i'm pleased to welcome our next candidate jamison hardy and i'd like to start please with asking you to give us an idea of the strengths and qualifications that you would bring to the job of school director  one of the strengths that i believe i can bring to the township and the school board is my education background is in public finance have a masters degree in public administration in my doctor's degrees in business administration with a specific focus in leadership and finance and because of that one of the issues that i see is finance and so i i'm looking at that as one of my strengths as a school board candidate what would be your priority if you were elected do you have a particular well  you've said you would be interested in the financial side is that what you would concentrate on do you think well in terms of concentration certainly that would be one of the higher priorities for me i know that there are some significant financial issues especially coming down the pike  the school board has no control over the state retirement program and so there's some unknown issues there but with proactive planning i think we can position ourselves to not have as much of an issue with that but i do have some other priorities one of those happens to be how the school board is run itself i think there's some inefficiencies in the actual way the school board is run in terms of the meeting i also do not believe that the residents should be kept from the public debate currently a lot of the debate happens behind the scenes and before the meeting and i don't think that's appropriate i think that the constituents need to be able to hear the school board members discuss some of these difficult topics not referring to personal issues here in any way i'm simply talking about budgeting issues i'm talking about maybe philosophical issues in terms of where to spend money so i do have some of those priorities and a lot of them are financial a lot i will i will say a lot of them are financial but they're not  actually segue right into another one of our questions which is how do you think that there is enough opportunity for public participation in the big planning issues for example a new school or the fields issue are residents privy to enough information early enough and if not how do you think that would be change could be changed directly to the to answer your question i don't think that the public is privileged to enough information in a timely fashion i think decisions are made in such a way that the community is not able to have a strong enough voice my dissertation was on strategic planning so that's where my area of focus is in terms of my academic work and i don't i have not seen a strategic plan i've seen board goals which are not political with a strategic plan i think that the school board could put together a process by where maybe every other month the school board could meet with the community and start to process the strategic plan five seven and ten years out whereby the community could have a say up front because what's happening now and what's happened in my time in peter's township for the last thirteen years i paid attention to it is it's the decisions are pretty much made and the input is after the fact right and so it doesn't help and the residents get upset because they don't feel like they've had a voice and i really believe that the residents need to have a voice there are some very difficult issues coming down the pike and one of those happens to be space and capacity currently today we are over capacity with the district's capacity capacity i believe is five thousand in the last report that i saw was approximately twenty students over that right now and there's a projection being even worse in the future we have about thirty percent build ability of houses in the township which means that that can be a big issue in terms of capacity for our school district now it's not going to happen overnight but the solution won't happen overnight either and so we've got to start now with the community having input and i do not believe that that's happened with the current school board do you think that the school board should be the place where students or where residents come or students for that matter to express concerns i do  i think that the school board would would better benefit the community by providing a forum for that to simply be the issue if you go to a school board meeting they have a time where they allow comments from the public and i appreciate that but it's very limited and very restrictive and it's tied to the school board business meeting which if there's an issue that the community wants to deal with i find it to be difficult to deal with it because there's a pressure to get to the school board meeting so i believe that the school where would benefit by having a separate meeting maybe once a month maybe two once every two months where the only item of business is community input where you could have an hour an hour and a half to discuss some of these things in a very open way where there's there's dialogue back and forth and i think one of the problems is people fear that they fear that because a director as the current board does it handles everything in the back room and then when they come to the public meeting it's simply done and i just i think that's wrong and i don't think it gives the community a sense of  participation this will be pretty big changes to give more input earlier and at a wider opportunity a bigger time period right monumental changes i think in the current peters township school board but i think it's time i think it's time that the current school board realize that the business as usual mentality that they've been using over the last four to six years is not working and that's evident by a five million dollars deficit that's evident by a projected five million dollars deficit and i don't think if we don't realize that as a community i'm a resident of peter's township i have three children all three of them are school age children and i have a youngest is kindergartner the oldest is eighth grade i'm going to be affected by these decisions my children will be affected by these decisions over the next fifteen years and if we don't start now those solutions to those problems were not be fixed when my children and other children come along the way how do you approach or how would you approach making fun of let ics this is i know this is a big deal i have a philosophy and it's an eighty ten ten philosophy i think the arts and athletics both play a major part in the formation of young people and i think that  academics should receive eighty percent of the funding athletics should receive ten and the arts should receive ten again that's a radical different change from what's currently happening and the philosophy of most people some of the greatest formations of my own personal life came through my contribution of athletics and the arts either through music or through drama and when you look at the greatest contributions of society you look at these people who make these contributions and they are not always the most academically  superior students and i think that if we have a more balanced approach and a philosophical approach such as eighty ten ten you send the message that there is a place for athletics arts and the dominant place by the way level i mean academics that is the dominant and i don't want to send any message other than that it is the dominant place but it's not the only place so that's interesting how about the western area career and technical center do you think that we make adequate use of that for students you know i have to be very honest and upfront i need to do more work and educating myself about that topic i don't believe i have enough information to to answer that and part of the reason is because when you go to a school board meeting you don't have an opportunity to ask questions and so you have to dig yourself and i don't feel comfortable making a decision or a position on that based on community input when i don't have the ability to talk to the authority the authority such as the school board or those in charge of administration so i apologize but i'm not comfortable and i was interested that one of the candidates had the information that only fourteen students from pieter's attend that school and i was surprised myself at how low that number was given if there were no students who are not ready for college right shouldn't spend the money to go to college i'm going to assume based on the information you were given that let's assume that's true yes if that's true then i think it's very underutiliz again i just don't have the comfortable sense right now to be able to make a statement however i think that that part of education is a vital one and we need to use it if it's not being used we need to use it better then you also mentioned  something about the not getting the information for the board meetings and what about getting agendas distributed earlier to the public agenda is a great i think it's important to get them out early the problem is if you go to a school board meeting and you see that there is an attachment that they say referred to the attachment that you know he never gets it and i think that's wrong so having an agenda is ok it's great i think we should continue with that but i think having all the information available is even more important now i want to give you or you one minute please to tell the voters why they should vote for you thank you i simply think that for me as a candidate for peter's township school district you receive a person who has no agenda personally i also bring to the office integrity honesty and a dedicated spirit i'm not driven by friendships and one of the problems as i see today is current school board members are driven by relationships with people who have agendas and i think the betterment of the whole district should be taken into consideration i also think that my focus on fiscal stewardship is a very important aspect for today and so for those reasons i think and i would hope and i would ask for your vote and i think that's that's the position i'll take today thank you very much