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Ananta Gudipaty - Mercer Island School Board Candidate Position 1
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In this episode of the Mercer Matters podcast Ben interviews Mercer Island School District School Board Candidate Ananta Gudipaty who is running for Position 1 in the November 2023 election.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mercer Matters Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Mercer Matters podcast. My name is Ben Sharp, and my goal is to have a discussion with each of the candidates who are running for Mercer Island School Board in the fall of 2023. I have reached out to each candidate and offered to have a discussion with them, but if for some reason you don't see a candidate listed as an episode in the podcast, it is because they have declined to be interviewed. So without further ado, let's jump right into this episode.
Meet Ananta Gudapati
00:00:40
Speaker
Hi, everybody. Today I'm joined by Ananta Gudapati, who is running for position one of the Mercer Allen School Board. Ananta, thanks for joining the Mercer Matters podcast. I'd like to get started just by saying thanks on behalf of our community for
00:00:56
Speaker
volunteering to run for the school board. I know it takes just a ton of time and energy to put together this campaign. So first of all, thank you for putting out the ring and running. So I thought I'd just get started, give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, spend some time on your background and tell us why you've decided to run for the Mercer Island School
Life on Mercer Island
00:01:17
Speaker
Board.
00:01:17
Speaker
Absolutely. Thank you, Ben. Thank you for this opportunity, for this forum. I'm looking forward to it. And I think it's a great way to get the community to understand about our candidates. So I really appreciate you doing this. You're very welcome. So my family and I moved to Mercer Island in the height of the pandemic at the end of 2020. What came after that, right? Once we moved and we registered with the schools,
00:01:44
Speaker
the school district office called us to welcome us and then the principals of each of the schools for our boys called and then the IT teams called and we got so many calls and we were like, wow, yeah, exactly. I'm like, I don't think we had, and our children were at private schools earlier. They were in a Montessori through their early years. And it was like, I don't think I saw this kind of response even from, from private schools.
00:02:09
Speaker
And so at that point we knew we were in a special place and we knew that this was going to be an amazing community.
Professional Journey
00:02:15
Speaker
And I can tell you over the last three years, four years, everything that we have seen only re-emphasized that notion. So this is sort of my opportunity to give back to this truly exceptional and amazing community. Awesome. So would you spend a little time on your background, what you've done professionally, that kind of stuff?
00:02:34
Speaker
Absolutely. I am a software engineer by profession. I spent about 20, 22 years at Microsoft and almost everyone has used my code at some point. Sort of my 15 minutes of claim to fame is if you play any audio on a PC, you're probably running my code. And if you use Teams, you're running my code.
00:02:58
Speaker
If you used Skype, Blink, any one of those communication products, you're probably using my code. So I've had an amazing run at Microsoft, learned a lot, worked with some amazing people, and I loved every minute of it. And I was quite happy there. But in 2019, out of the blue, I got a call from Amazon.
00:03:20
Speaker
They heard me talk at some conference and they wanted me to come and run their learning platform. I wasn't particularly looking for a new role, but I'm like, what the heck? It won't hurt to go talk to them. And I went and spoke and I realized that this role gave me the chance to bring my personal passions and my professional experience together.
Interest in Education
00:03:43
Speaker
And suddenly this light bulb went off. I'm like, man, this sounds like a great opportunity.
00:03:48
Speaker
And it took me all of one day to make a decision. And a few weeks later, I was at Amazon. And the last five years there, I had a chance to build the learning platform. I had a chance to experiment with all kinds of learning methodologies. One of my favorite topics is how the brain learns. What causes us to learn? What is the process of learning?
00:04:11
Speaker
Simple questions like, if I ask people, what did you learn in class yesterday or last week? I'm talking about even in corporate learning. What did you learn in the class last week? Most people can't remember. At best, they'll mention one or two high level points. But for the same person, if I asked them about a movie that they watched two years ago,
00:04:33
Speaker
They'll tell me every nitty-gritty detail about it. So what is it about the movie that we remember so well? We can chalk it off to entertainment value, but it's got to be more than that because our brain processes things in a different axis. And so what is it about it that causes us to remember that so well? What is it about this that causes us not to remember? And then you pair this with the other statistic that says 75% of the people picked
00:05:03
Speaker
their profession based on the inspiration of one teacher. Three and four people apparently pick a profession based on the inspiration of one teacher. So it's not the entertainment value. There's something more. And that's something more is what I've been, it's been a passion topic of mine for at least a decade, if not two decades.
Modernizing Education
00:05:22
Speaker
I have had the chance to collaborate with neuroscientists, developmental psychologists,
00:05:28
Speaker
some of the greatest educators in the world. And that sort of networking and that connections have led me to far off places. I met with educators in pretty much all the continents, I think, except Antarctica. I haven't come across anyone in Antarctica yet. But I had the chance to actually connect with some of the folks from the Ministry of Education in multiple countries, including India, and had extensive conversations on how they plan curriculums. And what I've realized is
00:05:58
Speaker
that there is so much new science and understanding of how the brain works that is not yet incorporated into our educational systems. So I started applying some of those things at the workplace in corporate learning. And the results were just phenomenal. I mean, just one course, 40 minutes, applying some of these newer concepts into the course led to
00:06:24
Speaker
400% increase in satisfaction of the people that took the course. They said, this course is relevant to me. I understand this course. I feel this was worthwhile of my time. Literally 400% increase in satisfaction. And then we actually measured downstream impact of this. And there's almost 160% increase in downstream impact where there's increased customer satisfaction from the people that took this course.
00:06:49
Speaker
And it's not a small number where you're like, okay, well that may be just luck of the draw. We're talking about statistically significant results with a statistically significant population. We're not talking about just a hundred people taking this course. We're talking about in tens of thousands of people in the treatment group versus the test group, right? So what's the baseline? And the results were phenomenal. So I have personally experienced how these models work.
Global Educational Insights
00:07:16
Speaker
I have seen how they work across the world. I had a few years ago, I had the chance to spend some time with a couple from Africa. This gentleman named Victor Kanu picked up all these children in Zambia in eighth grade. These are children that kind of like the bottom 10% of the children. He picked up all these children and he wanted to show that it is possible that really the potential of these children is being missed
00:07:45
Speaker
assessed, right? So he picked up all these bottom 10% and started his school. And over the next four years through high school, he basically taught them all of the, uh, what he calls holistic education. So all the science subjects, but also building the whole human being. And I'll talk about that in just a minute. The results were amazing. These people went from being the top bottom 10% to the top 10% nationally in less than four years. And in fact, that school came to be known as the miracle school.
00:08:16
Speaker
I had a chance to spend some time with him. It was just some of the most insightful conversations that I've ever had in my life on education. I realized that there's just phenomenal potential out there. Then last year, I had a chance to work with the math department and work on the
Critique of Current Educational Frameworks
00:08:35
Speaker
curriculum. As part of that, we were looking at the publishers of different books and online content that we can use for the math curriculum.
00:08:44
Speaker
here on Marshall Island. And I actually had a chance to review, we looked at some lists of, we started with a list of some 40 different publishers, whittled it down to six, and then finally ended up picking one. I think it was a good choice that we ended up picking. But in that process, I kind of looked at, hey, what is the foundation knowledge that all of this content is created on? And you know, the newest
00:09:09
Speaker
research, the latest research that I found that this content was built on is from the early to mid 90s. Basically, the best resources that we have out there are 25 years old. And then most of them are 50 to 60 years old. So we're a lot has changed in the last 25 years, our understanding has changed so much. The world has changed so much. And most of this is not incorporated into into the educational curriculum.
00:09:38
Speaker
So we're basically teaching them 25-year-old understanding of learning models, and we're missing out all of this phenomenal research that has since come out that literally kind of undoes what we knew earlier.
Enhancing Learning with Neuroscience
00:09:54
Speaker
I'll give you this example in a slightly sort of more neuroscience perspective, and maybe that'll help. So everybody knows that our brain has two hemispheres. There's the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.
00:10:07
Speaker
A lot of the learning that we target is really targeted for the left hemisphere. I call it information dissemination. We just feel like, okay, we need to share this information with the children. We need to teach them this. And our definition of teaching is usually sharing that information. And there itself is a red flag. If education was pure information dissemination, then we should have the most educated world right now because in the palm of pretty much everyone's hand is a phone which has access to all the information in the world. Right. That's right.
00:10:37
Speaker
So we should be the most educated population ever, but if you look at it, that's not what the data shows. So it's not pure information dissemination. It's a lot more than that. And in my analysis of this corporate learning and also talking to all of these people and sort of the learning over the last decade, if I was to boil it down, all learning that's targeted in the left hemisphere of the brain, retention is almost virtually impossible.
00:11:02
Speaker
You get 50% loss of retention in the first hour, and you get 90% loss in 24 hours. So if you're really lucky... So how do you make it stick? Exactly. If you're really lucky, you will get to retain 10%. Well, the secret is, turns out, is in the right hemisphere. When we target knowledge or learning for the right hemisphere, right hemisphere thinks very differently. And if you want to read up a little bit more on that, I highly recommend some of the work of Jill Bolte-Taylor.
00:11:31
Speaker
She did a TED talk. She also has a book that's titled The Stroke of Insight, I think. She does a fantastic job of describing the differences between these two hemispheres of the brain, and they're really two completely separate personalities. The right hemisphere has, you know, we think of it as art and various aspects of creativity and sort of appreciation of beauty and all of that.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yes, that's part of it, but there's a lot more to the right hemisphere. We actually have not studied the right hemisphere as much as we should. And that, when you target learning for the right hemisphere, right? I mean, you would target it for both hemispheres, but really, you see that you sort of hinge it to the right hemisphere. Then the learning actually has
00:12:18
Speaker
very powerful impact. It actually creates a feedback loop in the brain, that feedback loop between the left and the right hemisphere. And turns out when you successfully create that feedback loop, retention, actually data shows retention can be greater than 100%. Like, wait, wait, how is that possible? How can you possibly know more than what I have taught? Well, it turns out we keep processing it and we find other examples of it and we actually develop new connections in our brain, new understanding of the topic.
00:12:45
Speaker
And over time, we can actually do a lot more. We can actually get a lot more out of it than what was taught.
Character Education
00:12:51
Speaker
So yeah, good education really should be leveraging this. And we should be figuring out how we can tap into the right hemisphere. And this is all the space that's just completely unexplored. But I'm seeing enough signals in the world that I see this sort of educational reform, educational transformation coming. I see it on the horizon. Probably a decade. It'll be a very different place.
00:13:15
Speaker
the kind of disruption that has come about, the technology brought about in other areas of our life, I see some sort of disruption like that coming in the educational space. And what I'm hoping is that bringing all of this experience to the school board and trying to influence some of that direction of where we go so that we can lead, because I feel that Mercer Island is an amazing community with phenomenal strengths.
00:13:37
Speaker
lots of brilliant, intelligent people, a highly educated population, and a great school district that we can bring all of this, and we can actually lead the way in this, set the example for other school district and the broader world. And that's what I'm hoping to bring to the school district. Well, thank you. I mean, this is all great and very inspiring, and kind of an exciting vision. I'm curious, how many people use the platform that you built, the education platform, and Amazon?
00:14:07
Speaker
primarily software engineers or was that the included the delivery drivers or kind of how many and what who used it? So it was the corporate learning platform it every single employee contractor vendor across the globe well north of 5 million people use that one. So lots and lots of data lots and lots of people on the platform. I'm curious what were some of the
00:14:33
Speaker
concrete things that you did or specific things that you did within that platform to make the education stick. Can you just highlight a couple of examples? Yeah, I'm trying to be careful not to divulge too much of sort of the, you know, okay, let's, let's, let's, let's reframe the question. I get it. So in general, what are some of the things that we can do to engage the right hemisphere of the brain and improve learning? Ah, fantastic question.
00:15:02
Speaker
So turns out the right hemisphere has certain aspects of it. So let me back up a little bit. The left hemisphere is really focused on the individual. So it's like me at this time. And actually, it doesn't really focus so much on now as projecting from the past into the future. So the left hemisphere is, in fact,
00:15:26
Speaker
I think while we might not have known the full neuroscience of it, over time, we understand that there are these two sides and we've come up with terms. The left hemisphere is sort of the head, or sometimes we call it the ego. It's about the individual. It's about protection of the individual. It's always somewhat defensive and making sure that I am protected at all costs. The right hemisphere is focused on the greater.
00:15:54
Speaker
It's on the community, on the whole. It actually doesn't really focus so much on the past or the future. It focuses on just the now, the present. And it is oblivious to all of these differences and things in the context of the collective. So we call that the heart. The actual heart is just a muscle that pumps blood. It doesn't have thought. But a lot of the, when we say speak from the heart,
00:16:21
Speaker
live in the moment. We're talking the right hemisphere. Exactly. We're talking about the right hemisphere. That's right. So right thinks in much more lofty terms, and it has these virtues or the human values, truth, love, peace, nonviolence, all of these values that think beyond the individual reside on the right hemisphere. So this is what sort of is called character education.
00:16:49
Speaker
And we've kind of neglected character education. But there's multiple pedagogies. For example, the Montessori focuses on this body, mind, and spirit. The Sathya Sai Education and Human Values focuses on head, heart, and hands. All of these pedagogies basically talk about developing the whole personality.
Incorporating Human Values in Education
00:17:08
Speaker
So when you take a lesson and you seed it with the concepts of the right, it has a lot greater impact
00:17:18
Speaker
Let me give you a very simple example. Let's say I'm teaching the children about the solar system. And I'm teaching them that, hey, the sun is the life force of the solar system. It's what created everything. And in fact, for example, if the sun's temperature were to go up by 0.01% or go down by 0.01%, all life on Earth would either fry away or freeze to death. Just 0.01%.
00:17:48
Speaker
And it had to maintain that precision for over 4 billion years for life on Earth to develop. So as we're talking about the sun, while we share all the other data, if we mention this, and then we actually, and this is where you see the right, think about the discipline of maintaining that perfect temperature. What? And it's just awe-inspiring. And then turn that into a reflective question. Who are the people in your orbit? What are they expecting from you?
00:18:18
Speaker
What are they counting on you? And how are you delivering to that? Now this person, this child is now starting to think about how am I impacting others? How are others impacting me? What are people counting on me for? And now they start thinking about their place in the broader society and how they can actually work or benefit the society. And so it's going to leave an impact. Who are the people that are in my orbit?
00:18:44
Speaker
And what I found is that children that go through this kind of education programs and their education programs like that all over the world, including Victor Cano's program was exactly this. Every lesson of their seeds in these values and virtues. And what it does is it brings out these individuals that are phenomenal because they are not absorbed in themselves. Why is that important? If you think about it,
00:19:11
Speaker
If I go around the room and asking people, who are your leaders? Who are the people that you really look up to? I will have, and I've done this exercise all over the world with all segments, corporate setting, children, families, you name it. And they all come up with names. You know, some people will list heroes like Gandhi or like Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr. Some people come up with their daily heroes, my uncle, my grandmother. Okay, great. Then the next question, what is it that makes them your heroes?
00:19:42
Speaker
And then they'll start listing characteristics like compassion, integrity, charity, taking care of others, selflessness, on and on and on. And that list, I could literally take that list and put it into any other place and they would all agree. In fact, that list is amazing. So that value and virtue system is universal. Universal, absolutely universal. And you know, it's actually interesting despite all the languages we have, all the cultures that we have, all the,
00:20:12
Speaker
geographical separations and distances and disparities that we have, our value system of who we admire.
00:20:21
Speaker
who we hold high is amazingly consistent. It's actually, I found few things more consistent in my marketing. Yeah, that's really interesting because as I hear you talk about this, I was thinking, man, how do you scale a value system in Mercer Island, let alone the world, right? I mean, you've got so many different backgrounds and so that was going to be a question I had. But the way you've illustrated that
00:20:45
Speaker
You're right. I think you're right. I think anywhere you go on earth, people hold those same virtues and high esteem. So that's very interesting. Actually, I've been searching all for all of these years, for over 15 years. I've been searching for somebody to come and say, God, I love this person because
00:21:03
Speaker
They were, they just cheated everyone because they swindled everyone. I have not come across or because they took the credit of other people's work. Never happened. Never happened. It's the same set of things. It's, it's almost like I would say we value as a society, if I had to summarize it in one line, what we hold high as leaders are those who are more selfless than selfish.
00:21:28
Speaker
It's almost like our entire value system is selflessness versus selfishness. And if it is that fundamental, and you're absolutely right, it was never about their profession. It was never about their language or their cultural background or their country. It was never about their wealth. It was never about their social status. It was always these set of virtues. And if we're that consistent and we are that universal in measuring this, you would think we would incorporate it into our education system better because it seems to be the higher order bit compared to everything else.
00:21:57
Speaker
And yet we don't, I did this set at workplaces and I said, who do you want as a manager? I have yet to find a guy who wants a selfish manager. So it is so universal in every walk of life. And yet we don't, I mean, at best we teach it a little bit in kindergarten, maybe if we're lucky. And yet, I mean, that's where the disparity is. And the programs that have incorporated this whole learning, the head, heart, both, right? You see the difference in them.
00:22:27
Speaker
You see the difference. They just blow the socks off any statistics that you want to measure. And that's the transformation that's coming because it's not just a fluke with one place running it and getting lucky. No, there's like programs all over the world. I can point you to.
00:22:41
Speaker
So you and I met this summer, had a great conversation and you told me a story about how you were volunteering in the school district.
Character Education Initiative
00:22:50
Speaker
It's kind of started with your son and this character development program. Would you mind just spending a couple minutes telling me a little bit about that and what you accomplished there? Sure, absolutely. I have been, as I said, I've been sort of
00:23:02
Speaker
Outside of work, I've been a teacher for 30 plus years. I work with youth a lot. I have mentored hundreds of students through their high school and through the college. In fact, I put a couple of the college essays of some of my students on my website. So you can go take a look at those websites and you can take a look at those essays and how these children reflected on their learning over the years. You know, they pick different aspects.
00:23:27
Speaker
based on the prompt of the essay, but you can get a glimpse of it. So one of the things that my son Maitreya, who's in 12th grade at Marshall Island High School, he said, you know, you do this awesome thing for the community. You do it at workplace. I've been doing this at Microsoft campus for seven years now. And he said, can you bring some of this to my high school? I want my friends to hear this. I want my friends to benefit from this.
00:23:54
Speaker
I thought about it and I said, okay, you know what? Let's see what we can do. And he said, you know, I'll start a club. And he took a lot of the initiative because he's seen the impact over the years. And he himself has participated in it and he finds it that it's his most distinguishing character. So he started the club and I just went and facilitated some of these sessions. And we did like eight last year. We piloted it last year. We did eight of these sessions. And at the end of the last June, basically, I had them kind of write their summaries.
00:24:24
Speaker
of what they got out of the program. I kind of just did a quick survey and the responses were phenomenal. The students said, I have them all verbatim here, but they said, this program changed how I think about life, how I think about how I interact with people and how I see them and how they see me. Another student wrote, it changed how I interact with my parents.
00:24:47
Speaker
I realize now that they're not monsters, that they actually care. And then another one said. That's a victory. Exactly. Will the parents thank you? I'm sure. This program teaches things that we really need in life. Why doesn't any other class do this? The concept of having a clean mind before acting, before taking upon a decision. It's so powerful. I think it will change everything I do in my life. This is eight weeks worth.
00:25:15
Speaker
I can go on and on, but I think you get the point. Wow. So you feel like this is something that you could help bring into the district and scale into our education program? I think so. And I think actually, I think it's going to be coming from lots of different directions. I'm not by any stretch a lone warrior here. I see the tide turning. There's an avalanche coming. The good part of it is that our superintendent Fred Rundle is actually, I mean,
00:25:41
Speaker
This program has existed in various formats over the years, because depending on where it was created, there's something called civic-minded education, which Fred is a big proponent of, is exactly this. The LA School District piloted this with select classes and actually talked to somebody that went through that thing and how it changed her life subsequently. So there's all kinds of flavors of this program. And I think we can easily bring this into our school district. And we can, I think, see the difference. In just a few years, you will see the difference.
00:26:11
Speaker
And the power of this is this changes the process of learning. And if we do it right, what we will find is a lot of the challenges that we struggle with. In fact, I was at a conference recently, just last week, actually, in the Caribbean, where 17 countries had come together, and the educators and the governmental leaders from the 17 countries came together and discussed educational reform. And what they talked about was how
00:26:41
Speaker
One of the psychologists, the guest speakers that came, talked about how a lot of the mental health challenges are a result of an imbalance in the educational system. The analogy that I can give you that really conveys that is, imagine you have a plane. This plane has three sets of wheels. There's the front wheel and the two back wheels. Let's say the two back wheels are the head and the heart. What happens when you create a lopsided education?
00:27:09
Speaker
We can talk about the front wheels later. Those are the hands and that's a completely different topic. But if you just take the backside of wheels, the majority of the weight is focused on those. The front one is purely directional. The backside of wheels, if you have, let's say the left wheels are the head, the left hemisphere, and the right wheels are the heart, the left and right hemispheres. If you take, let's say our education system focuses so heavily on left, so we'll put 130% of the air pressure on the left wheels.
00:27:38
Speaker
We probably put 10% if we're lucky, on the heart. So we'll put, we'll remove, we'll deplate it to 10%. Now. Pretty lopsided takeoff and landing. Well, first of all, get that plane to get out of, with 10% air, get that plane to get out of the gate and taxi to the runway. You'll be lucky if it does that. Let's say it does, you probably have damaged the wheels enough that there's no way that plane is getting up to 200 miles per hour so it can take off. Yet this is the education that we provide to our children and we expect them to take off.
00:28:07
Speaker
I think that analogy covers it all. Well, listen, I think all of this is very interesting and hugely inspirational. And I learned a lot from you this summer, and I've learned even more during this discussion. I think I'd like to pivot now to some of the issues that we're facing as an education community here in Mercer Island. The first question I'd like to ask is, what are the top two or three
00:28:37
Speaker
most pressing issues that you see facing the Mercer Island School District at present. Excellent. I love it. Bringing it all back into sort of the now and the reality of it, right? One, I think, is the health of our children, the mental health of our children. I think it's a very top issue.
Key Issues for Mercer Island School District
00:28:56
Speaker
You know, I recently read a heartbreaking statistic that every eight hours, just in the state of Washington alone, every eight hours,
00:29:05
Speaker
a child between the age of 10 and 17 commits suicide. It's just heartbreaking to hear that. So health of our children. What is the root cause of this? And how do we address this? We can blame social media. We can blame technology. We can blame societal pressure. So we can blame all of this. But I feel, I actually know what the problem is.
00:29:29
Speaker
is that we have not given the children tools to have their deep inner conviction, the self-reliance. All happiness that comes from external objects is transient. It comes here today, it'll go away today. So if I'm relying on my social media ratings, then yeah, I'm going to be up and down because they go up and down.
00:29:52
Speaker
Today you post something, it goes up. Tomorrow, people have moved on to something else, so it goes down. So in any time when I rely on external measures, external sort of validation or artifacts to measure myself, I'm going to go up and down. We need to teach children how to, you know, true happiness comes from within, how to tap into that happiness, how to find their own confidence that's separate from the outside. This is one of the core pieces. And once you address this,
00:30:22
Speaker
A lot of these other issues, now we've given them the strength. You've taught them to fish. You've given them the strength to handle whatever comes their way. That, I think, is an important part of education. So I think we do need to spend a little bit more time and energy on developing the whole human being. And that will help us address some of these issues. And I think that's the top issue that we need to cover. Another one.
00:30:50
Speaker
is sort of this sustainability and long-term, you know, sort of that there's a lot of talk right now, especially at this moment in time, the fiscal sustainability of the school district and of the school environment, especially with declining enrollment, et cetera. Yeah, there's different factors. There's obviously people leaving. We need to find out why, right? And clearly they're not finding something that they're looking for, that they're moving on to something else.
00:31:14
Speaker
So that's an opportunity for us to introspect. The people that are happy with you, getting data from them is good. It's reassuring. It's reaffirming. But the people that are unhappy for you with your education system, the people that are leaving, that's the more important data. I would love to go talk to every single family that has left the school district and understand why. Because in there is a clue of what we're not doing right. I think that we need to go do that. That'll help with the enrollment.
00:31:44
Speaker
somewhat, it may not solve fully because overall birth rates and et cetera are going down, which is a broader societal function. But the way that I see it is, from my experience in business, I'll also tell you something. There is no other industry that has as much funding as education. The nonprofit education sector has probably more angel investors, more amount of money than anything else. I think we can latch on to some innovative programs.
00:32:14
Speaker
I think we can find lots of other funding sources. So I think if we do things right, we will actually get two words with one stone. We'll fix the health of our children and we'll fix the fiscal challenges that we're facing them. There's lots of different ways of going about it. This is where I'm hoping to bring my background in sort of the business to figure out how we can actually compensate for a lot of this. And we do have actually a very wealthy population. If they are convinced, if they're convicted,
00:32:43
Speaker
we will have no shortage of funds. So can you spend a minute on the enrollment issue? For those listening, that may or may not have tuned in or understand what's going on, can you just quantify with some numbers, if you have them in front of you, what the situation is, just give some perspective? Great question.
00:33:06
Speaker
So basically, our schools are funded based on the number of students that attend.
Impact of Declining Enrollment
00:33:10
Speaker
So if we have a 5% drop in attendance, well, that's a 5% drop in revenue, which means you have to impact something. Programs get affected. Teachers may get affected. Facilities may get affected. So there's data that's showing that we have potentially 10% drop in enrollment over the next decade. And that's alarming because that's significant impact
00:33:35
Speaker
It's the science of a contracting society and economy, which is very harmful because a lot of the things that you will have to make some very hard cuts and it's uncomfortable. So the projections of up to 10%, some numbers stated even higher, those are the ones that are causing a lot of alarms. What are the reasons for that? Is it all population? I don't think we can chalk it off all to population changes. Overall, I think in the Western world, we are seeing birth rates drop.
00:34:05
Speaker
overall countries are struggling to maintain. But this is, I mean, US is running into it, but Europe has run into it for a while. This is why I think in places like Ireland, you actually get paid, couples get paid $10,000 to have a kid. So it's not a new problem. Others have been down this path before and there are various approaches. So that's one part of it. But the second part of it, I believe that I have talked to enough parents on the island
00:34:34
Speaker
that they are concerned about the lack of proper STEM education, their lack of academic quality, or they're concerned about the lack of academic quality in education that they're choosing to go to private schools. Now, the interesting dynamic here is that a lot of these people that are choosing to go to private schools clearly have the disposable income to send their children to the private schools. It's expensive, it's not cheap. My question is,
00:35:01
Speaker
what can I do to win these people back and get them to give the same money to the school district? Great. You've read my mind. That's literally the next question I was going to ask. Clearly, the data shows that we have a declining enrollment. We have fewer incoming kindergartners than we do leaving seniors by about 150, 160, I think, this year.
00:35:25
Speaker
from Fred's data. What do you think we can do as a district to win back some of these students?
00:35:33
Speaker
Absolutely. And some of it, maybe the COVID kind of messed up a lot of things, right? And some of it, maybe an after effect from COVID, we might be recovering from it. Sure. And I think it's fair to say that some of the COVID dynamic, there's nothing you can do about it, right? I mean, people were made decisions, and a lot of cases, they're going to stick with what they decided. Exactly. So setting that aside, though, last year, we had almost double the number of outgoing seniors to that ratio doubled.
00:36:03
Speaker
Clearly, the COVID thing was a one-time thing, but we still have a problem. Exactly. I think from my conversation with parents, I actually talked to parents who it has nothing to do with COVID. They pulled their children out because they are concerned about the academic rigor and quality. They have a very valid point. If you think about it, there is no question about it. Science is here to stay. It's changing every aspect of life.
00:36:29
Speaker
And you can see this thing very clearly in colleges. I work with a lot of children as they're applying for universities. I have a very good sense of what's happening in the universities. Almost all of the good universities out there, they're now starting to offer data science and computing programs, informatics. They're offering these programs in their humanities department. There are programs out there, literally, if you go to University of Michigan, there's a program out there on art and data science. It's everywhere. There's no denying it.
00:36:59
Speaker
And if we want our children to succeed, if we want them to shine, we absolutely need to give them solid foundations in science, in math. And it can be anything else. They could be interested in theater, but they will still need enough technology foundation. I've seen some of the most successful doctors. Actually, I work with a doctor here at the University of Washington that works at the Seattle Children's. He's an MD.
00:37:27
Speaker
But he also knows software. And he says that one of the things that makes him successful is he can code probably better than a lot of software engineers can, or at least as good as they can. These have become commodities. They're essential technologies. Familiarity with computing is becoming as essential as familiarity with reading and writing. So we have to evolve our programs. There's no question about it.
00:37:55
Speaker
The challenge is not that the children are overwhelmed. We might want to label it as that. But really, if I go down and look at it, that's not what I see. I see inspired children doing just as well. I actually know a child who is doing the combination study of computer science and art. And she is thriving and she's loving it. The inspiration is missing in our education system.
00:38:25
Speaker
Once we bring that back, a lot of these problems go away and we will actually, you know, it's this, right? If you get, you know, a number of years ago, I was at Workplace, we were talking about something and we were talking about how do we get customers in and we're talking about, you know, how to compete angles and this and that and all kinds of analysis, marketing and messaging. After lots of debate, one guy gets up and says, you know, it's simple. If we build products that people absolutely love,
00:38:55
Speaker
All of these things will get fixed. There's a lot of truth to that. If we have an education system that is leading the way in the state and beyond that is setting a new bar altogether, every one of these people will come back. We have to be better. That's all. That's a simple solution. And we should be at a place where we're giving the run to private schools for their money. And I think we can do it. We have the talent. We have the community.
Vision for District Transformation
00:39:25
Speaker
Well, that's a very, I mean, again, very inspiring aspiration. And I agree with you, we do have the talent and the community. I want to pivot a little bit. You had mentioned hard cuts in your previous answer. And the long term facility planning is something that's sort of front of mind for everybody.
00:39:46
Speaker
There have been three community education sessions where Fred Rundell addressed community on some of the hard choices that the district is considering. Can you spend a minute and just share your perspective on, if elected, how you would approach the facility planning, the budget cuts, the bond measures? There's a lot that was on the table, but if you could summarize your position
00:40:16
Speaker
on some of those key issues, I think that would be really helpful. Absolutely. You know, if you think about it, again, this goes back to, I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but I'll explain. None of these bond measures.
00:40:31
Speaker
And at some point, they may be necessary because we do have aging schools. There's no question about it. We do have aging schools. The fact that we are at a place where we're having to rebuild all of these schools almost at the same time is probably not an ideal place that says something went wrong in the past. Ideally, you want to be at a place where you're systematically slowly rebuilding all your schools in a rotation basis where it's really the same amount of money that's just going through all of these one after the other after the other. But the fact is we're not there. So we are at a place where we might have to replace multiple schools because of the aging
00:41:00
Speaker
buildings and infrastructure. That's just part of life. What I found at Workplace in Business also, if you're doing well and you're really performing, I mean, you're sort of knocking it out of the park on your core metrics and the core indices that matter, then going to the well and asking for more money is usually not a problem. It's when you're floundering and you're going and asking for
00:41:30
Speaker
money, that becomes a problem. I mean, it's the same thing in our household also. If our child is knocking it out of the park, getting straight A's and doing fantastic and leveraging themselves, yeah, as parents, we're going to be like, yeah, OK, you want that? Sure, here. Right? Where if they're struggling with this thing and then they ask for a new iPhone, you're like, well, you know what? Let's focus on education first. Let's get your basics right.
00:41:54
Speaker
So I think we're kind of in that quandary a little bit. And that's where I see a lot of this. That's the underlying tone of a lot of this discussion that I see. And of course, when we present something like this, there's also somewhat of a knee-jerk emotional reaction that's just human nature. That's also playing in. I think what we have to do is not get caught up with all of that. And I don't think we should be rushing to any decisions. I think we can take input. We can hear the community.
00:42:23
Speaker
and then we take all of the data and see what levers can we pull to get to the desired outcomes and then work through it. So if we're trying to make a rush to a decision, which I don't think anybody is, from all my conversations with the board and this, nobody's at a place where they're gonna make a decision in the next week or month or two or three, right? I think this is a long-term, that's why it's called long-term. I think we need to take the data, figure out what the right long-term solution is,
00:42:52
Speaker
But I think we also need to invest in sort of raising the bar on ourselves in our education. And I think there are mechanisms that we can do that. Most of the people that I talk to, I'll give you just a small example, right? Most of the people that I talk to in the community, they would love to help out in the schools. I mean, they're like, yeah, if I can, I mean, we have people that have pretty much every profession you can imagine. We have people that have been highly successful in their respective positions.
00:43:22
Speaker
or in their respective professions. Can we bring them to inspire our children? Because inspire children child's ability to learn is orders of magnitude greater than an uninspired child. It's very simple. What mechanisms can we put into place to leverage the community to inspire our children? It's actually a conversation that I recently had with a few people in the school district. And I think there's some very
00:43:52
Speaker
powerful ideas that we can implement quickly. Once we do that, and once we give them the right tools and resources, we are next to one of the greatest universities in the world. I think University of Washington was ranked number six last year by one of the rating agencies at least. Go Huskies. Yeah, go Huskies. Number six in the world. We're not talking about number six in the US. This is like in the same league as Cambridge and MIT.
00:44:18
Speaker
You know, if we are not able to provide a instruction for some really advanced student, that's like, you know, why hold them back? If they are the place where they can expand, then let's figure out how to collaborate. We already have programs that collaborate with the university. Let's give them every opportunity. Let's not hold them back. So I think there are things, there are small initiatives that we can do now that address the root. I think we need to just keep our goal very, very clear, our metrics. And, you know, this is the board's job
00:44:49
Speaker
is to set the vision and set the target metrics. I mentioned this last night in the League of Women Voters. There are five people in the board, and all five people together manage one employee. They hire and manage one employee. I feel sorry for the particular role. You've got five bosses. It's bad enough to have one. You have five, right? But that's the role.
00:45:16
Speaker
And these five people's job is to set the vision, set the goals. And I would love to see us set very clear measurable metrics for assessment. So you take the ambiguity out of it. You bring crystal clear the same way that we assess in business. Let's bring that, that rigor. Set those goals, set those metrics. And if we're clear that our goal at the end of the day, our core competency, our core objective is to provide phenomenal
00:45:46
Speaker
education that truly transforms this individual to discover their own full potential, to go serve the world. If we can create an education, a system that basically goes back to those core principles and set those goals, yeah, understand where we are and keep on raising the bar constantly. I think a lot of these other issues will get addressed. And that's what I'm going to work on as a school board director. I'm going to be looking at what goals do we set? What measures do we set? I have two decades of experience doing this.
00:46:16
Speaker
I know that just with the right goal and the right metric, you can change the entire business. And so I think it'll be the same here.
Conclusion and Campaign Information
00:46:22
Speaker
Well, with that, Ananta, I want to thank you very much for joining me. I've learned a lot. I find your perspective very inspirational, and I think you use those words.
00:46:35
Speaker
many times in your responses. I think we need that and we'd benefit from that. Just to wrap up here, if people want to learn more, where can they go to get more information on you and your candidacy? Excellent. Go to my website, anantaforschools.com. It has some articles in there. It has some more of this and I'm actually uploading a few more videos today on there. I will keep updating that website. Go there.
00:47:06
Speaker
There's a form in there that says that you can just sign up for your email so I can keep sending updates. But there's also a place for you to reach out. You want to have a conversation. You want to discuss something more. You want to express your concerns about something more. I believe that one of the most important aspects of this role is to be a good listener because that's where the change really begins. So I am available any day
00:47:34
Speaker
any time to hear the public's input. Just reach out, send a note. I promise I will respond and I will connect with you. All right. Well, thank you very much, Nante. I wish you the best of luck with your candidacy. Thanks for joining. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Thank you again for this opportunity. Love the forum. Love the conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.