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David Caviness (Place 5)

“Introduce yourself, do you have any children attending ISD in Coppell, why are you running for this office?”

“I just want to say welcome, glad you’re here. My name’s David Caviness, I’m a 12 year resident here in Coppell. My wife, Jessica, she’s a classroom educator, been teaching now for 17 years. We have three boys – Blake, Bo and Benjamin. Blake is a fourth grader at Pinkerton, Bo is a kindergartener at Pinkerton and Benjamin is Pre-K, he’ll start kindergarten in the fall, also at Pinkerton. I feel it’s important that we serve the community in which we live. I have done that for the last 12 years. I’ve been on several Boards with the city, the Keep Coppell Beautiful board as well as the Coppell 2030 Vision Plan. More recently here in the district, I am co-chair of the Bond Oversight Committee. I serve on the Pinkerton PTO Board as a Dad’s Club President. Also, I am on the Board of Directors for the Coppell Education Foundation. I’m running primarily because I feel as parents, we are a little underrepresented on the Board, I could bring a long term parent’s perspective to our Board. I’m glad you guys are here, thank you.

 

“Can you tell us about the organizations who are endorsing your campaign and approximately how many CISD Board meetings you’ve attended in the past?”

“First part of that question, the only endorsements I’ve received are from individuals within our community. I have purposefully and intentionally ignored any request I’ve received from any outside organisations, especially in the right wing special interest groups of Austin. All my public supporters are listed on my website, you can go there. Davidcaviness.com. Those are specifically listed there. I’ve been attending Board meetings regularly for several years. I can tell you over the last year, I can tell you over the last year I’ve been to every one save probably one or two. I think it’s important that we’re engaged and we’re participating. It’s easy to sit at home and watch the Board meetings from your house. Unfortunately you also miss a lot of the interaction and engagement that goes on when you’re sitting at home and watching it the next day. I think it’s important and I have been attending Board meetings.”

 

”How can we keep our best and brightest teachers and administrators on our campus?”

“I think that’s a serious issue facing our district. When you look at how strong our school is and how strong our teachers are, there is a lot of outside pressure from other districts in terms of recruiting. I have over the last couple of years in preparing for this process, talked with many teachers, I’ve worked with many teachers professionally. One of the things you hear all the time from teachers is they want to do what they do best, and that’s teach our kids. As administration, sometimes we tend to start pushing down on our rules and regulations, and what that does is it puts a lot of burden on our teachers, it keeps them from educating our kids and puts more and more paperwork on them. I think first and foremost we need to be aware of our policies and procedures and what we are implementing and how that affects teachers. Secondly, and I hear this all through our schools, from both kindergarten all the way through our high school here, is teachers sometimes don’t feel like their thoughts are being appreciated and being listened to. Sometimes they feel that it’s a top down and they don’t get enough feedback. We should definitely place a greater emphasis on making sure that we are listening to our teachers, we’re giving them the proper avenue for them to provide feedback to us, the district administration, and taking this seriously.”

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