Why I am running
Douglas County Schools
The Douglas County School Board is letting us down. Ten years ago, our district had been recognized as a high-performing district with dedicated instructors and administrators and we scored in the 80th percentiles for Math and English on Nevada State tests. Now, after a steady decline in test scores, Douglas High scores in the 44th percentile for math and the 55th percentile for English. I believe that political and social pressures have affected the curriculum and the way students are taught. This has taken a toll on the quality of education. Parents and the community need to consider not only student success as a measure of getting educated, they also have to consider what the students are being taught.
Schools nationwide, and our schools, too, have been bombarded for decades by ever more left-leaning education policies, and more recently, progressive ideology has been ushered into classrooms and libraries, as well as professional development programs for teachers. Yes. In our county. If we stick with the current Board, we will have a progressive, left-leaning, ideology-based education pushed on our children and we will not preserve the founding values of America including individual merit, color-blind non-discrimination, and preservation of the nuclear family.
I decided to run for school board because I witnessed, first hand, the the lack of transparency by the Board and the Superintendent regarding the infiltration of Critical Race Theory and the LGBTQ agenda in curriculum and in teacher training. I decided to run because the current Board simply does not understand how the progressive "woke" agenda has fundamentally changed how students are taught, but more importantly, the profound negative effects it has on students academic success and their future success as adults.
My wife Leslie is a 30+ year retired public school elementary teacher with an M.S. Ed in Curriculum and Instruction and was a substitute teacher in DCSD until the 21/22 school year. I was able to help her two to three times a week during her last year of teaching in Roseville, California. I saw first hand what an elementary school teacher experiences daily and it was eye-opening. I support all teachers and the commitment it requires
Sincerely, David Burns