We need Gilbert Public Schools to focus its energy on educating our children to have lifelong success. The sad reality is that GPS has seen enrollment, reading scores, and math scores drop over the years. That is unacceptable. We need to work towards ensuring that Gilbert schools and students are the gold standard in Arizona, like we used to be.

In order to do that, we need to prioritize our district budget to focus directly on student performance and make sure that we are allocating the resources to K-3 to ensure that the strongest foundation is built for our children. From there, we have to focus on core competency and eliminate the woke politics that are invading our classrooms by adopting curriculum that focuses on knowledge and achievement.

When our kids graduate from high school, they have to be ready to either enter the workforce and become productive members of our community or they need to be ready to pursue higher education for a more specialized career that requires a university education.

There are no more important people in a child’s life than their parents and we need a school board that understands that. Our public schools were better when parents were seen as partners and not obstacles by the education elite.

I am always going to fight for parents to be involved in the entire process of educating their children. Whether it’s curriculum adoption, classroom concerns, the district budget, school events, safety issues, etc., Gilbert parents will always have a voice on the school board and will always have an open door with Ann Stevens.

The most important resource we have to educate our children is our good teachers. We must allow our teachers to teach and not get overburdened by government and district red tape. We must also look at prioritizing our school budget to make class sizes work best for our children and the teachers doing their best to educate them.

As we begin to improve the educational environment, we must also look at creating incentives to not only retain our great teachers but to attract the best to come to Gilbert. I also believe that strict and high-performance standards are necessary for our teachers because we cannot tolerate poor performance and teachers who just aren’t able to meet the high standards, GPS must ensure educational success for our children.

It is not the responsibility of the taxpayer to pay for irresponsible and lazy government. Over the years, Gilbert Public Schools has seen its budget skyrocket while enrollment has gone down and reading and math scores are going down. There must always be fiscal responsibility and transparency, but that is doubly required during this time of continued decay.

We need a school board that will do the long and tedious work of going through the $500 million dollar budget for GPS and re-prioritize spending to meet the needs of our students as well as setting up the district for long-term success and fiscal health. Where waste can be eliminated, it must be eliminated. Where we can cut spending to do things more efficiently, we must. Our Gilbert families do not work for GPS and should not be made to pay for bad decisions and wasteful government spending.

I will fight for a full audit of the last five years of spending and budget decisions to understand how the GPS budget has almost doubled during that time as enrollment and scores go down and the general state of affairs has gotten worse. The taxpayers of Gilbert have a right to know what has happened with their money and what the plan will be going forward to respect them.

Ann Stevens will always be a champion of the taxpayer and always provide every opportunity to the public to see and watch what is going on with our money.