I have managed to pick up the requisite signatures to have my name placed on the ballot to run for School Board in the Ellenville School District. My main aim in running is to promote ideas and would like to hear a response from the other candidates, I would like to point out that you can have an early voting ballot sent to you to mail your vote to the school rather than go down to the school to vote on voting day. The fact that the voting occurs in the school creates a bias toward school employees, I would now like to put forward some ideas I would like to advance.

We should gradually reform tenure by limiting salary increases on the tenured portion of peoples positions. For example, offer extra stipends for exceeding class size thresholds or shorten the workday and then add a period that is not guaranteed by the persons tenure. This would make it possible to shift workloads from people higher on the pay scale to those lower on the pay scale rather than lay off people of lesser seniority.

There should be an affirmative effort to develop remote learning. We should develop summer programs with remote learning courses that students can take from home. I believe it should be possible for teachers to banish disruptive students from their classrooms to remote learning in or out of school. When teachers exercise the option of remote learning, they should expect to have their classes recorded. The availability of a recording would be of great pedagogical value and was often not made available during the pandemic remote learning hiatus which I consider a kind of sabotage. There should be made available remote learning electives for students particularly in courses of low enrolment. There could be a teacher in one school teaching students in multiple schools. I believe the future of Higher Education could well be with remote learning so we should prepare them. I can easily imagine a free remote learning University established at the National level with both live and artificial intelligence professors capable of educating billions of people. There will no doubt be a luddite resistance to this on the part of existing institutions, but it will help to control costs in Higher Education to have this competition.

I'm a bit obsessed with this remote learning because I spent a bit of my life as a professional student being paid to be a student at the graduate level and doing a small amount of College level teaching. I grappled with the subject of Physics. I generally did not know what was going on in class until I studied it from the textbook. I always hated it when the professor wouldn't follow the book. My favorite professor was the one who let me photocopy his notes. I think a remote learning system where you have access to a recording would be a truly superior learning system. I believe Education is more about students studying than teachers teaching.

Francis M. Gurgui

Napanoch