What does a Listening Tour conversation sound like?

Speaker:  Jay, I’d like to see the policy makers do something about two things: One, I would like for them to be more realistic about what a high school graduate should be able to do. We need to stop raising the standards so significantly.

We’re at a threshold where our kids are perfectly capable of having a good working knowledge that a high school diploma would award and then marketing themselves in the workforce. I feel like we overshoot that sometimes and we’re targeting more of the individuals that are more college bound and as you said earlier, not everybody is.

Then the second thing that policy makers need to help us with is attendance. We are struggling with attendance. One-third of our population in Bay County is absent on any given school day and there are no true ramifications from a school principal standpoint of what we can do to change that. It’s no longer viewed as being important.

Then that’s translating to the workforce as I hire younger people to my staff, oftentimes in support roles but sometimes in teacher roles where they didn’t find it important to come to school. Can you imagine their track record when they become employees? We’re not setting them up for success.