willing to contribute to the current elementary school project before the voters?

As I understand it, the district receives about $3 million a year in SILO funds. When the current board discussed that issue they assumed using up to 50 percent of the sales tax funds to reduce the property tax burden. I'm in that same mindset; obviously it's something that needs to be looked at year-to-year to keep the tax rate level. We need to keep some of that money in reserve, however, to address maintenance issues with the other buildings that may occur.

If voters do not approve the bond issue what will you do to address the needs of school facilities?

I agree with statements that incumbent Dan Woodin has made. He said the first thing he would do is talk to voters and find out why they said no. I would talk to the community to find out directly from them why it didn't pass and establish what they believe is the right direction to go. I would then speak with the administration and revisit the data that was gathered over the past several years to create a plan that addresses the facilities issues of the entire district at all grade levels. The buildings need to have something done to them; I don’t believe that anyone would disagree with that. We need to offer the best product to the Ames community and not just one that could work. We tell students to do their best work and we need to show them that we do as well.

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