Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Editor’s note: This is one in a continuing series of interviews with local school board candidates. For the Clovis School Board, in District 5, Nathan McCreery is challenging incumbent Terry Martin, the board president.
Nathan McCreery
Q: What made you decide to run for the school board?
A: I made the decision to run for school board because the things that I’m seeing in our schools are not the direction I think we need to head as a community.
Q: How are you qualified?
A: I have run a small business in Clovis since 1978. I was the first president of Clovis Downtown Inc. I’m a former president of the New Mexico Professional Photographers Association. I’ve served on several different boards of directors. I have worked in public schools as a substitute teacher. You know, I’ve just been in the community a long time.
Q: What do you see as the school board’s role in deciding what books are available in the school libraries?
A: The school board has oversight in the case that there were books in the school libraries that were not appropriate for children to see. Obviously, that would be different for a first grader than it would be for a twelfth grader.
But the question is, why would we have books in the library that would be objectionable to most of the community? The school library, in my opinion, the books should be primarily there for students’ reference, for class work and for things that they will have to cover in their classes like research papers, outside research and reading, etc.
Any student that’s in public schools can also have access to the public library and the standards between those two, I think are quite different.
Q: As a school board member, would you vote for the district to act independent of state mandates? If so, under what circumstances?
A: If you go to the state’s Board of Education website and you look at their statement of purpose, the very first bullet point in that is that the school boards should act autonomously in the interests of the community.
That’s completely in conflict with what the Department of Education is saying to local schools. They’re saying we have to operate by their standards. But the state’s Board of Education says we should be autonomous. So, there’s a conflict and there are areas in schooling where I think the school board needs to absolutely stand up and tell Santa Fe to leave us alone.
I think there is no time ever that a parent loses primary responsibility for their children. They may not act like they have primary responsibility. But pure and simple common sense would tell you that a parent has primary responsibility for their child.
The school board and I understand why that rule is in place. This is an issue that it is not unique to New Mexico. I see it coming up all across the nation in states.
If you don’t like a special program or you don’t like an assembly or something that’s going to be called part of the curriculum that’s going to be taught, you do not have the option of opting your child out of that program. They do.
There’s nothing you can do about it. You can put them in a different school, but now I have to ask a question: If a parent has four or five children in school, how can they afford to take them out and put them in a private school?
It’s such an abridgement of our rights as U.S. citizens and as free moral agents, we have the right to decide what our children are taught.
Q: If elected, what would be your No. 1 priority?
A: The first priority that I would have for the school board is that I want them to begin school board meetings with prayer. They have taken that off of the agenda. I think that 95% of the people in Clovis identify with a church of some kind and they have taken prayer out of the school board meetings. That’s the first thing.
The next thing is I would like detailed information about how budgets are arrived at because of a lot of the stuff that’s done. According to the law, things have to be done in a public setting. But the budgets aren’t done that way. From what I can see, the budgets are done in private meetings with somebody. I don’t know who made that decision.
I would want to see more public comment and more public input. We have the right to say what our money is spent for and how much of it is spent. As a board member I want to be more active in the policy decisions of the school than what I have seen from current school board members.
— Compiled by Landry Sena, the Staff of the News
Terry Martin
Q: What made you decide to run for the school board?
A: I love serving the students and the community. I feel that we always need to put the kids first. That’s the main reason.
Q: How are you qualified?
A: What I can say is that what I have learned as far as being on the school board is how precious our kids are that we deal with in our school system.
Q: What do you see as the school board’s role in deciding what books are available in the school libraries?
A: That honestly is going to be up to the superintendent and her staff. My position is only to do the budget and that’s pretty much it.
Q: As a school board member, would you vote for the district to act independent of state mandates? If so, under what circumstances?
A: The answer is no. All our funding comes and flows through the state.
Q: If elected, what would be your No. 1 priority?
A: I want to see our school district be the number one school district in the state of New Mexico as well as the country. That’s achieved through our instructors and the efforts of the teachers in our school system.
— Compiled by Landry Sena, the Staff of the News
