Thomas Gardiner is one of three school board candidates vying to unseat the incumbent of District 9, Venus Cain. The two are running against Delvin T. Howard and Brad Owens.
Gardiner is a parent to a student in the district. He’s a former journalist, Marine Corps veteran, and communications consultant who is active in environmental protection efforts.
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 the county can choose the representative for this seat. Gardiner sat for an interview with Capital B Augusta.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Capital B Augusta: Tell me, what do you think the biggest issue is facing the Richmond County School System, parents, and students?
Thomas Gardiner: I would say that the biggest issue really is student performance overall. So with the scores that we have, our students are regularly testing below proficiency. If you take out A.R. Johnson, Davidson, and C.T. Walker, the rest of our schools have maybe a 15% proficiency rate at their testing intervals. So that’s abysmal.
That’s Georgia Milestones results. And so they’ve had about 10 years now since that test has come on board, and our scores have not gone up. [Editor’s note: last year, the district experienced gains in math in all grades but seventh, according to a Capital B analysis of state and local education data.]
Our students aren’t improving, and so I think that’s the biggest issue. But that also boils down to the little things, right? Like the consolidation, how we’re spending money, the budgetary issues; those things all play a role, but I think ultimately that is most important. Are we doing what we have to do to give opportunities to the kids that are in our care? This is the future of our city. This is the future of their lives, and we need to take that a little bit more seriously.
Speaking of student achievement and student performance, what do you plan to do, if elected, to improve student performance?
Well, so we have to boil down those issues. Like, where do those things come from? Is it environmental, right? Because we have a lot of classic lead exposure and things like that that could be affecting a lot of our children, especially in parts of District 9 where particular ZIP codes are more heavily affected than others. That’s a major issue. There’s some information about it, but a lot of it is kind of kept quiet or whatever, and we need to be investigating that.
The other thing that I see that we do a lot of is the development authority bringing in these companies and giving these tax abatements, right? These tax packages and things. So these companies come in, they use space. They use our land, our resources. They’re polluting. They’re doing all kinds of things, adding to those problems, but not contributing to the the tax base, right? And so while they’re here, using our roads and our infrastructure and things, their tax abatements also impact the schools, right?
So the school board is the biggest portion of the property taxes. So we’re doing a big disservice to our children, to the future, by not setting those things up more beneficially for the students. You know, we’re putting things on their back and not paying for their future with their education, and that’s what we need to be doing. So that’s a big thing, and then how we’re spending money, how we’re allocating those resources. A school consolidation saves money for the Board of Education and all that. But if you look at the statistics for how consolidations work and how the results play out, it’s not ever beneficial for the children. Scores schools don’t usually perform better. You get a higher ratio of students to teachers, and the quality of education tends to go down rather than go up. And those are really big problems.
What would you do, if elected, to improve school safety for students in Richmond County?
So that’s a multi-tier question as well. So that depends on whether you’re talking about what kind of safety, right? Because we have students who are bringing weapons to school and dealing with some of those things, and then you have outside threats as well. So that’s a multifaceted problem.
Students bringing weapons into the schools.
That’s really hard to do anything about from a legislative position, right? Because what you have to do, you have to change culture, right? So those things happen in a city’s culture. But part of that is making sure that we’re getting those students proper opportunities. So we’re putting people in a place where they’re in an environment with a lot of people from a total cross section, and that also is affected by that consolidation, right? So you don’t have the counselors or enough staff with that many students to effectively work one-on-one with students who might be at risk for violent behavior for those things.
Another issue is the lead contamination issue that I mentioned earlier, right? So there is a major correlation between lead exposure and one particular kind of crime, and that is aggravated assault. Aggravated assault in Augusta is like 400% the national average here, and there’s, like I said, a direct correlation. [Editor’s note: In 2024, Richmond County’s aggravated assault rate was 59% higher than the national rate, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.] So if we have these issues that we know about, then we could be doing things to preemptively get ahead of those issues, right? Get ahead of that violence.
