Why Theodore Miller Is Running for Cumberland County Board of Education

Theodore Miller’s children graduated from Cumberland County Schools years ago, but the father and retired Army master sergeant said he remains concerned about the education students are receiving in the school district.

Miller, who will be 64 at the time of the election, grew up in Flint, Michigan, and came to Fayetteville through the Army. He retired as a master sergeant after 20 years and decided to remain in Fayetteville. His children later graduated from E.E. Smith High School. Today, Miller owns a small dog-walking business.

Now seeking one of three at-large seats on the Cumberland County Board of Education, Miller has centered his campaign on what he described as a straightforward goal: ensuring students graduate performing at grade level. He argued that completing the coursework required for a diploma does not necessarily demonstrate that a student has mastered reading, mathematics, and other subjects at a 12th-grade level.

That concern is also personal for Miller. He recalled one of his daughters being recognized for making the A-B honor roll, only for the family to be notified later that she would have to attend summer school because of her performance on a state proficiency test. Miller said the experience raised questions for him about whether classroom grades and state assessments were measuring student achievement consistently.

What are the top two issues the Board of Education should focus on over the next four years? How would you approach them?

For me, the top issue is that all students graduate at grade level. I do not believe that all of the students we are graduating are graduating at grade level. They may have completed the coursework that was required, but they are not necessarily graduating at grade level. In some cases, they may be significantly below grade level.

If you’re graduating as a 12th-grade senior and you have an eighth-grade reading level or an eighth-grade mathematics level, I’m not sure how you qualify that as actually having graduated.

The second is holding the school system accountable for ensuring that all of our students are graduating at grade level and actually having a goal for the board. If I’m elected, I’m going to push an initiative that every senior who is graduating must take and pass the GED test to graduate.

For me, that should be the standard. 

I think one of the questions that has come up is declining enrollment and how you fix that. You fix that by having parents believe in the school system and believe that their children are receiving a proper education.

The GED is a nationwide standard used to demonstrate that someone who did not complete high school has academic knowledge equivalent to someone who did. If that’s what we’ve agreed someone should know to earn that credential, then every senior we’re graduating should be able to pass that test.

That gives us actual numbers and a baseline. Then we can work to make genuine and measurable improvements in our students’ education. That is my No. 1 focus: the quality of the education of the students and having all students graduate at grade level.

Cumberland County Schools has faced difficult decisions involving school closures, facility maintenance, and consolidation. What principles would guide your decision-making when evaluating future facility needs?

The biggest thing is: How does this promote the education of the student? Whether it’s closures, building maintenance, consolidation, location, or other decisions, I want to look at what is in the best interest of students and the educational process above and beyond everything else.

The schools and the board belong to the people, and members of the school board are representatives of the people. Then you look at the standard things: What are the costs? What are the benefits? What are the liabilities we’re looking at when we’re making these decisions?

I want to see the information, know it, and understand it. What’s the plan? What’s the goal? How do you measure success? Those are questions that have to be answered before making a decision.

How can Cumberland County Schools best support students with disabilities and ensure families have confidence in the district’s special education services?

We need to ensure students with disabilities have the proper resources allocated and available to provide them with the best possible opportunities and outcomes that are achievable for each individual student. 

Each student is going to be different in the way they are educated because their needs are going to be different. It comes down to how each individual student and their plan for getting a quality education can best be served. As a member of the board, my responsibility would be to make sure the program itself has the resources necessary to accomplish that.

Student enrollment has declined in recent years. What role, if any, do you believe the Board of Education should play in attracting and retaining students and families in Cumberland County Schools?

We need to create a school system where parents want to send their students to our schools instead of choosing an alternative or homeschooling. I talk to a lot of parents who say there’s just no way they would send their children to a public school. 

Why? Because they don’t trust that their children are being educated. They want their children to be educated, whether their aspirations are to go on to college or simply enter the workforce after completing high school. The best way to attract students is to have the best possible education system for our students that we can. Again, it gets back to my No. 1 goal: Every single student graduates at grade level.

You do that, and we’ll be a model nationwide. Every other school system in the United States would be looking at Cumberland County and asking, “How did you do that?” 

That’s the goal. That’s the standard. I want every student to get the best possible education because, in some cases, K-12 is all they’re going to get.

What steps can the Board of Education take to recruit, support, and retain high-quality teachers and staff?

Give them a positive environment where teachers are working in a productive environment that they want to work in. Give them the job satisfaction of knowing they’re being allowed to do what they spent so much time training to do: teach and educate children. They should be able to do that in a safe, disruption-free environment.

We hear about teacher pay, and I understand that. But teachers want to teach. They’re not doing it to get rich. They do it because it’s something they feel called to do and something they love.

How do we get good teachers to come here and stay in our school system? Give them an environment where they feel they can actually accomplish what they came here to do, where they feel good about coming to work, and where they feel they’re making a difference in students’ lives.

Teachers shouldn’t feel like they’re simply coming in and punching the clock or that, no matter what they do, they just have to move a student along. They shouldn’t feel like they’re not being allowed to teach because their classroom is so disruptive that they can’t do the work. 

They shouldn’t dread coming to school to teach. They should look forward to it. If we do that, we’re not going to have a problem attracting and keeping teachers.

What are your views on year-round schools? What factors would you consider when making decisions about expanding or maintaining year-round calendars?

I don’t have a problem with year-round schools at all. I understand the benefits of year-round schools.

When year-round schools were first being discussed, not just here but in other places, including Michigan, the reasoning was that over summer vacation there was a measurable degree of learning loss from the previous year. 

If you were moving, say, from eighth grade to ninth grade, you might lose some of the knowledge you had when you completed eighth grade and have to spend the first part of ninth grade catching up. With a year-round school system, the breaks are shorter, so knowledge retention can be greater, and there’s a more seamless transition as students continue through school and the material becomes more difficult.

So I don’t see a problem at all with year-round schools.

Cumberland County Schools currently has several schools identified by the state as low-performing. What role should the Board of Education play in improving student outcomes at those schools? What strategies would you prioritize?

The Board of Education plays a major role in the schools if we want it to. One pledge I’ve made during my campaign is that if I’m given the opportunity to serve the people of Cumberland County on the school board, I’m going to be at a different school every day. I’m not going to spend all day at the school because I have a job and have to work, but I want to visit different schools and look at different areas.

I don’t want to just talk to the principal or assistant principal. I want to talk to different people and look at different parts of the school. One day, I might go have lunch at a school. I want to see what our students are eating and how much food is being thrown away. I want to talk to cafeteria workers about what they see because the people who really know what’s going on are the people doing the job day in and day out.

Another day, I might ride a bus and talk to the bus driver. How would you improve the route? What do you think about the equipment you’re operating? What maintenance issues are you seeing? How would you improve being a bus driver? 

The same goes for custodians. I want to go into schools and look at fire extinguishers, bathrooms, and facilities. Are they clean? Are they well-managed? Is everything in working order?  It’s about getting into the schools, seeing what’s happening, and talking to the people doing the work to find out where the problems are, what we can do to improve things, and how we can make our schools operate more efficiently. The people who have been doing these jobs for 15 or 20 years often have good ideas, but sometimes nobody has asked them.