SCHOOL BOARD Q&As: Travis Padget

Name: Travis Padget

Age: 48

Occupation: Financial advisor

1. Please introduce yourself and explain why you are running for school board.

I was born and raised in Newton and returned as an adult to live and work here. I love being in my hometown and love being a part of making our town/community/world a better place to live and thrive. My husband and I have three sons and live on a small farm in the Newton area. We are dedicated to raising our family with strong ethics and a quality education. This will be my third term on NCSD’s School Board and I am looking forward to serving our District these next four years. I am running again as I see the district has been making great strides of improvement the last few years and I want to continue that work, the School Board has been working hard at being more effective and I believe the current Board has made significant progress in how well we work together (whether we agree or not), and I will have 3 children in the District over the next couple of years which is a shift in my personal perspective as I didn’t have any children in the District for the first seven years of my eight. The School District is extremely important for the success and well-being of our community and needs to be in the hands of strong steward of our children’s educations, our employee’s careers, and our communities tax dollars.

2. What is a parent’s role and how does it fit into the school district?

Parents should be team members with the school district and especially at the classroom level. The effectiveness of our teachers and curriculum needs to be enforced in the home and community, but our educators also need to personal insights from our families to help guide their work in individualizing each students education.

3. How do you think the district is recovering from the 2020 school year?

I believe the District is still working to recover from not just 2020, but the early end of school in 2019. We experience learning loss every summer during a regular cycle, but then to have a 6 month summer pause, followed by weekly remote learning and all the skills our educators and students and families had to master during the 2020, the learning loss and ability to measure “success” has been thrown way off course. We will continue to monitor our efforts and adjust our interventions as needed. These are the cards we were dealt and I believe we will be successful in navigating these uncharted waters as long as we all work toward the best interest of the education of our children.

4. What’s the best quality of Newton schools? What can the district improve on?

Red Pride is by far the best quality of Newton schools. We have amazing pride as a community in our schools and that pride serves as a driving force in how we review success in the schools, how well we work to educate and promote our staff, and why we continue to see such great community support of our District. As a team of life-long learners, our entire district should be working at constantly improving our entire district; we should never look at ourselves and think that we have it all figured out.

5. What other school issues are you most passionate about?

I believe we need to continue to work on continuity of language across buildings and through the grade levels. I believe we need to make sound financial decisions on how we spend our budget and how we decide taxation numbers (in my opinion, we need to stay as consistent as possible in our school tax rates to make it easier for families to budget. I believe we need to ask questions and review data for direction and answers. I am passionate about the quality of education our students receive and how well we prepare our educators for their most important charge of teaching our future.