Editor’s Note: This is the seventh story in an 11-part series focusing on local candidates running for election. The City Commission candidates ran Thursday. The School Board candidates will run Friday and Saturday.
If you would like a PDF of our entire Voters Guide, email us at [email protected]. Printed copies of the Voters Guide will be available to read at Zeb’s next week.
Name: Eric Votaw
Race: School Board
Current job: Senior manager of financial operations for Freightquote in Kansas City.
Current community involvement:
I have helped coach over 26 different teams and those are related to my children’s teams.
I’ve been a member of the School Board here for a little over 12 years.
I volunteer for a number of different jobs and roles related to the school anytime I have a chance to kind of give back in that way.
Why are you running for election?
First and foremost, it is about my children, and I will admit it’s a little bit selfish that I care deeply about the education and experience that my own kids receive here, but broader than that, I have a strong sense of wanting to serve this community and I have for a long time, and I always want to find some way to give back.
I’m born and raised here. I’ve lived here my whole life. My children are fourth-generation students through the school district. Wanting to find a way to give back, and I have a passion for the community, a passion for the education and experience my kids are getting and this is just sort of the culmination of that perfect opportunity.
Earlier this year, residents participated in surveys and focus groups about what they wanted in a new superintendent. We’re going to ask you some questions related to this same data since they relate to leadership vision for the district. One of the top priorities was creating more competitive salary and benefits packages to attract and retain staff members. How do you think the School Board should approach this issue?
It is a complex situation because a vast majority of our budget goes towards personnel and towards salary and payroll expense, but it’s still not enough. We need to do more, and we will do more, but we have to get creative in finding ways to identify revenue sources and funds that can be freed up for those purposes.
Our real opportunity is finding different aspects of being a staff member here that makes it attractive to be here, and we’ve done so by trying to create a full benefits package that appeals to a little bit broader group. Every district in the state is going to be challenged with we need to pay our teachers more and we absolutely need to pay our teachers more, but how can we create the — in addition to that component, how do we make it just a more appealing place that the best of the best want to be here?
Like I said, the compensation package can include your college reimbursement, your days off that you receive, your health care package that you receive, but it’s more so than just maybe what they feel in their pocket.
It is also, “Is my voice being heard, does my opinion matter, are you making me shift what I do today tomorrow 180 degrees?” So much of the time in education, we find ourselves — the priorities in the direction of which way leadership wants to take a school district shifts one year to the next completely, and instead of setting up a routine and structure that teachers and staff can get accustomed to and grow in, there’s always new mandates or new experiments that they want to try on how we teach and educate kids.
I think allowing teachers to kind of control that more so than administration or a School Board makes it an attractive place and ability to retain and recruit people here.
Another priority that residents noted was upkeep of buildings. What capital improvements do you think are needed across the district?
That’s a great one, and it is top of mind for the School Board currently. It’s a process we’ve been going through for the last year plus, a little bit more than a year, identifying really what all those needs are and then how do we go about addressing those needs in a timely manner.
A good example is brand new turf. We need new turf for the football field. It’s passed its sort of expected life. There becomes safety issues after awhile if you don’t address it. We need a second gymnasium badly at the high school. We’re the only district in our league that doesn’t have an auxiliary gym at the high school, so we have to use our middle school gym, which is full all the time, too, you know, we have a need for that.
We have constraints at a lot of our buildings where we need more classroom space, more places for our kids to meet up and collaborate, maybe not in a traditional classroom, but in an open space where they can meet. And then there’s just a lot of the infrastructure of these buildings. If it’s new roofs, new HVAC systems, a lot of that is coming end of life, and we need to figure out how we can replace that without becoming a big burden on the taxpayers.
We’ve been working on that process here for a year or more identifying all those needs and that was an important piece with this new superintendent coming in. This is sort of our charge at this point is we need to address these capital improvement needs and what’s that strategy going to look like, how do we afford this, how do we pay for it and also how do we make sure we’re doing it smartly and strategically for what our district might look like 10 or 15 years down the road?
This is a little bit more in-depth than maybe you need, but we’re actually right now having an enrollment study done that looks at the community and looks at neighboring communities and kind of overall where schools are in Kansas, where growth is happening, where there’s decline in school populations, looking at new housing starts in the community and all that to determine just how many kids we’re going to have through our buildings 10 or 15 years from now because that’s important to know as we go into some of those picking and choosing which of those we can knock off first.
Improving diversity and equity in the district was also noted as important. What role do you think the School Board should play in this?
Diversity and equity is probably something that is important that the community has a voice in. We have begun a committee, I guess you could say, of staff and students and community members that can have a say in where they feel there is improvements that can be made.
As a board, we’re only seven members deep and we all may think or feel like we have pretty good coverage in that area or the right solutions, but really what we need is we need that feedback from our staff and our community to understand where there’s opportunity to improve.
Primarily in the area of where can we do a better job of maybe meeting the needs of our students, so that they can excel at the highest level. I feel like that’s the key thing around that initiative is, “How can we ensure that we’re meeting the needs of each of our students in our district?”
How do you hope to improve the educational experience for students?
We’ve learned a lot during COVID times and what we thought maybe worked doesn’t necessarily work and things that we didn’t know would work, works now. We know for sure that students need interaction, they need that time with other students, with their peers, with their teachers.
They need that interaction in person, so the more opportunities we can provide for them, if that’s additional course offerings we can provide, if that is additional activities both before and after school, enrichment programs of various types that we can provide our students, that’s the best way to continue to build upon the success that we have here.
Not only community members but School Board members themselves said they wanted a next superintendent who is a proactive thinker. But the board plays a key role in this as well. What vision do you personally have for the district?
My vision is that we have a school that is years ahead of where we are going. That we can plan for and prepare for the challenges that are before us. A great example of that is where we are as a society with social media. We can see today that social media directly impacts every single classroom in every one of our buildings, and we need to be at the point that we are leading our community in what our expectations are of kids and adults with social media in our community.
There is a lot of negative, mostly negative, that comes out of that, and my vision is one that speaks into that challenge around social media and makes that one less barrier to a successful education here.
The other vision that I have is leading to greater post-graduate opportunities. We know that we’re not necessarily in the day and age anymore where your best opportunity is you must go to a four-year college right out of high school. We know that there’s so many different jobs, different lines of careers that people can go into, maybe even different educational paths they can take that are nontraditional and the better we can do at laying those options out for particularly our high school students and also providing them more advanced courses, advanced placement courses, dual-credit courses, those types of opportunities in a high school setting, the better we’re setting them up for success post-graduate.
What do you think are the biggest strengths of the school district?
No. 1, no question, is our staff, strong staff from I feel like from our superintendent on down to every person. It’s often overlooked, but we have an outstanding transportation department. We have an outstanding food and service department, maintenance and facilities. Those things keep everything looking good.
They help us as a board know that, “Hey, we have other things we can focus on because those things are getting accomplished.” Our teachers and our staff are just top notch and that is no question our strength.
Our facilities that we have all across town are wonderful. That is a great allure, and we have people that respect the facilities and want to keep them in nice condition and be able to make them safe for our students. We have a great location here in Eudora in relation to the KC metro area and Lawrence and all the other schools around here that are similar size.
And then our community is just — I’ve been here 40 some years, and we have never had the support in the community in my lifetime more so than we do right now and that’s largely evident in our Eudora Schools Foundation, which is community driven and the support both financial and otherwise around our district is top notch.
What do you think are the biggest challenges?
We have a limited tax base. That means we have a lot of houses in this town, but we don’t have a whole lot of commercial or other warehouse, retail type of businesses and property that we can draw from. That means we are — they call it a “bedroom community.”
People work here and go to school here, but everyone leaves to go work or everyone leaves to go get their groceries or goes to buy their car or whatever, and so we’re challenged as a district financially because of this.
In fact, it doesn’t seem like we’re in a poor part of the state, but we are in terms of an assessed valuation per pupil, the amount of value in the property in Eudora, per pupil, is one of the lowest in the state, which means our mill rate does not generate much tax for us, so that’s another one of those challenges why we’d like to be able to do more from a salary standpoint, but it’s difficult.
That’s a big challenge is a low tax base. I think COVID has put a strain on our educators and all of our workers in the system to where it’s a challenge to want to keep them excited and energized coming back for more and so that definitely a challenge is keeping them engaged.
We have the amount of strain on our staff and on our students, from a mental health standpoint, is off the charts. This isn’t unique to Eudora, this is everywhere, but you read about it all the time, I mean, our society is fracturing and breaking down from a mental health standpoint and that ability to cope with and treat those people and provide them that support and service that they need, that’s a huge challenge for us right now.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Not other than I appreciate the opportunity that you guys do in these profiles. It’s great. I’ve served for three terms already and want an opportunity for others to serve as well, but I also know that this is an important time in our town, and with my kids in middle school and high school, I just want to make sure that I can try to serve and kind of be part of some of those important decisions as they were nearing graduation, so I think that’s the main thing I want to convey to folks.
