Blue Valley parent joins school board race after beloved, longtime teacher fired
After watching the Blue Valley School District terminate a tenured kindergarten teacher, Tiffany McCalla decided to throw her hat in the ring for a seat on the Blue Valley School Board ahead of next week’s election.
“This is definitely a last-minute thing. It wasn’t planned or anything, but the situation has really pushed me and a lot of our community to take a moment and say, ‘What’s going on here?’” McCalla said. “I have kids in the district. I have seen a good teacher get let go for not a good reason.”
“I would just like to be part of that change to make sure it doesn’t happen to good people anymore.”
Earlier this month, the Blue Valley School Board voted to terminate Sunset Ridge kindergarten teacher Barbara Hart for violating the district’s policy around when physical contact with a student is acceptable. According to several parents, the violation occurred when Hart picked up a distressed child.
During the board’s October meeting, dozens of parents flooded the chambers to support Hart and requested that the board update its policy around intervening in emergency situations.
McCalla — who serves as the Blue Valley Parent-Teacher Organization president and sits on the education advisory committee — was one of the parents who showed up in support of Hart.
“I was disappointed in the school board’s lack of asking questions and finding out more information,” McCalla said. “They didn’t ask questions, they kind of fell to what we call a group-think mentality, and didn’t dig in and make sure our HR department was doing their very best and investigating all aspects of the situation.”
“If a teacher needs to be terminated like that, there should be plenty of investigation and due process there.”
Now, McCalla will be running as a write-in candidate for District 5 — which is in the northwest corner of Blue Valley — against incumbent Gina Knapp and candidate Steve Roberts in the Nov. 4 general election.
The Blue Valley School District Board of Education is made up of seven members, with six members living in geographic districts and one serving at-large. They are elected to four-year terms. In a general election like this one, all residents vote for all candidates in all of the geographic districts.
This year, three seats for the unpaid positions are on the ballot, but only two districts have contested races — including the race McCalla joined.
Along with holding the administration and district accountable during meetings, McCalla said she would like to focus on taking care of teachers and teacher retention if elected, she said.
“I believe that the school board can support the teachers by supplying them with the education and training they need to handle the continuing changing dynamic of students with mental health needs,” she said in a statement. “We have to do a better job of listening to the teachers and what they need.”
Personnel decisions
Knapp, who’s seeking reelection in District 5 after her first term, said she thinks it’s great that McCalla decided to run for the seat, too.
“I think it’s important to have an open dialogue about everything going on in the district,” Knapp said. “It appears to stem from the frustration about a personnel decision.”
She acknowledged that it can be frustrating when members of the public are upset about something like a teacher firing because district officials can’t fully explain what happened due to privacy policies around child involvement and an employee’s personnel files, which are confidential.
“My votes are never personal or political. The district has a process they go through, there’s an HR department. There’s interviews and recommendations made,” Knapp said. “The story that’s been in the media has been very one-sided and incorrect.”
“I know that anybody who knew what had happened, they would agree with our vote. Unfortunately, we can’t disclose all of that.”
Blue Valley Superintendent Gillian Chapman said in an updated statement on the matter that these decisions are never taken lightly.
“Every staff member, regardless of tenure, is expected to uphold our professional standards and our legal responsibilities,” Chapman said. “Our decisions are grounded in the duty to protect children, uphold the law and maintain the trust of our community.”
Trades programs and teacher retention
Knapp first ran for election during the district’s recovery from the pandemic, facing the discussions around mask requirements in schools and efforts to bring students’ test scores back up, she said. But her emphasis was on supporting special education programing.
“My oldest son is a special education student and he struggled a lot in school,” she said. “I wanted to get involved at the district level to help move our special education programs forward.”
In the last four years, Knapp saw student test scores come back up and as part of the board helped implement new math and English Language Arts curriculum, hired a new superintendent and approved a new strategic plan to guide the district in the future.
Along with implementing the new curriculum and continuing to improve test scores, she would like to see Blue Valley open more opportunities for students who want to enter into the trades or other career paths beyond college.
Specifically, she’d like to expand the district’s Center for Advanced Professional Studies program and build on its partnership with the fire department or other career readiness programs.
And teacher retention and wages remain big issues, Knapp said.
“Teacher’s colleges are not graduating enough teachers in Kansas. Young people are not going to school to be (teachers) anymore,” she said.
She’d like to continue seeing increased wages for teachers and explore a home-grown teachers program, which encourages individuals from the community to become teachers and work in their local schools.
Expanding teaching opportunities
Part of Roberts’ goal — as the other candidate challenging Knapp in the election — is to find avenues to allow qualified individuals to teach at school even if they haven’t attended a teacher’s college.
He received a bachelor’s in engineering and a master’s in education, which led him to becoming a math teacher for several years. On the side, Roberts said he drives for rideshare services to help pay the bills and tutors students.
“Getting a master’s in education didn’t make me a better math teacher. … Teachers shouldn’t be constrained to a teacher’s college,” he said. “I’m saying we have lots of citizens in our culture who come from a variety of disciplines and vocations — some, not all, but some could walk into a classroom tomorrow morning and be effective.”
This could help at the district’s center for advanced professional studies or trades programs.
“There are teachers who can come from all walks of life,” he said. “Who do you want to teach a welding class: a teacher or a welder? Not every welder will make a good teacher, but some will. And not everyone who graduates with a teaching degree is a good teacher.”
To help with retention, Roberts said he’d like to support higher wages for teachers earlier on in their career and base it off of performance, not the district’s salary chart — which accounts for how long a teacher has been in the district and their academic degree.
“One of the things I’m emphasizing this year is we need to pay professional educators as professionals,” he said.
‘Change the system’
Roberts said that he didn’t know that McCalla joined the race as a write-in candidate.
“Admittedly this is news to me. That’s a hard way to go,” Roberts said. “The first time I ran for the State Board of Education was in 2008 without any party affiliation and qualified for the ballot with signatures.”
Roberts served on the Kansas State Board of Education from 2013 until 2021 and ran as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, but lost to Sharice Davids in 2024.
Like McCalla, Roberts disagreed with the district’s decision to terminate Sunset Ridge kindergarten teacher Hart, he said.
“It seems to me the 6-1 vote took common sense and rational experience off the table. They said, ‘We have a rule, the teacher violated the rule, she needs to be terminated,’” Roberts said.
He doesn’t know exactly what should have happened because he’s “not privy to the background,” but he’d like to see something change to support tenured teachers like Hart.
“Chances are something is amiss with the system,” Roberts said. “I’m working to change the system so any family who wants a good education for their kids, they can have it.”
