Support CCS recognizes that none of our goals can be achieved without our teachers, whom we recognize and respect both as professionals and as members of our community who care about our kids. We are therefore committed to promoting school board candidates who demonstrate respect for teachers by acknowledging their expertise, listening to their concerns, and seeking to ensure that they are given the time, funding, appreciation, and resources they need to succeed in their work.

Support CCS endorses candidates who see public education as a joint endeavor between teachers, administrators, and families, and who understand that such collaboration requires clear, timely, and consistent communication between all parties to establish and maintain a relationship of trust. School board candidates should recognize that parents have the most important role in their children’s lives; that role is strengthened when families and teachers forge strong connections. Candidates promoted by Support CCS will work to affirm and enhance CCS’s current efforts in this area across multiple platforms of family-school engagement, including but not limited to email, Canvas, website access, and the StopIt App. Additionally, candidates endorsed by Support CCS must commit to engaging in open dialogue with the community.

School board candidates endorsed by Support CCS will understand that student mental health and wellness are important for enabling academic excellence, creating a safe environment, and allowing all students to achieve their potential. Our children need our support now, more than ever, to cope with the distress that the pandemic has caused. We will support school board candidates who will promise to continue and deepen the robust mental health and wellness partnerships CCS has established (such as the partnership with St. Vincent Ascension Medical Center) and who will support CCS’s efforts to find new tools (like the StopIt anti-bullying app) to improve the student experience.

Our increasingly globalized society requires that, in order to successfully navigate the world and its challenges, students must acquire broad cultural competencies that will allow them to collaborate across differences and to be aware of and respectful toward the vast array of human experiences. Support CCS endorses candidates who acknowledge this reality and are committed to expanding CCS’s ability to prepare students for it, both by recognizing the cultural diversity within our own Carmel community and by seeking to understand and appreciate the world beyond Carmel and the concerns and customs of people around the globe.

School should be a place in which every student feels safe. Candidates endorsed by SupportCCS will be committed to creating an environment in which students feel safe from physical and mental harm and feel confident expressing themselves in a judgment-free environment. SupportCCS will promote candidates who partner with and support the Director of Student Services, the specially trained SROs, building safety specialists, counselors, social workers, and all other staff working to foster a safe and non-threatening learning environment for students.

Academic excellence can take many forms. Support CCS aims to endorse school board candidates who balance the importance of traditional measurements of achievement like standardized test scores and acceptance into institutions of higher education with other metrics of excellence, such as superior achievement in coursework, mastery of vocationally related skill sets, national and state-level awards for para-curricular accomplishments, etc. We seek to support candidates who hold the view that academic excellence is only achieved when all K-12 students receive plentiful opportunities to develop and fulfill their individual potential.

A better metric would be to compare CCS with local and Indiana schools. Here, as the Indianapolis Star and education-focused website Chalkbeat show, CCS retained a clear lead over many other districts in the state. Indeed, CCS continues to be one of the leading school districts in the country.

Continuing the tradition of academic excellence in Carmel Clay Schools, CCS has announced that Carmel High School has 56 seniors that have been named 2022 National Merit Semifinalists.

I want to focus on the women and men in Carmel who are, day in and day out, in the face of a global pandemic, unprecedented scrutiny and opposition, continuing to show up for our kids. I want to talk about teachers.

Being kind and social and understanding how to get through negative emotions, bad days and stressful interpersonal situations, are life skills that will aid our children not only throughout their time in public school, but well into their adult years.