John Dick, school board member from Monroe County School District, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the schools.
There is a school board meeting tomorrow in Key West.
Dick said, “We have meetings where anybody’s interested in going. It’s not a big agenda this time, we do have a closed session prior to the meeting for a few minutes, we get our quarterly safety and security update. In other words, the board is shown what’s new, and usually the way school safety is now, there’s always updates. And so there’s things that we’re doing that we don’t share with the public, because it’s ways of keeping people from gaining entry into our schools. So we get an update on that. And so that’s a closed session, and then the meeting will start at five o’clock, and there’s not too much on the agenda. We’re going to get a presentation about technology. That’s a big deal in schools now and there’s also some pushback now on technology. Are we going too far? Is it too much? And of course, it’s very expensive, so we look into that. Are we getting a good bang for our buck? And I hope that’s correct, but we’ll see. But again, technology, there’s one side that says do it, do it, do it. And then there’s others that say, hey, I want the students to learn and not just relying on technology. There’s valid points on both sides. You say to yourself do the students really learn to do the math and the writing when they have they go to a computer and say, do this for me. And they do it.”
Artificial Intelligence is another concern.
Dick said, “It’s scary, because AI will, maybe everybody will be the same, I mean, and you want things different. You need different viewpoints. It’s in the school districts, it’s being used in curriculum and helping to write lesson plans and whatnot, as it should be. I mean, it’s a tool, and use it. The thing is, you have to get to the point where that cannot be the controlling issue of the whole school, school day, and the school programs. It has to have input from human beings. You have to have humanity into it. I am nervous about what AI can do, and rightfully so. A lot of people are, and we’re concerned. I think countries are concerned about it, and there’s a lot in the world going on right now, and boy, I’m concerned about what this world will look like in 10 years for my children and grandchildren. I mean, you can ask the AI to do a report for you, and on one point you say, well, the students didn’t learn anything, but if they have the report and the report is a good report, then so be it. I think about it and grapple with what could be the right answer, but I don’t have it.”
Monroe County School District continues to move forward.
Dick said, “Monroe County slipped quite a bit in the COVID years. We lost our ranking by a good amount. We’ve gained that back, and we are definitely on a good trajectory. We’re improving. We just got results from the progress monitoring. We do three during the year, one in the beginning of the year, the second one to see how they’re going, and the third one at the end of the year. And we are doing very well. We’ve made good improvements from one to two, and now we’re working to go to two to three. Our graduation rate improved. All our signs are very good. Financially, we’re doing very well. We’ve got good control over the funding. So I see everything in this school district is we’ve overcome the loss that we did in the COVID years. And with Mr. Tierney, he said we’re going to go for the top spot. I think Miss Axford has the district, and the staff and the teachers have the district on the trajectory to go there, and I think that Mr. Tierney will ride with us all, and it’ll become the number one district in the state of Florida. I see it happening.”
Monroe County School District also honors and accommodates military families.
Dick said, “They’re very welcomed here. And this community is a pro military community from Key West to Key Largo all the way up and down the Keys. It wasn’t that many years ago when we had three combat veterans from Vietnam serving on the school board. So it shows you what we had and what we are, and we do every year, on all the holidays, we definitely come out and represent the military and honor them for their service. Very proud to be part of that.”
The superintendent also has employees in the district office getting into the schools.
Dick said, “He’s talking about administrators, the secretaries. Everybody has got to come out to the schools and spend some time in the schools, and they help with the students. The schools can decide exactly what they want them to do, but I think the majority of them, and I did speak to some of them that did it this past week, they sent them with some of the students that might be falling behind and help with them, and mentor them and speak with them so they’re coming out of the district office, getting into the schools. I really like that. As I said to the superintendent, I like to see some of them permanently be put out back in the schools, but maybe some of them will like it again and say, hey, I want to get back into the school. So we’ll see. But it seems to be working. The couple of people that I spoke to said they thought it was a good experience. So this is an initiative that superintendent Ed Tierney has brought here, and we’ll see how it works.”
The Marathon Middle/High School stadium will be named after Mike Puto.
Dick said, “We’ll have a big ceremony, I guess, at the first football game of the upcoming school year. And so keep that on the radar. We’ll invite a lot of people, and it should be a big time. He’s very excited, I will tell you that.”
How is the proposed baseball stadium complex in Islamorada at Founders Park going?
Dick said, “There’s some holdups on that one dealing with I guess, the turf. Of course, look, we don’t own that property. We are just using that property. We’ve been tasked with making the improvements. But we can’t just say what we want to do. It’s not our property. So it gets to a sticking point and the project is kind of stuck. So we’ll see what happens.”
Dick was a judge for the South Florida District essay contest hosted by the VFW recently.
He said, “That encompasses all the posts in Monroe County, but also most of the posts in Miami, which is a lot of them. And so they get a lot of entries. We have a few entries here, but when I was reading the essays, 99% of them were written almost by the same person, which means they were done by AI. So I’m sure teachers are coming across that and what do they do? Every one of them has had the same setup, the same points that came through. Because there was a question, I forget what the question was, something about being patriotic. And they all had the same way. But I’ll tell you what, we had a crew, the judge and the ones that won were not written by AI, I could tell you that.”