Hickman County school board member Andrea Davis now has seen education from both sides. A former teacher for 11 years, she said her initial dive into the world of the school board “is totally different.”
“You see a different side of it,” she said. “It’s a lot harder than I probably thought it was, trying to do it all. You want to try to do as much as you can for the students, but finances are getting slimmer and slimmer – being able to stretch things as far as they can be stretched, trying to be creative.
“It just surprised me how much our hands are tied (because of funding). Looking at it from the other side, I guess I thought, just make it happen. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Hickman County school board members, l-r, Shannon Dowdy, Andrea Davis and Matt Hicks just prior
to their November school board meeting. All three were first-year board members in 2017.
Her fellow freshman board member Shannon Dowdy said the biggest lesson he learned during his first year was “the financial end of it. There’s a lot I didn’t know. As a parent, outside the school, you don’t realize what goes on behind the scenes.”
Learning how accounts are broken down in the general fund has been “interesting,” Dowdy said. “It was a lot to learn.”
The district’s third newish board member, Matt Hicks, agreed that finances have proved to be the largest hurdle for him. “That’s the biggest challenge. The discipline stuff is not fun, but it’s not been as hard as learning the finances and how all that works,” he said. “It’s been a little harder than I thought, but it’s been good.”
The Hickman County board is one of a handful that welcomed three new school board members last year, a situation that in general can create some challenges on both sides, as newbies and veterans adjust.
That was no problem in Hickman County, though, where the newer board members say they got help from board Vice Chairman Martie Templeton and Chairman Allen Kyle, and also received individual briefings from Superintendent Casey Henderson. While Templeton, who also sits on KSBA’s board of directors, is entering his third year, Kyle has the benefit of a total of 26 years as a school board member. He said incorporating three new board members into the ranks wasn’t at all difficult.
“I’ve known them all their lives,” Kyle said. “It’s just meshed. We’re a small community so we all know one another. It helps a whole lot that everybody knows everybody.”
Hicks said he is still learning the ropes, but “I feel a whole lot more comfortable about it than I did when I started. I’m getting more of an understanding of how it works.”
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