ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
One of the many boards up for election is the Kansas State Board of Education, and one of the candidates for that board is Jean Clifford, who is running for District 5, which covers 44 and a half counties in western and north central Kansas, which comprises 81 school districts and roughly 50,000 school students.
As Clifford tells it, her roots in Kansas and in education run deep.
“District 5 the largest area to run in that is not a statewide race, including all of the other races I have been involved with. I have served on the Kansas State Board of Education in the past – I’m not an incumbent for this race, but I have served, and I served 10 years on the Garden City USD 457 Board of Education,” Clifford said. “I’m a certified teacher with a special education degree, and I’m a former college adjunct instructor. I’m also a retired Air Force officer, I served 30 years in the Air Force on active duty and in the research as a JAG advocate. I’m married to Senator Dr. Bill Clifford, we’ve been married for 44 years, and he represents Senate District 39 in southwest Kansas. We have six children and four grandchildren. I’m running for the state board because of my children and grandchildren. I believe in education, and I believe education is important to the future of our state. I want my children and grandchildren to have a bright future, and I think by having a strong school system, strong academic requirements, we’ll have the workforce tomorrow that’ll bring our state a successful economy in the future.”
Clifford said her interest in education was sparked by her own time in school.
“I’ve always enjoyed school, and my original degree was in education. I taught kindergarten and sixth grade in the past, and I really enjoyed it,” Clifford said. “I went on later to become go to law school and become a lawyer and join the military, but education has always been a passion of mine. I really stressed that with my own children, and I think the way to be successful as an adult and as a community member is when you have that firm grounding to understand and be proficient in reading and math and the other basic subjects, to be a successful community member, to be a contributing community member in the future.”
Clifford added some recent events inspired her to run for the board again.
“The most important and foremost thing in my mind is we have a new commissioner of education, Dr. Jake Steele, who is from Southwest Kansas. He understands Southwest Kansas and the needs and the opportunities we have out here to improve education,” Clifford said. “I’d like to be part of the team on that state board to make the decisions to help do that. I feel like I have a really strong background in education. I’ve lived here for more 30 years. I raised my children here, and I would like to see all of these students be successful, return to Southwest Kansas, and be the workforce we need out here to make our economy great. I feel like I have a good background for. I feel like I can be effective, and especially with the district being this big – this is the largest district on the state board of education geographically – and it’s probably one of the most diverse, because we have several population centers, but everything else is a smaller community. I think I can make a difference for Southwest Kansas. I would really like to see us improve our academics for these students, get the parents involved, and support parental involvement, and have the local control we need to make sure that our schools are working effectively with the students we have.”
One of Clifford’s main goals, should she ultimately get elected, is flexibility in terms of local control.
“I’d like to see us have the authority to make some decisions that would be beneficial to our schools in terms of the curriculum and the needs of our area,” Clifford said. “Each school is very different from the other ones, and each school consists of individual children’s individual families with their own needs, so I would like to see fewer regulatory requirements and more of a general standard for accreditation. I’d like some flexibility in how we meet those needs out here. I’d also like to see us try to drive costs down – schools need to have be fiscally responsible and make sure the money they’re spending is being directed towards student learning and not being spent on something that doesn’t really help their school and their students be successful. I think that’s also important to our taxpayers for us to have that transparency and accountability because they need to know where the money is being spent, and we need to be making sure we can tie that student learning to the funds that are invested in those students.”
Overall, Clifford said, she is ready to get to work should she be elected.
“I know there are challenges in education, and I think we need to be ready to deal with those,” Clifford said. “We have a great opportunity right now with a new commissioner, and with the largely new state board coming up, and with the change in the state funding formula for schools to make a real difference, and I’d like to be part of that group. Experience does matter, and I’d like to lend my background and experience to the board.”
