Episode 19 Dr. Lance Arbuckle: Jesse James, Free High School Lunches, and Tailored Learning

You talk about the school lunches and And to me, I hear a few questions in there.

Is that a philosophy that you have on both your goal setting that you have exhibited in the past, but also your philosophy on education? Do you feel like that is the appropriate approach for you as a superintendent to go deeper than just...

math, science, reading, social studies,

which I'm not saying any of that's a discounted because you

also – but do you see that as a natural progression of where education – what education is to a community?

Yeah.

I mean, I think the primary role of any administrator, quite honestly, principal, superintendent, anywhere in between there, is to remove barriers from – from kids and families to have access to education, right? We all know that, you know, equity and being equal are not the same thing.

And so there are, when we have opportunities as school administrators to remove barriers that either are in front of kids and families to accessing school.

Um, I always saw my role as an assistant principal, you know, assistant principals, the, the mentality or the, the, the, uh, stereotype is all they do is school discipline, right? Just discipline all day

long.

Um, and yeah, they, we, we, As an assistant principal, I did a lot of school discipline.

There's plenty to go around.

Yeah, I know, right? That's true.

But I always saw the role as a little bit larger than that, where my role as the assistant principal was to help students change behaviors that were barriers to them accessing what's going on inside the classroom.

I like it, yeah.

Right? And so...

My philosophy was, you're here.

What can we learn from why you're here? How do we not get here again? And if we can implement that, how do we not get here again? Then guess what? We just removed a behavioral barrier from that kid being successful inside the classroom.

And so I just feel like I've – whether I did it consciously or unconsciously, my job as superintendent is to remove barriers from families to access public education because I think public education is the – I mean, it's the best thing America ever came up with.

Right.

I mean, it's in my opinion, you know, it is a core piece of our democracy.

And I think we need to we should do everything we can in every community, in every household to support public education.

Now, I'm not against parent choice.

And, you know, if people want to choose to do something different.

you know, I'm going to support them in their choice.