i'd like to welcome david this boss who is an incumbent on the school board now and is running for another term thank you for coming and talking with us today thank you for giving the opportunity to push it i'd like to start off by asking what you think your greatest strengths are as a school board member well i've been on the board now for nine years i've been a member of this community since one thousand nine hundred one have my law practice here since ninety four and my kids both were raised here and graduated from school here so i  really have a strong tie to the community i want to see it succeed i want to be someplace special and i think that the years that i've spent working on all the different committees in the school board really gives me an advantage over a lot of other people that might be running for this position do you have any particular concerns as you head into this new year or a new term probably the biggest concern is how we're addressing the the funding of the school district and we  fight that battle almost daily with the state they give and take to our budget but we're already looking at the possibility of asking for exceptions to raise taxes as much as four percent we can't allow that to happen and we've got to work with the administration get our costs down so that we don't have to keep going back to the community and asking for more and more money in the nine years i've been here the only time i ever voted for a tax increase was the year that the governor came in at the last second and pulled a million dollars from our budget we really had no choice but every year i've tried to find ways to save money refinancing our debt making it easier for us to function but we can't continue to ask the people in this community to pay more and more we're just going to be like allegheny county eventually the problem this year the extra funding needed for the retirement pensions of the teacher that what is the economy on it's kind of an ongoing problem that is every year our contribution to the pension plan goes up into the foreseeable future as their salaries as to health benefits we don't get any more money from the state so we need to be more and more cognizant of where we can save money on an annual basis are our budget actually good has gone up every year that i've been here what would your priorities be if elected well i think we have a really special person in our superintendency right now and i think we need to give her an opportunity to put her team together and build this district with her plan there have been too many times in the past where we've been fighting personnel issues and getting too involved in the day to day business of this district we have to give the superintendent what she needs to succeed because from what we've seen so far she can take this district a long way and improve it over where we have been over the last seven or eight years and i think we have to give her that opportunity we have to step back into our role as a board and not attempt to run this district on a day to day basis what would you say is the main role of the school board well if you look at the statutes in the way the the the state runs this we are really tasked with creating policy and were tasked with hiring a superintendent and creating a budget that's our most important function but we also have to deal as a liaison between the teachers the community parents students and get that information to the administration i don't think our job is to try to micromanage how those things are done but when we're presented with concerns we have to bring those to the district and then work with the administration to say this is how the community sees this we would like to have you move in that direction but on a day to day basis that's not our job well you've actually segues into a question that i've heard from many members in the community how do you how does the public get input to the school district is it through the school board  how can people be heard when they do have legitimate concerns not little things but legitimate concerns and i think the best way would probably be to contact school board members directly and get it into the chain properly but for years we have had initiatives where every time there was a large issue or problem we had a committee we had the long range vision committee that was established when i was president of the board those findings are still on the website so people can look at that and see what we thought five years ago right now we have a committee that is working with the health education program and another committee that's all that's working with the mathematics curriculum so people are getting involved on a regular basis we send out surveys all the time we did one when we were hiring the superintendent what would people like to see in that individual and we got a lot of really good feedback so i think there are a lot of opportunities for people to get involved but if they feel like they're not being heard they can come to the meetings they can stand in front of the podium they can express themselves like a lot of people do but i think we create a lot of opportunities by those committees and it has really drawn in a lot of people in the community how do people know what's being discussed in a particular community well for example the l'orange vision committee we actually went out and we we recruited people to come in on special areas so there was one on curriculum one on safety one on buildings so we tried to recruit people that were working in those particular areas we put that on the web site i know that shelley belcher does a really good job of keeping the community informed by blasting e mails out there about all those sorts of things so when a new committee is being established and i believe there is the comprehensive planning for education in the future that's going to be coming about here soon and she has been sending information out about that program already when the agendas are not really public until the very last minute and i think community members said i didn't know that was going to be discussed at such and such a meeting and a of times we're not sure that either there are an awful lot of we will come to the executive session before hand and be handed a new agenda with changes so we try to get it out there as soon as it's final week we sometimes we will get on our friday packet we will get a draft of the agenda so we know generally who's going to be hired what issues might come up and things are going to be voted on you would like to get that to the public but if over the weekend someone is removed from a position it's going to be an embarrassment to them that they were on another off so it's a fine line you have to walk there are probably some of the things that could be made made public like just general the general bills i think should be available to the public so everybody can see on a monthly basis where things are being being spent but anything that really has to do with personnel issues we have to be extremely careful with what about funding decisions about athletics how do you approach  decision on something that's going to be fairly expensive but it's really focused just on that reading well i think you have to look at that as a big picture and i know this is been an enormous issue this year but we have a fifty three million dollars budget less than two percent of that goes towards activities and clubs and sports and salaries so it's a very small number relatively speaking i think we have to make things available for all of our students there are a lot of students that wouldn't be interested in coming here if we didn't have sports and if we didn't have all the activities that we have but when you look at something like the fields and the fields are a huge issue in this election out of our the way we've restructured our debt those fields are costing us about ten thousand dollars a year because that money comes from the capital budget and i had to laugh when i read one of the entries on the blog that says yes i understand it comes from the capital budget but i don't care it's wrong well you have to actually look at the facts to determine whether it's a problem so i don't really think that on a percentage basis we are out of line with what we spend we make these things available to kids that that may not have an interest in going to college they want to go to western area they want to play football they want to be in theater so if you don't have those things available you leave those kids behind and i know we have candidates that want to defund sports we can't do that it's not fair to the families that can't afford to pay me we already don't fund things like hockey but the parents want to pay they're able to do that i think there's a lot of parents that their kids play football they couldn't come up with fifteen hundred dollars for their son to play football so it's just not a reasonable thing to do i want to ask you quickly do you think that we promote the use of the western area courses adequately and we don't and it's a shame because i've been on that advisory board for years on the joint operating committee this past year we had fifteen or twenty students that went right up to sixty thousand dollar your job and they walked  with machinist degrees or welding degrees they got a commercial driver's license while they were there and they're well equipped to get into the oil and gas field so they have immediately taken over jobs and i think that if it's going to come to the point where people here are going to say it's hundred thousand dollars for college is no longer a great investment when my son can get a job next week it's going to be a change i want to give you a minute to tell the voters why they should vote for you ok thank you  i would love to have the opportunity to conserve continue to serve this community i spent years on the zoning board i've spent years here with the school board only with one thing in mind to make this community a better place i think all of our children deserve a well rounded education they deserve an opportunity to do well in whatever field they choose and i think it's our job to make that a possibility for them you're going to hear from candidates that make this election about nothing more than the fields and if you want someone that will listen to a small group of people do what they're told and raise taxes i'm not your guy if you want somebody that will look at every situation and all the facts that are presented there and make a decision that is best for the entire community i hope that you will vote for me in november thank you very much