Rhonda Thurman is seated thrid from left
Hamilton County School Board member Rhonda Thurman of District 1, who retires this year, went through the highlights of her 20-year career for the Pachyderm Club Monday, including her push for more charter schools and against "weak principals".
The longtime hairdresser told the group it has been her honor and pleasure to serve all Hamilton County parents and to advocate for parent choice in education. She said she sits on the school board to defend county families, not to defend the school system.
It seems Ms. Thurman has lived up to a Ronald Reagan catch phrase she said she holds dear: “Paint with bold, bright colors... not pastels,” she said. She quoted an old newspaper article which spoke the truth about her: “She would never go along just to get along.”
“She has been a constant bastion for us,” County Commissioner Steve Highlander said.
Commissioner Highlander praised Ms. Thurman’s sense of humor and told a story. Ms. Thurman had arrived late at a board meeting one day years ago, and the chairperson teased that she had stayed too long to have her roots dyed.
“You’re not tall enough to see my roots,” Ms. Thurman had retorted, without missing a beat.
Looking forward, Ms. Thurman said she believes a charter school revival would restore some lost value and values to the Hamilton County school district. She said charter schools demand better discipline since students may be asked to leave, and that a charter school’s more transparent funding, hiring and curriculum invite a healthy scrutiny that may make them better at educating children than other local public schools.
“I would love to see a charter school at the north end of the county,” she said, naming Highway 58 as a possible location. “I’d like somebody to take that on,” she said. “I’d love to help you.”
Ms. Thurman continues her fight against unused paid vacation days of district employees, accumulated year after year. She said some retirees have collected more than $100,000 worth, paid when they leave, which cost the district $1 million in one year alone. She warned that certain principals soon to be denied this perk will be unhappy.
“I hate it for them,” she said.
Ms. Thurman began her talk with her top two fights since 2004: the single-path diploma, which she said forced many kids to drop out and earn a GED instead and may have helped create a shortage in the technical and career workforce; and the Everyday Math curriculum, which she called “fuzzy math” that did not require students to learn algebraic formulas or multiplication tables. Both had been adopted just before Ms. Thurman was elected to the school board, against heavy opposition from families and teachers.
“We messed math education up,” Ms. Thurman said. “It’s been messed up for 20 years.”
Ms. Thurman enrolled her own daughter in private school in the wake of “fuzzy math.”
“I have never been shy about that,” she said. “These people (private school families) are not my enemy. They’re doing us a favor. They’re paying for education twice.” She said the district would have nowhere to put these students if it got them tomorrow.
Ms. Thurman said that district officials have a record of sending their own children to private schools, especially those at central office who make “six figures,” she said.
She said current Superintendent Justin Robertson’s predecessor Bryan Johnson left the post because “he put his son in private school.”
“He may not tell you that, but I will,” she said.
Ms. Thurman has survived five superintendents: Mr. Johnson, Kirk Kelly, Rick Smith, Jim Scales, and Jesse Register, who was hired in 1997.
“He took good neighborhood schools and turned them into magnet schools,” she said of Dr. Register. “We never have recovered from that.”
She listed several other topics of caution.
* Library book selection:
She praised the state legislation for helping to remove so-called Library Bill of Rights language from the school’s legal policy.
“It’s all been taken out,” she said, because it never should have been there in the first place, she said.
She said she helped iron out a process to remove R-rated books, which have been chosen by each school’s librarian, from elementary school libraries by submitting book titles for state review.
“It’s quite an arduous process,” she said, but can be effective.
When the topic was first brought to her attention, “I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” she said: the worst four-letter words and compound swear words, and a “tutorial about masturbation,” in local public elementary school libraries, she said.
* “Weak principals:”
Regarding “furries,” students dressing and acting like various animals: “Let me tell you something. Animals are not allowed in school,” she said, and blamed “weak principals” for being pushed to allow students to meow, scratch and hiss all day at school.
She also blamed weak principals for not cracking down on cell phone use at school. Some don’t enforce the district-wide policy that bans them from the classroom, and some high school principals allow students to use them during lunchtime, she said. Ms. Thurman said students use their phones to dodge school resource officers and plan and film fights, among other problems.
“Those principals are the ones that need to be called on the carpet about that,” she said.
“We need some strong male principals,” she said.
* Transgender students playing on female sports teams:
“All these years of Title IX,” she said. “There’s a difference, people. There’s a difference.”
* Pandemic closures:
Ms. Thurman said that she and board member Joe Smith were the only school board members who fought to keep school open during the COVID pandemic, and to allow students through second grade to go without masks.
“How do you learn to read when you can’t see a teacher’s lips?” she asked. “Our kids have suffered mightily because of it,” she said.
“We could have opened schools up way before we did,” she said, and that the school board made the decision to stay closed, not the state.
“We’ve lost our minds,” she said.
Ms. Thurman celebrated her victories, too:
Sale Creek Middle School football field. “It is packed every night there’s a football game,” she said, and the school no longer has to rent a field and can now earn concessions revenue.
The state helped her keep the school district from requiring class fees to get a report card.
Soddy Daisy auditorium
Soddy Daisy softball field
Daisy Elementry School entrance remodel
Soddy Daisy track
Ms. Thurman expressed her support of Republicans running for school board seats Aug. 1:
Dist. 1: Steve Slater
Dist. 2: Ben Daugherty
Dist. 7: Jodi Schaffer
Dist. 10: Felice Hadden
Dist. 11: Sherrie Guinn Ford
She told the group, "Thank God for Chattanoogan.com and for John Wilson asking all the questions throughout the years."