From Sean N. Hall, Orr’s Island:
I am writing to announce my support for Tyler Washburn’s bid for membership on Maine School Administrative District 75’s board. For more than two years now, we have all experienced unprecedented disruptions to the routines that once defined our daily lives. This unfortunate reality is particularly true with respect to how the children in our community have had their school lives disrupted and their opportunities for educational achievement attenuated.
As a former teacher who actually worked at Mt. Ararat Middle School while Tyler was a student there, I am keenly interested in the restoration of traditional instruction methodologies (as soon as it is safe to do so), the return of academic rigor, and a focus on developing those competencies in our community’s students that will best prepare them to compete and succeed in an increasingly complex world.
After spending a good deal of time discussing education with Tyler Washburn, I feel confident that his appointment to the school board will do much to undo the academic and social deficits our students have developed since the beginning of the pandemic, and that his student/outcome-centered focus on educational policy, as well as curricular and budgetary decisions, will benefit our students and our community at large.
When asked why he wanted to be on the school board, Tyler responded that it was “all about the kids.” In an era when even the most innocuous appointments to boards and committees seem to have become polarized and political, Tyler Washburn appears to genuinely be most concerned about what is best for our community’s students.
For Tyler, it really is all about the kids.