Former St. Pete City Council member Bill Dudley is running for Pinellas County School Board. Dudley is the third candidate to enter the race to replace three-term board member Janet Clark. Clark has not filed for re-election yet, but said she plans to.
Dudley joins retired Gulfport Elementary teacher Joanne Lentino and SPC adjunct professor Matthew Stewart in the race.
“I’ve been an educator all my professional life,” Dudley said of his decision to run. “The only time I haven’t been was when I ran for City Council and was on council.”
He said he considered running for something like the State House, but decided that wasn’t for him.
“I’m one of those guys who likes to keep it local because I think that’s where the rubber meets the road,” Dudley said.
Dudley has been an educator for 35 years. He spent most of his career teaching at Northeast High School in St. Pete but also had short stints teaching in elementary and middle schools.
He’s running for a seat on the school board at a time when public perception of the school district is failing. After last year’s “Failure Factories” report that uncovered five chronically failing schools in South St. Pete, those in the know have been crying foul over a school board that not only did nothing, but reportedly took steps to create the problem.
“If it was easy to solve, it would be solved,” Dudley said of the impoverished public schools on the Southside.
But he also acknowledged that it was time for a change.
“I’m not real sure how effective [Janet Clark] has been,” Dudley said. “If the schools have been in that situation that they’re in, she was part of all of that.”
Dudley has some preliminary ideas on how to improve the failing schools and educational outcomes as a whole. First, he said students need to be ready to start school. That’s an issue of better utilizing early childhood education.
He also suggests taking a look at better compensating teachers in struggling schools.
“Good teachers shouldn’t be only for the IB programs and the special programs,” Dudley said. “Good teachers need to be in those schools and the reason they don’t go is it takes a lot of work in those schools, and quite frankly I think we need to compensate them for extra time.”
But as far as a concrete plan for the five failing schools — Melrose, Maximo, Lakewood, Campbell Park and Fairmount Park Elementary — Dudley said he’s not ready to dive into the details. Instead, he’ll be meeting in the coming days and weeks with current school board members, Superintendent Michael Grego, and school administrators to get a better feel for what needs to happen.
And he’s also going to be talking with teachers. After all, they’re the ones in the classroom with students every day, which reminds Dudley of another thing he’d like to change — scheduling teacher meetings during class time.
“That’s just stupid,” he said matter of factly.
Currently, teachers are sometimes pulled from class to go to mandatory meetings leaving students to be shuffled into other classrooms and taken away from valuable classroom time. Instead, Dudley suggests looking at other alternatives like paying teachers what the district would pay a substitute teacher to attend meetings during non-school hours.
He’s also not a big fan of the current standardized testing structure.
“The state testing is crazy,” Dudley said. “You spend half the year teaching kids how to take a test. It’s stupid.”
In the coming weeks, in addition to meeting with stakeholders, Dudley will also be working on getting his campaign together including establishing a website with more information for voters.
