Incumbent candidate for Escambia County School Board District 2 seat faces two old foes
It's rematch time.
The same three candidates who ran for the Escambia County School Board's District 2 seat four years ago are all running again in the upcoming primary.
This year's race sees Paul Fetsko, incumbent candidate and the district's former assistant superintendent, facing challengers Ray Guillory and Kells Hetherington.
In the 2018 election, Hetherington lost the primary election, coming in third with 27% of the vote in a three-way race. Fetsko won the seat after taking 55% of the vote in a runoff against Guillory.
Meet Paul H. Fetsko: Candidate, Escambia County School Board D2
Meet Raymond Guillory: Candidate, Escambia County School Board D2
Meet Kells Hetherington: Candidate, Escambia County School Board D2
Paul Fetsko
Fetsko is a retired longtime Escambia County teacher and administrator. He started out his career with the district as a teacher focusing on deaf and blind students.
After five years as a teacher, he became a special education administrator, eventually overseeing the district's programs for deaf, blind, homebound and medically fragile students, in addition to programs focusing on adaptive physical education and occupational therapy. He managed such programs for over 20 years.
Fetsko served as the district's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction between 2000 and his retirement in 2012.
If reelected, one of his biggest goals would be to close the achievement gap, he said. To do so, Fetsko said, he would like to push his fellow board members toward reinstating an educational model for "continuous improvement."
"When I was the assistant superintendent, we utilized an instructional model that gave us great results in closing the achievement gap," Fetsko said. "That model was dropped, and our steady increase in gains has never recovered to what it was before that."
The model was dropped by the Escambia County School District in about 2008.
"One of the major premises of it was that the teachers designed, developed and created the instruction to happen in their school," Fetsko explained. "Each school had a leadership team organized by grade level or by subject area, and those teachers developed what the instruction was going to be and which standards and objectives were going to be covered within a three-week period."
Alongside his foremost goal of closing the achievement gap, Fetsko said, he has three additional priorities: maintaining strong academics in the classroom, recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers and ensuring the safety of schools, students and staff.
"Our kids need to be safe," he said. "And then, we need to educate them."
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Ray Guillory
In his professional career, Guillory worked in the restaurant management business as well as with unions. He is the past treasurer for the American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations of Northwest Florida.
Additionally, Guillory said he has served on the board of directors for CareerSource Escarosa, an organization that provides career readiness training for people who are looking for employment.
Guillory said as part of his union work, he traveled to Tallahassee on multiple occasions to petition state representatives to increase funding to educational programs.
He said as a private citizen, his lobbying efforts did not achieve the results he would have hoped for, so he is running for school board with the goal of improving the local educational landscape from the inside.
As the father of three daughters, Guillory said, "I will bring parent's perspective to the board." Two of Guillory's daughters are graduates of Escambia County high schools. His youngest daughter is a rising seventh grader.
"My top goal is to make sure that we don't lose any more schools like we lost Warrington Middle School," he said, referencing a school slated to become a charter institution after repeatedly earning D school grades. "We have other schools that are in the pipeline that have the same things happening to them."
Guillory said that he believes underachieving schools' average proficiency test scores must consistently rise on a year-in, year-out basis.
"They'll have these two or three bad years, and then they're like, 'Oh, well the state is going to be involved if we don't bring this grade up,'" he said. "So they put this concerted effort in once every three years, and they push, push, push to raise that grade up from a D to a C, and then they go back to business as usual."
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He added serious problems like the underachievement of certain District 2 schools cannot be fixed until local leaders are willing to publicly address hard truths.
"Because there's a lot of other things that need to be worked on such as school safety, or what are we going to do about the millage rates?" he said.
He also said he thinks school board members should hold more town hall meetings within their districts to hear from parents.
"So when we're talking about tax rates and stuff like that, maybe we should be having town hall meetings, getting feedback, not only from the teachers and the staff — who are underpaid, understaffed — but also we should be talking to the constituencies to find out if they are willing to pay a little bit more so that we can improve the schools," Guillory said.
Kells Hetherington
Hetherington is a former journalist. In an interview with the News Journal, he said that he started off as a political reporter in Danbury, Connecticut, and once worked as a manager for a NPR affiliate based in Alaska and then as a deputy editor for the Washington, D.C.-based media outlet, The Daily Caller. He is currently going through an examination process on his way to obtaining a license as a certified public accountant.
"Well, I ran four years ago and didn't win," Hetherington said about his 2018 run for Escambia County School Board. "But I appreciated the many, many people who voted for me."
He has chosen to put his name back in the hat for a second time because "… since I ran, the same problems are still in existence or have gotten worse, and I concerned that I have a 2 1/2-year-old daughter now who is obviously going to be in the school district for a very long time starting very shortly," he said.
Hetherington said his top concern is school safety.
"What I've heard as I've gone around and gathered signatures for the campaign is parents are telling me that schools are out of control when it comes to behavior problems," he said. "Bullying is not being addressed by the school administrators, and when they complain — even in situations where there is a physical altercation that results in someone's being bruised or mildly injured — still it is not getting addressed by school administrators."
Hetherington said parents he's spoken to in recent weeks are unhappy about a lack of disciplinary measures for students who cause trouble.
"When we have a situation where a student is acting belligerently or out of control, we need to intervene and take care of it," he said. "But the right now the administrators and the teaching faculty just simply (address) it as a hands off approach, 'You work it out amongst yourself.' And that's not always possible."
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The second biggest complaint that Hetherington said he's heard from parents has been the mishandling of assessments and evaluations to determine if a student meets the criteria for special needs or academic accommodations.
"This is something that I want to address by stepping in and allowing a third-party type evaluator to be paid by the district, for the parents to take the student to that third party evaluator to get him evaluated," Hetherington said.
"Students who, for example, need to take tests in separate rooms or get extended time, they're not getting those accommodation," he added. "That's a shame, because a lot of these students could succeed, but they can't succeed without these accommodations. So, it's a cutting off our nose (to) spite our face kind of thing — we save a few bucks right now, but in the long run, it's costing a lot of money."
Hetherington also said that if elected to the school board, he would work to increase teacher salaries.
Colin Warren-Hicks can be reached at colinwarrenhicks@pnj.com or 850-435-8680.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Meet the candidates for Escambia County School Board District 2 seat
