Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of two stories featuring candidates for Brookings School Board. One three-year school board post is up for grabs in the April 11 election. Vying for it are Jennifer Lacher-Starace and Kevin Sackreiter.
BROOKINGS – After being a high school teacher, Jennifer Lacher-Starace has made a career at South Dakota State University of teaching future teachers.
Now, she wants to use her experience to impact local students by winning a seat on the Brookings School Board.
A Brookings native, Lacher-Starace went to Bates College in Maine. Inspired to pursue a teaching career thanks to her high school English teacher, the plan at the time was to quickly return to South Dakota to teach after graduation.
“There weren’t jobs (in South Dakota). There was no teacher shortage in South Dakota,” she laughed. “That made me nervous, so when I was offered a job teaching in Maine, I thought I better take it because who knows if anything would ever open up in South Dakota.”
For 14 years, she taught English along with some history and journalism at a small Maine high school of about 500 students.
After meeting her husband there and having two children, the young family wanted to be closer to family. Her husband’s family lived in Connecticut, hers in Brookings. It never really was a contest in their minds.
So seven years ago, they made their move to Brookings. Her husband works as a special education teacher at the Flandreau Indian School, while she’s employed as an instructor at SDSU’s Department of Teaching, Learning and Leadership.
“I work in the secondary teacher education program. I teach courses; I supervise student teachers; I advise undergraduate students as they go through our program,” she explained.
She teaches courses to students before they start student teaching and also while they are student teaching.
“That’s incredibly rewarding because I can really follow these young teachers in the early stages of their development as professionals and develop really good relationships with them,” she said.
Other courses she handles include assessment and literacy, as well as courses on methods of teaching English and social studies.
Once or twice a week, Lacher-Starace is visiting schools in the Brookings region as far west as Huron and as far south as Sioux Falls in order to observe her student teachers in the classroom. This firsthand exposure allows her to witness a variety of classrooms and approaches, from small schools such as Rutland to those struggling with large English Language Learner populations such as Huron.
“My high school teaching career was spent all in the same school of 14 years. So this has been fun to see the range of types of schools. We think of South Dakota as not being a very diverse state; we’re such a rural state, but there’s a tremendous difference in our communities and, as a result, in our schools,” she said.
Through her job, she’s therefore able to see the challenges these other schools are facing and how they’re attempting to address them. It’s also given her expertise that’s hard to come by.
“I have been a classroom teacher, so I understand what that entails and involves. I work with young teachers, so I’m doing ongoing professional development. I have relationships with teachers in the Brookings schools. Either I’ve worked with them because they host our student teachers or they were once my student teachers at SDSU,” she said.
Through her children – a daughter in the fifth grade at Camelot and a son in the first grade at Dakota Prairie – she’s also gotten to know those at the elementary level. Because of that and her students she sends out to the middle school and high school, she feels like she knows the teachers of this district.
“I would hope that they would see me as very accessible. I suppose I can’t promise I’ll always be their ally, because this is more of an administrative role; however, will I be able to empathize with them in a way that other school board members might not be able to? Yeah, I think I will. I know the challenges of public schools,” she said.
Her knowledge on how to use assessment data to make decisions would lend itself to school board conversations on school standards, resources and setting and achieving goals.
Why did Lacher-Starace decide to run for the school board?
“I care a lot about schools, and I know a lot about schools,” she said. “I thought maybe they do need some expertise and maybe I would be a good person.”
There is no personal agenda in mind as she runs her campaign, no deep ills in the school system she wishes to eradicate.
Instead, she’d like to emphasize giving all stakeholders a voice in district decision-making.
Having seen personalized learning in other schools she’s visited, she welcomed it being tried out in Medary Elementary. She likes the principles behind the approach of personalized education, of empowering students to make their own decisions about how they best learn.
The trick as a school board member is to be ready to aid in bringing in that kind of innovation to the Brookings School District.
“We need to support the teachers, we need to listen to the teachers and figure out what’s working and celebrate that and think about how do we grow that success across the district,” she said.
With work, the Brookings School District can become as much as a destination as any of the schools she visits through her job, a place where innovation is constantly brewing.
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
