Portales School Board welcomes new member

The Portales School Board welcomed new member Cade Skinner on Monday night at its regular meeting.

Skinner defeated Doug Pfaffenberger, 172-107, for the District 1 school board seat last week. The seat was previously held by retiring board member Rod Savage.

“It’s a lot of information and a lot to take in, but I enjoyed it,” Skinner told the News after the meeting.

Skinner was sworn in Monday to take over the last two meetings of the year for Savage, and he will officially sign on to the board for a four-year term in January.

“I’ve sat on boards before,” Skinner said. “There’s a lot of activities going on that I didn’t know about, but I’m happy to learn about all of them.”

Also at Monday’s meeting, board members approved a change in the curriculum from Carnegie math to Pearson math.

Two of Portales’ math teachers, Julie Fraze and Amanda Crawford, presented to the board why they believe the Carnegie curriculum isn’t working for them.

Fraze said that Carnegie math is more problem-based, while Pearson is a more traditional way of teaching.

“Our teachers have tried it, and it’s something that they have not felt success with,” Fraze said.

“They (teachers) said that with absences, it was really hard with a problem-based curriculum to catch students up,” Crawford said. “If teachers aren’t happy and don’t like what they’re doing, they won’t project to the students.”

However, the junior high math department seems to like the Carnegie curriculum. Fraze said she believes it becomes difficult to teach when students enter higher levels of math.

Crawford said the math department adopted Carnegie math in 2020 during COVID.

The Pearson curriculum will be adopted immediately for the high school math department.

Sara Hunton, the district literacy coach, also presented a positive Vistas Data report after stats showed students were above average in all areas.