On Mon., Sept. 9, Arizona House Representative Juan Mendez spent a day observing students and speaking with educators at McClintock High School.
English teacher Amethyst Hinton-Sainz served as the chaperone for Mendez’s tour.
“This is the first year we’ve done this,” Hinton-Sainz said. “It’s called ‘Take Your Legislator to School Day.’ It’s been great. He [Mendez] was very enthusiastic.”
Mendez at first found himself apprehensive at the thought of returning to high school after 11 years.
“I was actually pretty nervous about going back to school; getting up early, I didn’t know what I was going to do for lunch,” Mendez said. “That was kind of stressful.”
Mendez had the opportunity to interact with students in Hinton-Sainz’s English classes, as well as students in the AVID and EVIT programs.
“I went to a few English classes, got to see a lot of discussions,” Mendez said. “The discussions they were having were so different from the lectures I remember having. They were more student-led, Socratic-style discussions where the students were challenging each other to think about things differently.”
Observation of teaching techniques wasn’t the primary purpose of his visit, however.
“We’re trying to start a dialogue that will hopefully bring some realities to the forefront of discussions about school funding and policies regarding student assessment,” Hinton-Sainz said. “We’re trying to get teacher voice in policy-making, since policies are often made by people who don’t really know education from the inside and aren’t experts.”
Mendez’s objectives of Monday’s visit were much in line with this attitude.
“I wanted to see how you make all this work,” Mendez said. “I’ve been in my position for two years, but I recognize that we [the state government] give out a lot of mandates, many of which are not properly funded.”
“It’s great to see that you guys can do so much with the little that we give you,” he continued. “But it’s -I don’t know if it’s encouraging or discouraging– to think of how much more you could be doing if we were funding the schools adequately.”
Most educators believe that the unsuitable budget is compounding the challenges today’s teachers face, many of which were non-issues for their predecessors.
“Arizona’s budget has shrunk while the population has grown,” Hinton-Sainz said. “So with less money we’re serving more kids with higher standards.”
While arguably the most significant, the education budget isn’t the only issue that schools are facing. Controversy surrounding the Common Core standards and the use of technology in the classroom are topics both Mendez and teachers hope to address in the future.
“I have seen many instances, both here today and at other schools, where technology was effectively used in a supplemental way,” Mendez said. “I think that has a lot of potential, particularly with first time English-learners.”
Despite the oddity of having a Congressperson on campus, the McClintock faculty and Mendez agreed that the sight may become a more common one in the days to come.
“We could make his next visit more of a town hall type of thing, pick some education issues to focus on, as opposed to just a day of observation,” Hinton-Sainz said.
“I’m going to get involved with some of AVID’s activities. I want to shadow one of the EVIT students, see how that program affects them. I’m absolutely going to come see the Poetry-Out-Loud contests,” Mendez said. “I’ll certainly be back.”
Monday was the first step to opening up a line of communication between educators and legislators, with the ultimate goal of passing more realistic legislation to improve Arizona’s education system.