October Mentor Meeting Reflection

In my October meeting with my mentor Dr. Joe Felan of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) I discussed with him about Teacher Licensure and news on the state board's decision regarding the local school district. In our last meeting, he mentioned to me that at some point in time he was a member of the local school board since the State of Arkansas is returning control to local control after 5 years, I asked him if he would run. He did express interest but said, "I don't think that now is the right time as it is a brand new school board elected from scratch". While talking about the school board I got to ask a few questions about how it works and how the local school board essentially makes final decisions when it comes to expulsions. He did say that telling a student that they cannot go to school is possibly the hardest decision to take while being on the school board. Soon after I touched the topic of teacher licensure and asked him what was the difference between the process in Texas vs the process in Arkansas. He told me that because of both Texas and Arkansas have an agreement regarding teachers crossing state lines that all he needed to do was pass an Arkansas History class. I would imagine that a teacher moving from Arkansas to Texas would have to complete a class about Texas History. Obviously, both states have totally different histories with Texas even being it's own Republic for 10 years. I also want to mention that while I see myself working a long time in this career, being a teacher isn't the only way to impact education, I was very much looking at the possibility of improving the system through writing laws about education. However, I would only pursue politics after a good 20-25 years of being a teacher in order to be able to put forth legislation that actually helps rather than hurt our education system.