Menu
Beau Baird visits with GMS seventh-graders
When Beau Baird was a student roaming the halls of Greencastle Middle School, he had no idea he would one day be State Representative Beau Baird.
In fact, the second-year representative from Greencastle didn’t want to be in politics, he told GMS seventh-graders Friday afternoon.
“I didn’t want to do this. I never thought about this,” Baird said. “But I truly love my community and I wanted to make sure that their representative was listening to them.”
But perhaps some of those seeds were sown in the very room where Baird was speaking, where he took Matt Huber’s social studies class.
“I think I took social studies with Mr. Huber in this classroom,” Baird recalled, thinking back to the 1990s. “So any one of you could do this.”
The room now houses Kristien Hamilton’s seventh-grade math students, though a few of them got a brief civics lesson on this day from their teacher, state representative and Principal Scott Weltz, a former social studies teacher himself.
“The most important thing about my job is listening to the people in the community,” said Baird, whose District 44 encompasses all of Putnam County as well as portions of Parke, Clay, Owen and Morgan counties
While they are several years from voting age, Hamilton emphasized that Baird’s constituency includes everyone, including seventh-graders.
“He’s making decisions that ultimately roll down and protect you,” Hamilton said.
During a question-and-answer session, Weltz asked Baird if he had any advice for students if they see something in their community or school they would like to see changed.
Baird told them to think about the issue first and really establish what the problem is. His next piece of advice was to think about the perspective of the person who has the power to change things, whether that be a student government representative, teacher, principal or parent.
From there, he said to try and find a solution that can work for all parties involved.
In a sense, that was the purpose of Baird’s visit to GMS on Friday.
Much ink has been spilled across the state over the last year addressing the disconnect between public school teachers and state lawmakers, particularly those from Baird’s Republican Party.
Hamilton, as the president of the Greencastle Classroom Teachers Association, has been active in going to the Statehouse, both during the Indiana State Teachers Association Day of Action rally last fall, as well as multiple visits since the General Assembly session began in January.
While they come at the issue from different angles, Baird and Hamilton have also found some common ground in their discussions. This trend continued as the duo sat and talked for most of Hamilton’s prep period Friday.
One subject that Hamilton brought up was the difficulty in accessing school data, as some is collected in one place, some in another, some in yet another. She went through this when she moved to Indiana from Illinois and was trying to research not only job opportunities, but schools that would be appropriate for her own children.
“As I’ve tried to research education in Indiana, I feel like it’s siloed,” Hamilton said. “There’s no cross-correlation. I think it’s critical you get that cross-correlation.”
Baird agreed, saying he’s had trouble, jumping from website to website, database to database, as he did school research for his own job as a lawmaker.
This issue is something being addressed in a bill currently before the legislature, and Hamilton encouraged Baird to look closely at it.
Another issue that is part of bills authored in both the House and the Senate is training teachers in trauma-informed education.
Better understanding the social and emotional needs of students is an issue that hasn’t always seemed necessary for educators — it was viewed as something to be addressed at home. However, it has become increasingly important.
Both bills address training for prospective and current teachers, though Hamilton said the Senate bill takes it further.
“To have some more solid resources, that would be phenomenal,” Hamilton said.
The educator also addressed the elephant in any room when it comes to teacher-lawmaker relations — teacher compensation.
While Gov. Eric Holcomb put together a task force to address lagging teacher pay in the state, there will be no results until next year. Teachers and their supporters have asked why Indiana’s budget surplus could not provide stop-gap funding in the meantime.
Baird said plainly that with it being a non-budget year and bills having already passed from the House to the Senate and vice versa, that will not be addressed this year.
“I think it’s too late to do anything like that because we’ve already passed the halfway point,” Baird said. “I don’t see there being a path to that happening (in 2020).”
He did not close the door to further discussion of the matter, however.
“I think we all care about our teachers and want to see them compensated,” Baird said. “We need to find a path forward together.”
Baird said he has reviewed budgets of public schools around the state and is concerned about the overall financial situation and how it affects the ability of corporations to better compensate their employees.
One thing he said he keeps coming back to is the high cost of insurance — a matter that affects any entity with employees, not just schools.
Baird said he hopes to see a legislative study committee look at the possibility of forming a statewide insurance pool for school employees to see if it would help local school districts mitigate this high cost.
“I don’t really care how it happens, as long as it frees up money to compensate our teachers, without making insurance coverage worse,” Baird said. “At the end of the day, maybe it’s not a feasible option, but I want to see it studied.”
Asked about the controversial subject of public funds going to private charter schools, Baird said he still has mixed feelings, knowing that for families in certain situations, it’s a good solution, though the corresponding funding loss is hurting public schools.
“At the end of the day, you want every child to have the best education they can have,” Baird said. “All the communities are so different. How do you level the playing field but still do what’s best for the families?”
Hamilton gave the example that Greencastle Community Schools has lost something like 80 students in the last year, which would mean nearly a half-million-dollar loss in funding, though these losses are not largely to charter schools.
However, it puts a corporation like GCSC in a bad position of losing funding while only being able to do so much to cut expense.
Baird said he understands this. While he believes the funding should follow they child “there has to be a stabilizing factor for the school that the student is leaving, for budgeting purposes.”
He suggested that when students leave a corporation, perhaps the funding could be tapered down at the old corporation while it’s ramped up at the new one.
Hamilton’s and Baird’s conversation made it clear that while they may disagree on a number of issues regarding public education, they both want what’s best for the students, the educators and the communities.
“I wasn’t thinking you have the magic wand, but I thank you for listening to me,” Hamilton said.
“None of us has the magic wand,” Baird said. “But it takes having conversations and breaking down these silos.”
This sort of genuine discourse has been the outcome of Hamilton’s Statehouse visits. It’s why she’s been absent from class some days, with a genuine interest in improving education in Greencastle and around the state.
And while the students couldn’t sit in on their teacher’s and their state representative’s conversation — and probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it anyway — Weltz hopes Baird’s visit still showed them the power of speaking up and having your voice heard.
“She’s been telling her kids about how you can get involved,” Weltz said. “She wanted an opportunity for her kids to see it.”