we're speaking with rebecca bowman another candidate for the peters township school director position i'd like to start off by asking you to describe the strengths and qualifications that you would bring to the office well thank you i appreciate the  opportunity i have a number of unusual skill sets which i would bring to the school district i have forty years in heavy construction so i have a lot of insight in construction project management construction cost controls those sorts of things in  addition i have years of experience as a human resource manager so i also bring insights into human resources issues employment issues hiring issues those kinds of things i also have twenty six years coming up on as an attorney so i've done contract negotiations and all kinds of property management issues i have had students children of mine as students in the district for the past twenty years i intentionally waited to run until i no longer had a child in the district because i think there's an inherent conflict of interest if you are serving as a school director and you have a child in the district so i waited until better still i have a business in the district and i've lived in the district for thirty years so i have very nearly every person beck to as a citizen of the district that you could have very interesting what priorities do you feel would guide us you if you were to take this office for me it is a priority academics come before all else the academic performance of this district is what sets it apart the community resources that are available because of the parents and the residents that we have in the district are very important but somewhat concerned as a former student parent that we don't always make the best use of the available community resources so i would be focusing on taking advantage of opportunities that are inherent in being part of peter's township school district to have any particular concerns that are leading you to run for the softness yes as a matter of fact i do i've been a tutor  township students for close to twenty years and i have found through the years that the primary issues with our students coming out are english reading speaking issues  sometimes when i'm tutoring physics for example the students are excellent on the basic skills they're not so strong on integrative thought process and so the thinking process the problem solving process are things that i think need more emphasis and then that when i do s a t tutoring what i run into is some of the vocabulary skills are not perhaps what they might be so you would be looking for ways to emphasize to encourage an emphasis on those skills on academic performance absolutely now i will tell you that as i work with these students and they leave to go to college i keep in touch with the students i've worked with and they come back and tell me that when they hit college peters township has lost left to the very well prepared so we're doing a good job there and i want to make sure we keep doing a good job good how do you feel about public participation  in school board decisions first of all is the school board the place for the public to bring its concerns about any issue regarding school matters absolutely the school board is the connection between the community and the administration and of course the teachers and the policies and so on or under the administration the school board is exactly the connection i have run into situations in which citizens will  complain about lack of access to information but yet they're not willing to step out and find the information that they need so if we're going to get into a situation where there are those who want more information that they are willing to go get it then we're going to find tools to reach them with the information that they want for peers patch for example is a very effective tool for communicating information but only if you're signed up for it so if you're not then you're not getting all of that information and that's there's a gap there that the citizens can fill by simply taking that step so it's a two way street you know it's good to point that out one point i have heard is that the public does not have access to decision to information early enough in long range planning for example to have an impact on decisions that are made the involve a lot of expenditure of money right and i see that as a problem well  it's sort of a step issue first of all many citizens don't get involved until the budget is approved and then they go i would never spend money that way well that's a little late if they only come to the budget approval meeting of the school board or the work's already been done and so there's going to be limited opportunity to affect the outcome if they want to affect the planning process then they need to get involved in committee meetings and attend committee meetings and participate in that way and they always have the opportunity to communicate with the school board in advance of any planning and say i see the upcoming the following upcoming issues please keep me in the loop so that i can participate when you discuss them so that the citizenry has an opportunity to shift some of that contact burden but they got to take the initiative are the agendas for committees available in the meeting dates readily available for seventy to date and i'm sorry didn't mean to interrupt the meeting dates are readily available and agendas would how would someone know when a something was going to be discussed well the for the for the committees i mean that is not so readily available and that's perhaps something that we could change in terms of improving the advance notice of what's going on in the committee  there is of course a planning cycle and if you get involved at any point in the planning cycle you will certainly know what that planning cycle is for the future so you may be a year behind but you certainly have anything to learn math but you're saying citizens should spend a fairly large amount of attention or energy to learn about it and get involved at that level rather than waiting until the decisions are about to be made absolutely right if you have a passion about an issue you have to go back to the beginning where the where the issue's going to iraq i can understand to why people don't spend that time because they don't really know what's going on and absolutely till it's a big public issue and then of course everyone climbs on the band right and you may not know about until your child is impacted by and if you don't have a child in the district you're you're even more tenuous relationship that's right how do you approach making funding decisions about full addicks and the arts well  priorities would be academics first pretty straight up about that the arts impact academic performance so my second priority among those three would be the arts they improve logical thinking they improve mem they improve pattern recognition they improve foreign language learning so the arts are extremely important to academic performance so that would be my second funding priority and academics is of those three priorities the thing that independent of the school district so therefore that would be my third priority and i've had both of my skilled and were involved in sports so it's not that you know my kids don't do that so i don't care it is simply that they feed less to academic performance and they are better able to be accomplished outside the district what about the western area career and technical center we apparently send a very very small number of students there do you think there's an opportunity for more students to learn about it and perhaps more publicity about it for students who are not really headed to college or should we head everybody to college no i encounter students working at minimum wage retail jobs with master's degrees and i can't find a plumber for less than eighty bucks an hour so i think that no not everyone should be planning on heading to college i think that in the past in its previous incarnation the training career and training center had a negative reputation i would like to see some of the capital intensive technology programs focused down at the current technology center where only one unit is producing that rather than every several destroy every dish and that would i think bring up some of the attractiveness for using that resource thank you now i'd like to give you one minute to tell the voters why they should vote for you up well i believe that as a long term resident of the township that i bring a unique perspective to the school board i am very fiscally responsible and conservative i am very upfront what you see is what you get wizzy wig i suppose i am very concrete as an engineer i have a very strong sense of quantitative elements of things at the same time as an attorney i have a perspective on flexibility and working between parties i also work as an arbitrator and a mediator and so i bring conciliation skills to the environment as well so when there are challenging relationships i am well equipped to help the school district get through those relationships successfully thank you very much thank you very much for the opportunity