Voters across Richmond County will decide on Election Day whether to retain District 9 school board incumbent Venus Cain or elect one of three other candidates to the seat. Thomas Gardiner, Delvin T. Howard, and Brad Owens are all working to unseat Cain.
Cain has spent the past 15 years on the board. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she is a U.S. Army veteran, mother, grandmother, and longtime community leader who has experienced Richmond County schools as a parent and grandparent. She has served in several public service roles, including airport commissioner, PTA president, neighborhood president, and both vice president and president of the Richmond County Board of Education. She retired after 30 years service with the Department of Defense.
Capital B and Local Matters of Georgia are teaming up to cover the District 9 race, one of the most important ones in Richmond County, because it is an at-large district, meaning voters across Richmond County can choose the representative for this seat. Cain sat for an interview with Local Matters Podcast of Georgia, a partner of Capital B Augusta’s.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the Local Matters interview in its entirety on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Student achievement
Local Matters of Georgia: We want to talk about student achievement. You know we have students performing at various academic levels. What specific strategies would you support to improve student achievement, particularly for those students who are performing below grade level? And how would you measure whether those strategies are indeed working?
Venus Cain: Our children need to be able to read. You can’t read, you can’t do anything. So we’ve put a lot of emphasis on changing up and using phonics more so. One of the problems for us as Richmond County as a system, we don’t make up the curriculum. The state comes back and says this is what you’re going to teach, this is how you’re going to teach it. We don’t give it long enough to really work. But I like the fact that we’re going back to phonics, which I think will help our students. And we’re putting more emphasis in our early grade levels to ensure our students can read.
How we do that is along the way, we have measures that we can check. We do the little spot test with the spot check that they do to see the progress the children are making.
I can give a good example. There’s something that’s been bothering me lately. I’ve been working with a parent who is homeless. Her child has not been in school since August. Yeah, has not been in school since August. One of the reasons is they’re walking the streets everyday. So you never know where they’re going to be at from day to day. The problem becomes when we do get them in school, you may have a child that’s missed six, seven, eight months of school. We’re still expected to get that child up to grade level. That hurts us.
Accountability
We want to talk about leadership and accountability. If you are reelected, what is one measurable change that you want to work towards? And how would your constituents hold you accountable for getting that thing done?
Well, my constituents hold me accountable everyday when they call me and say, “Why did you do this this way and why did you do this that way?” One of the things that I do want to do, I do want to see the T. W. Josey project finished. That is very, very important to me. I just got a text message that they’re going to have the unveiling of the T.W. Josey football field, which I worked very hard to make sure they got. To make sure that it was worthy of Deon. I worked to make sure they got the press box redone and updated. I want to see those projects through as well as a museum for the Laney community for their hall of fame.
School safety
What is your approach to balancing school safety, student discipline, and creating a supportive learning environment? Are there specific policies and programs that you would like to see implemented to improve discipline and safety?
I have been asking for the last several years to strengthen our student code of conduct. And I’ve had some pushback from board members. And then you’ve had some pushback from community members that say, “You know – that’s what kids do. They fight.” No, that is not what children do. I’ve seen some of the vicious fights. I think they’re just horrible. I think we should have a zero tolerance. I do not feel that any child should go to school and feel like school is not a safe place for them. Not only should the student, but a teacher should not feel that a school is not safe for them.
I don’t like the fact that we have to put security scanners in and have them at football games and kids have to walk through metal detectors because I feel schools should be a fun place like it was for me and you and some of us older. But I do have to realize this is the day and time we’re living. So, I’m a big proponent of whatever we need to do to keep these children safe. Let’s do it, but I don’t want it to feel like it’s a jailhouse. When it comes to the football games, let’s do bookbags, clear bookbags. Even in the schoolhouse, let’s move to clear bookbags.
