For the first time since 2016 Cullman County voters will have the opportunity to have a direct say in who leads the Cullman County School District. With no Democratic contenders vying for the superintendent position, the contest between incumbent Dr. Shane Barnette and challenger Morris Williams will be decided during next month’s Republican primary election on Tuesday, March 5. The Times sat down with both candidates to ask a curated series of questions. Some questions were presented to both candidates while others were specific to the individual. Today, we are sharing Barnette’s responses. Look for Williams’ interview in the Thursday, Feb. 8 edition of The Times.

The following has been lightly edited for both length and clarity.

CT: School choice is primed to be a big issue among Alabama lawmakers during the 2024 legislative session. Do you feel as though school choice negatively impacts public school systems? Why or why not?

SB: We’re making decisions about school choice on a state level, but we all know that there is a huge difference in education here in Cullman County, and in Cullman City, than there is in other parts of the state.

I feel like we live in a special place. Cullman County is unique in that we don’t have some of the challenges and some of the issues that they have in other parts of Alabama and other parts of the country. Thank God, because I wouldn’t want to live in a community that have some of the issues other people have right now. We currently already have school choice in Alabama, but it isn’t to the level that many people want it to be.

There are still things we can do to increase school choice and give parents options. Right now, parents can pull their children out and homeschool them if they wish or they can put them in private school. Some of the bills that are being discussed will give money to those parents who want to homeschool or send kids to private schools. I’m not always against that, but at the same time we have to be careful that we don’t drain our public systems’ funds so that we can’t provide a good education for our students. There are so many different school choice bills out there right now. I don’t have any problem with school choice. Many parents that homeschool their kids or put them in a private school do it for a variety of reasons. I don’t think we should pull a kid out and place them somewhere else just because they’ve been getting in trouble or have had some disciplinary issues. I think we should work with the school and family and come up with a good solution for those situations, but some families want more religion and things like that in their instruction or to have more hands-on learning. I can understand and appreciate that. All of that to say that there are some components of school choice that I fully support, but at the same time if we pull funding out of public education it’s going to do damage to public schools and reduce the number of opportunities for our public school kids if we aren’t careful. So, we just have to be very careful as we promote that.

CT: In 2019, a $30 million multi-sports complex — commonly known as “Project X” — was shelved. In hindsight, do you believe this project was a good idea? If so, why do you feel as though public support was so low?

SB: I would say that I was probably thinking too progressively when I promoted that. We had a business plan that would have paid that facility off. The plan was for when we weren’t using it for our students we could rent it out to host national conventions and travel-ball tournaments, things like that to put money back into our school system. If we had built that facility back then, by today we would be putting money back into our school which we could use for different projects. But again, it was probably too progressive at the time for that. One of the things we heard at the time that we first proposed that, was that we needed to do something with that lake property [430 acres of inaccessible Section 16 property acquired by the school system from the Alabama Department of Conservation in 2010 plus an additional 10 acres purchased by the school board in order to access the property] before we build anything big. Also, to be honest, we had a lot of projects at our local schools which needed repairs or upgraded. A lot of people wanted those projects done before we ever did anything else. As people began to talk to me more about their concerns, I agreed with them. So we put that project on the shelf and we’ve worked hard since then over the last four years to make repairs and upgrades at our local schools. We’ve also sold that lake property and put that money in a trust.

Looking back on it, would I propose it again if I could go back in time? No, because I realize that it wasn’t a good time. We’re a lot more traditional here and that was really thinking out of the box.

I was born and raised here in Cullman County. I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve seen us through the years struggle financially as a school system, so I was trying to think of something we could do, that nobody’s ever done, that could put money into our school system and help us get our school system up to par like it needs to be. If anything, what people should take away from that is that I listen to the people. When people had complaints about that, I’m the one who put it on the shelf.

CT: To follow up, do you think if you had better communicated those ideas about how the project could bring money back into the school system, it might have swayed the public’s opinion. What do you think you could have done to maybe communicate that vision a little bit better?

SB: Because the land wasn’t in our name yet and because some additional money which would have helped pay for it weren’t secured at the time, I couldn’t announce what the project was. That’s why it had to come out as “Project X.” To be honest, it was really out of my wheelhouse. But if I could go back in time, I would slow the process down and would have held more public meetings to let the community have input into it. I also would have also shared our business plan more. The business plan was really solid, but I never really had an opportunity to share it with everybody. Obviously, it was a pretty good idea because now the city of Cullman is doing the exact same thing and they’ll generate millions of dollars for the city. Just wait a few years and look at the revenues that are generated from the one that the city is building and you’ll see what kind of money it would have produced for our school system. I will say this though, I don’t have any plans of bringing that project back up.

CT: Since you were appointed to your current position, more than 20 schools in the district have been named Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence. You’ve mentioned this as one of the district’s achievements during the last eight years. Could you explain how this program differs from the U.S. Department of Education sponsored Blue Ribbon Schools program and how the district benefits from participation in either program. Also, as a BRSE board member, do you feel as though your affiliation creates a conflict of interest with your position as superintendent?

SB: I’ll explain the two programs first. The one national blue ribbon organization [BRS] looks at academic achievement only. When I was assistant principal at West Point Elementary, I lobbied to get them to evaluate the school. The next year, after I had been appointed principal, they came back and gave them that award. It was only based on academic achievement. Then, I found this other organization [BRSE] which actually branched off from BRS. The reason they did was because they felt there were a lot more components that go into a school being successful than just academic achievement. What they [BRSE] do is survey parents, teachers, administrators and students. They also come in and visit classrooms. They evaluate the culture of a school and when they evaluate the academics of a school it’s not just academic achievement, but whether or not they are trending upward. In other words … the growth of a school. It’s much more thorough than the other organization. While I’m very proud of West Point Elementary for getting that recognition — and there are some other school systems around here that have also earned it — they didn’t visit the school or anything like that. All they do is look at how you scored on a state test.

So, I found out about BRSE when I was trying to get the BRS organization to look at West Point Elementary. When I became superintendent I reached out to them and told them we have a really good school system and really good schools, but we want to be better. We’re really good, but we want to be great. I asked them to come and evaluate our schools and tell us where we can improve. Another difference between the two is that BRSE gives you an action plan after they evaluate a school. The action plans for some of those first schools were about 120 pages long if we ever wanted it to become a Lighthouse school. We were really kind of overwhelmed, but they were brutally honest. So we went to work and every school had a leadership team that started working on those action plans. BRSE would come back and walk through again until we got to that level. That’s where we started and it’s kind of grown from there.

When I look back on it, we had an 82% graduation rate when I first became superintendent. One of the things we’ve been able to do through BRSE helping us that we’ve got that up to about 97% this past year. That’s a huge achievement for us. Our college and career readiness indicator was around 72% when I came in and that was up to 99% this past year. I think we’ve only got two schools left that haven’t made it to Lighthouse status yet, but they will soon. Just one example was Fairview High School received a D on their state report card. Well, BRSE brought in one of their accessors and he came every month to work with that principal and leadership team to address some key issues. I’m pretty sure it was by the next state report card that they had raised their score up to an A.

As far as me being on the board, that’s not a paid position, I’ve never been paid anything from BRSE. Because of the change that we had in our school district, they came and surprised me at a board meeting to name me as the first BRSE Superintendent. Most of the time these initiatives are led by individual schools, well I came in and said that I wanted us to be the first full blue ribbon district. That’s why they recognized me. After a couple of years went by they approached me and asked if I would consider being on their board just because I have a passion for our schools getting better and they thought I would bring a lot to their board in leading other school systems to get better as well.

CT: I’m glad you brought up the Alabama State Report Cards and College and Career Readiness indicators because it leads into my next question. Cullman County was recently ranked fourth among county school districts in the 2022-2023 state report card issued by the Alabama Department of Education. Graduation and College and Career Readiness scores remained high at 94 and 97 percent, but proficiency scores in core subjects were much lower — English — 54%, science — 43% and math — 33%. Can you explain the gap in these scores? How are students graduating if only 33% are proficient in math?

SB: Well, there are several different levels that they score these subjects on. There isn’t a pass or a fail. When they say “proficient,” that is the highest level. So you can be an average student and still not be considered proficient even though you are scoring high enough to move on and be successful at the next level. We have a lot of students in Cullman County who are scoring high enough to go to college and be successful there or in whatever job they may be going to even if they aren’t what is considered proficient. All of that is based on how students score on the ACT and those percentages cover grades 2-12, I believe, depending on what school you are looking at. So, for the district our proficiency level is all of those percentages averaged together. We might have a lower grade with students who may be struggling in something like math proficiency and that doesn’t affect our graduation rate at all. We have great students who score near perfect on the ACT and then we also have some students that score lower on the ACT, but still meet all of the requirements to graduate. If you pass all of your classes, but you aren’t a good test taker — and we have students like that — you might not score well on the ACT and it would show that you aren’t proficient, but you still have a passing grade.

CT: You mentioned earlier how one of your goals as a district is to always find ways to get better and improve. Is there any way that you as the superintendent can help the teachers inside those classrooms to do more at their jobs and teach more effectively, so you do see those scores begin to go up?

SB: I certainly think so. If I didn’t, then I probably don’t need to be in this position. Another statistic that we look at when we are talking about the kids that are graduating. Something really important to me is how many of those kids who are going to college have to take remedial classes. If I really believed that only 33 percent of our graduating seniors were scoring well enough to go to college, then why wouldn’t more of those kids have to take remedial classes? I haven’t seen the numbers for the most recent graduating class, but the class before that tied with Hartselle City Schools for the third in the state for the lowest percentage of students taking remedial classes in college. That’s pretty incredible. What that means is that we are graduating a lot of kids, more than ever in the history of Cullman County Schools and probably one of the highest graduation rates in the state. Of those kids, fewer of them are having to take remedial classes, but they’re not scoring high enough on the ACT? To me, that doesn’t add up. Now, do we want them to continue to raise that proficiency rate? Yes, we do. But our kids are prepared to go college and they’re prepared to go into a career and I’m excited about that.

As the superintendent, I do feel like I impact that. The first thing I want to do is hire well. What makes the biggest difference in not just proficiency levels, but achievement overall, is how good that teacher is who is working directly with those kids. That’s the number one thing that affects academic achievement. There’s different ways of improving that. You either hire well or you make the people that you have better and I think we’ve done that over the last eight years. As we have people retire or leave, then we hire the absolute best person that we can hire for that job. Because our system has improved so much and we’ve gotten some recognition from the blue ribbon stuff and some other things, we’ve got teachers who are coming from other places wanting to come into our system. That’s really exciting. We have some excellent teachers, and they hear me say this all the time, I love them, but I want them to continue to get better. I want to be a better superintendent next year than I was this year. If I’m not, then shame on me. I feel like our teachers want to be the best teacher they can be. I just want to give them the tools they need, the professional development they need and the support they need to get better. When they get better they relate to the kids better and the kids learn more.

The other thing is, take textbooks for instance, we don’t get enough money from the State Department to even buy a series of math books. A lot of people may not understand this, but because the money we get from the state doesn’t cover those, we have to come up with $1 million local dollars to put with the state money to buy math books. The next year, we might buy reading books and we have to put another million dollars with it. The board and I make it a priority to buy the best books we can for our kids and teachers. That’s one way I feel like I impact the classroom, is by supplying those tools to them.

You also have to create a schedule that maximizes instructional time. Now, when you have crazy weather like we just had that might jack things up pretty bad, but we get creative and we come up with ways to make up those standards. We’ve spent a lot of time with professional development where I might bring someone in or we help each other to learn better strategies and better techniques to help kids learn. One of the things we’ve done over the last few years is all of the K3 are going through LETTERS training which teaches the science of reading. There’s data that shows teachers who use that to teach reading, their students improve more. That’s just one thing. Every teacher in this school system has had an opportunity to learn more and improve their craft and I feel like they are going to continue just getting better.

CT: One of the challenges this district faces is maintaining and operating 27 campuses throughout the county. County school systems in neighboring counties have much fewer schools (Blount — 17, Morgan — 17, Walker — 18 and Winston — 10). Would the district benefit from shedding the cost from having so many campuses, some of which are less than 10 miles apart? Please explain either way.

SB: Would we benefit from having fewer large schools? That’s a tricky question because would we benefit financially? Absolutely we would. Are finances the only thing we take into consideration when deciding what is best for kids? Absolutely not. There are many things that we do throughout our school district that may not be the best thing financially, but it’s what is best for our kids. I’d like for anyone who says that something I did wasn’t in the best interest of students to show me. My decisions have always been what is best for young people and sometimes that may not necessarily be what’s best for the adults. I want to do what is best for our employees, but the kids come first, always.

When I look at consolidating schools, it would absolutely save us money. That was actually a hot topic when I first became superintendent because my predecessor had talked about closing some high schools and only having three big high schools. When I would go around and meet with different groups they would ask me when I was consolidating schools, but the problem I ran into is that everyone wanted to consolidate schools, just not their school. They wanted to close everybody else’s school. One of the things that is special about Cullman County is that our schools are the center of our communities. If we close a school, we are essentially closing that community down. I just can’t see that being what is best for these kids. As long as we have the funds and we are able to continuing operating where we are right now, we need to continue keeping those schools in those communities. At this time I don’t think that’s what the people of Cullman County want. I also think it would be foolish to consolidate schools with the way Cullman County is growing at the moment. Right now projections show us growing exponentially over the next five to 10 years, so I believe even our small schools will be bigger schools soon. I just don’t think we need to consolidate any of our schools at this time.