Public Education Matters

Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.

Scott DiMauro 0:15
This is Public Education Matters, brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:26
Welcome back to Public Education Matters. I'm your host, Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the nearly 120,000 public school educators OEA represents around the state. Those educators have so much power to shape the public education landscape in Ohio, not just when we stand together to stand up for pro-public education policies at the state house, or when we stand together to stand up for the strength of our collective bargaining agreements. Educators can truly make a difference in the policies that affect their fellow educators and their students when they answer the call to serve on local school boards. Now obviously, there are rules about only being able to serve on the school board in the district where you live, but not if you happen to work and live in the same district. But too often, educators who are eligible to run for their local school board don't answer that call to throw their hats in the ring. Dan Heintz is an OEA member who wants to change that and who wants more educators to follow his lead to run for their local school boards. We sat down with him earlier this year to hear more about why.

Dan Heintz 1:43
Hi, my name is Dan Heintz. I am a public school teacher at Chardon High School, where I teach 10th grade American History honors and regular and also AP US History. I am on the board of education in my hometown of Cleveland Heights- University Heights, which is where I went K-12, so did my wife and my son graduated in 2021.

Katie Olmsted 2:04
So why are you on the school board there?

Dan Heintz 2:09
Good question. Originally, it was because an orange monster got elected to be our president about eight years ago, and I zoned out for about two months and watched almost no television. Kind of crawled into a news cave, and when I turned on the news for like the first time in weeks, somebody shouted a question to Michelle Obama. And the question was, Michelle, what do we do now? And her answer was very, very simple, and it changed my life. And she said, "We do more." So I spent about two months really intentionally thinking, What is my more? And I came to the realization that, you know, I love public education. I've learned a little bit about public education, especially through my my involvement in my local where I had been the vice president of the Chardon Education Association. I had sort of found my voice in that capacity, and it was time for me to grow, and so I pulled a few people close, and they helped me get elected to the Board of Education.

Katie Olmsted 3:31
And so that was eight years ago. What have you learned in eight years?

Dan Heintz 3:35
So much. I often say that being a teacher gives you a really good understanding of the work and the kids being involved in your local as a building rep gives you maybe, like, a 10 foot high perspective moving up in the local gives you a higher vantage point from which to look out at the education landscape within your district, and being on the board of education gives me a broader view of, I hate to say it this way, but of the education industry, the education world, and as a result, I've learned a ton. I've negotiated contracts now on both sides of a round table, which is fascinating. I actually don't participate in negotiations for the Board of Education in Cleveland Heights, but one of the first things that I really pushed for is that board members be present during negotiations which had never been done in Cleveland Heights before, or at least hadn't been done in recent history. And my negotiating in Chardon. Me the incredible importance of having a board member in the room, because if there's not board presence in the room, then the board is getting a filtered understanding of what's happening in that room, and it's not always accurate.

Katie Olmsted 5:17
Oh, I work with locals that are in bargaining crises, and I can only imagine what a difference that would make to have an actual board member there, because so much of what we do, from the comms perspective, is just trying to get a message to the board members about what's actually happening and what's actually at stake.

Dan Heintz 5:34
It's dereliction of duty for the Board of Education not to have representation in the room during negotiations. You are negotiating 70 plus percent of your budget, so you are not performing your job from a taxpayer's perspective, and you're not doing your job in terms of your responsibility to your teachers. And instead, you are filling the room with people who are administrators who, unfortunately, too often sort of get braggadocious about what they were able to achieve at the bargaining table, and also tend to use that as sort of their props for their next gig. And that's just the nature of the business. Administrators want to move up. And that's fine. That's their job. That's totally cool. But who is at that table on behalf of the community, who's going to continue to be there, and they're going to have another generation of kids coming up, who are the students, who, who that contract is deeply affecting? So there has to be a member of the Board of Education or two, at least in the room. It's, it's anything else is just not doing the job.

Katie Olmsted 6:47
And I love that you've brought up that, that you are representing the community. You are an elected official, and you - if they like what you do, they vote you back in. If they don't like what you do, they vote you out. You are accountable to the voters, the taxpayers, the parents, the people in the district, in ways that maybe some other decision makers aren't.

Dan Heintz 7:07
Yeah, and, you know, and people sometimes. Another thing that I've learned on this journey that I've been on is a lot of people really don't understand the role of the board of education. They think that we are sort of, some people think that we are really involved granularly on, you know, who gets what coaching job or what, you know, how many? Who knows. We're not granularly involved in the day to day operations of the school district. Board of Education has really two hires. We are responsible to hire and let go treasurer and the superintendent. When you get from very far beyond that, you're really getting into a realm that's not yours to be in. We are not there to guide decisions based on, you know, or who gets hired, or all those sort of just boots on the ground stuff. We've got professionals for that. They're called teachers, and so it would be inappropriate for a school board to poke their noses into a lot of the day to day stuff when the school board evaluates the superintendent and the treasurer, which they should do every year, that's when conversations about, hey, tell me what went wrong. What did you learn through this? Or what have you? That's where sort of the accountability of the sup and the treasurer comes into play i s during those evaluation discussions.

Katie Olmsted 8:43
As an educator, did you understand fully what the job entailed before you took it?

Dan Heintz 8:50
Not at all what I knew. And one of the things that I'd really like to remind your listeners about is that I knew education, and I felt like that was a voice that had been missing from our board for too long. You know, when you think of the other boards that are out there, the realty the realtors board, those. It's made up of realtors, the bar organization is made up of lawyers, and yet, boards of education are not often populated by educators. And so I felt like, okay, we needed that voice. We needed that knowledge on the board, and my colleagues on the board say all the time how valuable it is to have me there. It comes up in in mundane ways, like when we're talking about MAP testing, they say, Hey, Dan, remind us, what do MAP scores really tell us? And what's the difference between a MAP score and another score? And, you know, so it's really valuable to have somebody who can just talk about that, who can talk about the burden, the administrative burden that otes brings. I mean, for our administrators, for our teachers. You know that? You know people talk about OTES who don't live OTES and holy cow. Okay, it's a nightmare for everybody involved. So those sorts of things are really important. And if you don't have the voice of a teacher on the board, the board ends up relying on their administrators, which is very often perfectly fine, but it is also a very filtered message. So having the voice of a teacher on the board, or, you know, a retired teacher on the board, I think, is critically important also in negotiations.

Katie Olmsted 10:57
Why do you think not very many educators make the run for it?

Dan Heintz 11:02
Because we're busy as busy can be, right? You know, we're busy enough. We're getting our kids up and off to school. We are coming home tired after a long day in front of kids. We're prepping tomorrow's lesson. We're grading today's papers, we're trying to maintain some sort of semblance of a marriage. We're hoping to have a social life now and again, and that's a lot, you know, it's a big job. Just being a teacher is a big job. All that being said, serving on the Board of Education has been one of the great joys of my life, and that's why I am such a big advocate for getting more of my colleagues to jump in, because public education needs you now more than ever, especially in Ohio.

Katie Olmsted 11:54
And at that local level, it is so important it that is, I mean, I don't want to use like battleground metaphors here, but that truly is the front line where a lot of education decisions are being made. Obviously, we have a lot of stuff coming out of the state house that affects what happens in our classrooms every day, but how that's implemented that comes down to school board decisions.

Dan Heintz 12:14
Yeah, it sure does when you talk about, you know, all of this chaotic book banning and all of these, you know, just bizarre rumors about kitty litter and bathrooms and and who's allowed to use what bathrooms? Who cares? Okay? I mean, what I care about at our public schools bathrooms is that it's clean and it has all the supplies it needs, full stop.

Katie Olmsted 12:36
yeah,

Dan Heintz 12:38
and you know, so you're absolutely right. It's really those boots on the ground that boots on the ground, understanding that does guide a lot of the work that the local Board of Education does, and having a teacher on that board to sort of interpret what these things, what these policies coming from the state, will look like in the classroom can be a really big deal. in my district, we just went through a really hard opening to the year, and we ended up, unfortunately, making the decision, having to make the decision to bring in metal detectors. And that was a really, really hard decision that, for the most part, had been taken out of our hands because of the behavior of some of our students. It was heartbreaking. But, boy, you want to talk about something that changes the culture of school buildings. That's it. And so as a school teacher and as a graduate of that very building, it hit very close to home.

And I do feel like that's exactly where the that unique perspective comes in, where, if you're, say, a business owner in the community, you say metal detectors, is a no brainer. Of course, we want to harden our schools. And first off, we know that that's that's not a clear cut thing. There's, there's not the data that says that solves all our problems, right. But also, you can bring to the table what culture feels like in a school. You see that in a way that if you're not in the schools every day, people wouldn't understand, necessarily.

Yeah, and you know, my district is a majority minority and majority poverty district, in terms of the students who are at our desks, not the community at large, there's a big difference, but the students in our seats are majority minority and majority poverty. And you know, I think that the rest of the board agrees with what I'm about to say, but I'm speaking for myself. I was against metal detectors because I felt like they would, you know, that when members of the community would come into the schools, they would sort of have their inaccurate ideas validated by seeing metal detectors, because that the truth is, that's not who our kids are. Are, unfortunately, a couple of kids forced us to make the decision, but it was heartbreaking, because I just feel like it's not a real representation of who our kids are and what they're up to, and yet, now also, just like some wacko who had a bomb in his the heel of his shoe now makes every one of us who goes to an airport take off our shoes, now every one of the students at our high school and middle schools have to experience this on their way in the building every day.

Katie Olmsted 15:33
And this is, I'm sure, just one of many things you've had to wrestle with in this role. In the last few minutes we have, let's sell it actually. Let's make this actually a good time, good because, I mean, listen, we're talking about the challenges, but there are opportunities here, and you've called it the great joy of your life.

Dan Heintz 15:50
Yes, it really is. Why? Because I'm able to interact with my hometown and the kids in our schools today in a way that that does impact their lives and and what a gift to me to be able to participate in making the decisions that helps to shape the rest of their lives in terms of what classes we can offer and what our facilities look like and you know, what teams are available to them, what field trips are available to them. It is fantastic, and being a teacher in the day and a board member at night makes me feel like I'm really taking my career that I chose because I love to a whole new level, and I'm taking my community maybe a step further too.

Katie Olmsted 16:47
Dan, thank you for joining us to help us understand and to help truly sell it. I mean it does. I can tell by looking at you and by listening to you, it is a passion for you, and it is such an opportunity for other educators.

Dan Heintz 16:59
Thank you very much. It really is.

Katie Olmsted 17:05
That does it for this episode of Public Education Matters, make sure you subscribe to this podcast on your favorite listening platform so you don't miss a conversation like this. In the future, we will continue to bring you new conversations every Thursday this season, as we continue to dive into the big issues facing public schools in our state every day, because in Ohio, public education matters.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai