New school board members elected

Jennifer McGavin and Kristina Hines have recently been elected new board members of the Delta County School district. 

McGavin ran for the board because she said she had wanted to do more volunteer work, get involved with the community, and was always interested in politics from a young age. McGavin explained her thoughts on her win, saying she was pleased she won but was prepared to make the calls to congratulate the winners. “One out of three people who voted [did] for me, so that’s, you know, 32% of the people… and that means that I’m representing a nice big chunk of people in Delta County who are interested in my viewpoint,” said McGavin. 

McGavin was excited to get to know everyone on the school board and get into all the technical things that are required to do her new job. Her main focus is decreasing the amount of bullying in schools, increasing teacher pay, and just offering the best for the schools. “Less bullying would be nice. So I think that we need to start watching that. I would like to look for ways to increase teacher pay so we can recruit more teachers,” McGavin said.

 McGavin’s first priority deals with bullying. “But I think one of the things is understanding what bullying is, right? Because you can say things like I’m not prejudiced. It’s just that I don’t like a B or C, but I’m not prejudice,” said McGavin.“For instance, with LGBTQ people, why don’t we just be more open, especially as older adults to saying if you want to be called he or her. That’s fine.”

 She believes one of the first steps to dealing with bullying is giving students a role model by acting like one. “If you want to be called they that’s fine. In return, you give us the benefit of the doubt when we mess up and we don’t call you the right thing. And then if we’re doing it, then maybe it’ll also trickle down to the students. So that would be my approach is being a role model,” said McGavin. 

Similarly, Kristina Hines was extremely excited for her recent win. She can’t wait to work with the other school board members and find out what she needs to do to get started. The reason she decided to run was because she has young boys who attend public school and wanted to be more involved. Asked what she would do to make the district a better place, Hines answered she will take input from students and building off of that to solve issues. Her first priority as a school board member is to learn the guidelines and rules.

Hines is interested in learning School Board policies, “I would just go straight with what is on the work sessions and the policy reviews and the title of board meetings, see what’s on the agenda, and work on those issues that’s already on the agenda first.” 

Scott Siettmann, a Delta high school teacher, thinks both McGavin and Hines are solid candidates that were elected. “Jennifer McGavin is very well educated with a master’s degree and has been a business owner in our community for a while and Miss Hines has students that are in the school system and she has, you know, been closely watching what’s going on with our school district,” said Siettmann.