Defever says teachers need training
By ROWENA PLETT
Reporter / photographer
Val Defever of Independence is Ninth District representative on Kansas Board of Education (KBOE). She spoke Monday at Centre High School to Centre USD staff.
Defever is a moderate Republican who believes strongly in investing whatever resources are deemed necessary to fully educate every child.
Much of that investment, according to Defever, should be in resources to train teachers and staff new ways of reaching students and in learning how to understand and instruct them.
She was a teacher for 14 years, 10 of those as a Title I instructor.
"I realized there are a lot of kids who struggle," she said.
She noted that teachers often can feel overwhelmed by the challenges presented to them and they often feel unappreciated.
"I value teachers above everything," Lefever told the instructors. "Like Rumpelstiltskin, we take flax and spin it into gold."
Although she no longer teaches, she continues to be involved in education. As a member of the state board of education, she is pressing for more money to fund staff development.
"All teachers want to teach and all kids want to learn," she surmised, "but we need to know how to do it better."
She said parents don't understand how important they are to a child's development.
She supports programs such as Parents as Teachers, which helps parents learn how to interact with young children to stimulate learning.
She also supports "extended learning," which grants more time for teachers to help students.
Defever talked about the Quality Performance Accreditation program which was approved by the Legislature and introduced to the public school system in 1992. It requires that students at all levels — elementary, middle, and high school — be tested for achievement in specific subjects.
"The testing shows how well a school system is doing," she said.
She emphasized that, if the Legislature demands improved performance, it must help educators to achieve that.
Using her three children, ages 32-18, to illustrate her point, she said educators need to recognize individual differences and not put everyone in the same mold of learning.
She suggested that maybe not all young people need classroom instruction. Give them a textbook and they can learn on their own, she said. She noted they may be bored in a classroom setting and would do better on their own.
That would free up instructors to spend more time with those who really need it, she suggested.
She said teachers need to learn to collaborate and to incorporate various subjects into their specialized ones.
A new initiative called "No child left behind," is being promoted by the state board. It would require testing more often.
She is concerned that more is being required of teachers without giving them the necessary training to fulfill their tasks.
"We have to have high expectations and we have to find ways to reach those expectations," she said, "but where will we find the money to fund it?"
She believes priorities are wrong. She said Kansas puts more into its roads than into its education system. School systems often emphasize sports programs over academics, she said.
She noted that the general public wants performance like when they were in school and they don't understand the new challenges.
Her four-year term as state board member will be finished at the end of this year. She was defeated in the primary by another woman, a conservative, whom she says campaigned very little and, in letters to constituents, presented facts in such a way as to put Lefever in a bad light.
Lefever decided to fight for her job, offering herself as a write-in candidate from the ninth district.
At the present time, Lefever is a business woman. Feeling burned out at her job as a teacher, she left the profession in 1988 and bought a music store.
She is concerned that the upcoming election will produce another board split evenly between conservatives and moderates
