Anette Carlisle Campaign Announcement Speech
Thank you, gentlemen, for your kind words. It is an honor to be lauded by such great community leaders and good friends! Thank you, Mr. Austin, Dr. Lowery-Hart, and Mayor Harpole, Jim, Russell, Paul. I am honored. And also thanks to Alice O’Brien for her comments in a few minutes.
I am also honored by the presence of Representative Four Price and his wife Karen, by Mayor McCartt and city commissioners Lilia Escajeda and Ellen Robertson Green. Thanks to my fellow board members Mary Faulkner and Jack Thompson, along with Jim Austin, for attending. I am very honored to have the head of Amarillo College, Dr. Paul Matner, and the former president here, Dr. Bud Joyner. Other dignitaries in the audience include the head of Region 16, John Bass, and the head of our P-16 Council, Robin Adkins. Gary Molberg and others from the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce, and superintendents from Hereford, Kelli Moulton, from Canyon, Mike Wartes, and from Amarillo, Rod Schroder. And so many AISD staff! I really feel like I should introduce the entire audience!
I am also pleased to have my husband of 32 years, Dr. Taylor Carlisle, and one of our three sons, Everett Carlisle, present. My brother, Dr. Tom Johnson, and my sister-in-law, Dr. Susan Johnson are also here. All of my family members are probably thinking, "Oh, no, here we go again!"
Really, thank you all for being here. This is an exciting time, and I appreciate the support from friends and family.
Now, the reason we’re here:
I am running for the Texas State Board of Education, District 15.
I am honored to have the support of my good friend and current State Board of Education Vice-President, Mr. Bob Craig of Lubbock.
Why am I running? Perhaps the better question is, why wouldn't I run?
This race centers on three things I care passionately about: our kids, our communities, and our economy.
Our kids need a world-class education. They must be prepared to be successful in college and in their careers. It is crucial that we provide them the great education they deserve, to build the workforce our communities need.
They need a strong curriculum that gives them real-world application. We need a curriculum that truly prepares them for success.
Texas needs an accountability system that drives learning and measures the right things, the things students need to be successful. We need to remove the punitive labelling system that tells a community their school is low-performing when it may be passing or excelling in 95% of the indicators.
We need flexibility to allow us to meet the needs of all students, rather than trying to make them all take the same path.
Our schools belong to the communities they serve. Right now, our schools have become more accountable to distant governmental bureaucracies than to the stakeholders in our own communities. We need our system to return local control to the people we know in our schools, to the people we elect to represent us on our local boards.
We also need to listen to education experts, and let them guide us when making the laws about our education system.
The make-up of the children attending our schools has changed over time, as have our communities. These children arrive at our classrooms with ever-increasing challenges, challenges that make it more difficult, and more expensive, to educate them. One significant challenge involves educating a growing number of students living in the crisis of poverty, students for whom survival may be their family's top priority, rather than algebra homework.
Educating all of our students is an absolute must, for therein lies the future of our state. Yet the schools cannot do it by themselves. We need strong partnerships with our local communities to better prepare our students for the workforce, and to create contributing members of society.
Our schools are being asked to do more and more with less and less. We have to forge strong partnerships with civic and nonprofit organizations in our communities, with churches, with institutions of higher learning, and with businesses, to create an educated workforce for our state.
Schools are the number one economic development tool for our communities and for our state. We have to prepare our students for their future, not for our past.
We have heard over and over from businesses that they need workers who have critical thinking skills, who work well with others in a diverse work setting, who are able to problem-solve.
Great things are happening in our schools! I've seen it as a parent and as a board member for many years now. We need to make sure we have a system that allows our schools to meet the needs of all of our students.
We must invest in our future by investing in our schools!
We have horribly complicated something that is really very simple. Teaching kids. Investing in education. Developing good citizens.
The solutions to the problems our communities face do not lie in the halls of the Capitol, nor in the laws of the Federal government. They really lie in the people in our communities. In the teachers, the community members, and the neighborhoods across West Texas; in the people of Lubbock, of Midland, of Wichita Falls, of Abilene, and all places in between. And, yes, in the people of Amarillo.
As the gatekeepers to the future of our students and our state, we need to make sure we are doing this thing we call education right. It's the only chance we have.
I would appreciate your support, and your vote, on March 6th in the Republican Primary. Thank you.
And now Alice O'Brien will offer a few closing remarks.