Vote Misty Servia for Manatee County school board

I am supporting and urging voters to vote for Misty Servia for school board. We need to rebuild trust in our school board, and putting Misty on the board will go a long way toward rebuilding that trust.

Misty has worked for 28 years as a planner and has served as a volunteer on nearly a dozen community panels and groups. She and her husband have put all three of their children through the Manatee County school system.

Misty is focused on solutions and saving time and money by making the right decisions the first time and by listening more and talking less. She believes we must better prepare our students from pre-K through 12th grade so our graduates will be competitive.

She believes we must press for more local control over student assessments and end the excessive concentration on high-stakes testing through the use of portfolios and other alternative assessments.

As the mother of a special needs child, she understands and strongly advocates that our special needs children receive the special accommodations that they require and deserve. Unfortunately, this does not always occur, a situation I personally witnessed while teaching at one of our high schools when a student who was supposed to take the FCAT test in a small learning environment had to take this high-stakes test in the high school gym with 300 other high school students.

I placed a call to Misty's opponent, a current member of the school board whom she is running against, to advise him of this situation, left him a message, but my call was never returned.

Thankfully, the student was able to retake the test as a senior in the proper environment and actually scored very well and was able to graduate.

Vote for Misty Servia.

This story was originally published August 12, 2016 at 1:05 PM with the headline "Vote Misty Servia for Manatee County school board."