I spent all day at the Schultz Center, whose history is too long to recount here but has a connection to the local school board in Duval County, Florida. The Schultz has the capacity to host large scale meetings that the school system lacks in other facilities unless it rents hotel space or attempts to hold a community meeting in a high school in the midst of a school day.

After attending interviews conducted by the Community Focus Group and the School Board, I have a good sense of the two finalists and will share my thoughts later. I am honoring the School Board’s request that no one publish before Wednesday so neither candidate learns about what the other said and gains an edge.

Mind you, they cannot legally embargo reporting anymore than they can close the meetings to the media and public. Florida’s Sunshine Laws still have some punch left in them. But they asked politely, so I will do as they asked.

There was a community meet-and-greet in the evening. I was tempted to skip it and went home. I live about 20 miles from the city center, about as far as one can go west in Duval County and still be in Duval County. But then I realized that there were two questions I wish had been asked and weren’t. I went back to ask them.

The set-up was not conducive for me to get in front of each candidate and ask my questions. I’m asking them here in hopes that one or more school board members might see this post and add the questions to their list that they will ask when they meet individually with each candidate tomorrow, that is, Tuesday. With this long explanation out of the way, let’s get to it.

1. DCPS has adopted online curriculums for its academic classes in the last few years. That translates into screen time in the classroom. How much screen time is optimal for students and what is the maximum screen time that students should not exceed in a school day? Please differentiate your answer by age as you see fit.

Nothing is sadder than to walk around a school several times a day looking through classroom windows to see that the students are working individually on mandated programs. Research varies on how much screen time is too much, but increasing anxiety and behavior issues among students suggest that the district is exceeding the limit.

Online programs saved many a teacher during the pandemic as a means of managing an otherwise impossible workload. But we have emerged from the pandemic. The problem is that online curriculums are very efficient at harnessing Skinnerism, the belief that human behavior and learning can be controlled and channeled through applying a system of rewards and punishments. But the theory runs into difficulty because humans are very clever and begin to rebel once they come to believe that they are being manipulated.

During my childhood (1960s) my sisters and I were under a television restriction. We could watch no more than one hour of television on school days and no more than two hours on weekend days. That is why I grew up never having watched Saturday morning cartoons. A boy had to carefully allocate those hours and I wanted them available for the evening. I don’t know if my Mom was ahead of her time or simply didn’t want her children lying around the house all day watching TV. Either way, we got the best kick-in-the-pants: go outside and play with our peers.

2. Vygotsky and Piaget, among others, pioneered theories of child development in the 20th century. How should these theories inform the ways we teach children and design curriculums?

School must be more than using children to produce reading and math scores on standardized tests. The state environment in Florida, with its punitive measures for teachers, schools, and districts, offers a great temptation to collapse the curriculum to focus on what the state tests require and then use that to grade all of the above.

School has to be more, much more than even providing a course of instruction that addresses the whole child with classes in art, music, physical education, and beyond.

We have to recognize that these young humans are indeed fully human at whatever stage of life they are living. They are not a work-in-progress that won’t be ready until they reach adulthood. They are living their lives now! But at the development stage appropriate for their age.

It is the job of schools, whatever type, to provide the environment in which children will thrive and develop as they should. As a freshman teacher, I greeted each new class by encouraging them not to miss out on all that high school offers. Beyond the academics, they should make time to find their posse, the group of friends they will ride with for the next four years, they should go to the dances, they should find after-school activities for their interests … the four years go by so fast, they need to experience it all.

All of it, including the heartbreak of broken romance, is a part of the human experience and crucial for them as they grow. How do we make sure that our schools are providing a safe place for them as they do so?