Melissa Semmler - Conroe ISD Board Member Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, we've got the Bluebont curriculum. Some school systems are
trying it, some are using maybe a part of it,
maybe not all of it. As I said, there's a
financial incentive in order to give it a try. Melissa's
similar joins us. She's a Conroe ISD board member. They're
going to be using the Blue Bonet in in Conroe
ISD school system. Are you going to be using the

(00:22):
entire program?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Melissa, we are using the English part of the program
right now, so for our ELA students English language arts.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
All right? Do you get any money for just using
part of the program or do you have to use
the whole thing?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
We do? We do? There is an incentive, she's part
of the program. I know that some of that incentive
is actually used for the printing costs. So it's not
as awesome as it sounds that the printing, because printing
gets kind of expensive. But it definitely helps offset all
of the costs, which is wonderful.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Okay, let's talk about the controversial parts. Supposedly, it's not
controversial to me, yea. I hear people make arguments all
the time for separation of church and state. First of all,
I don't think they understand what was meant by the
separation of church and state. It was only met by
the founding fathers that our country would not endorse a

(01:15):
specific religion. In other words, we did have to have
a Church of England. Here in the United States, we
could have we could all decide what we wanted our
religious viewpoint to be. There's no problem with having a
mention of God in the schools, is there?

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Personally? I don't think that the mension of God in
the schools is problematic at all. You can see and
documents written by our founding fathers that they refer to
God all the time, so I definitely think that there
is a historical reference there, and I don't think it's
important to note that. You know, for centuries monks were
the primary scribes for manuscripts. So a lot of Western

(01:57):
culture and Western literature has is strongly, strongly influenced by
the Church. And in order to interpret some of that
literature and some of the main aspects of politics and culture,
it is important to have an understanding of Christianity and
the tenants and symbols in it.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well. Concerning the fact that this was founded as a
Judeo Christian society, I would think so. But how much
religion is actually in the Bluebonic curriculum? Is there a
whole bunch of it?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
No, I wouldn't say there's a lot of it. There's
some where they're trying to help you have a better
understanding of I guess the ideology behind whatever the piece
was that was written. And it's not just Christianity. They
refer to other religions as well. Christianity has been highlighted
a lot in the press, but they also refer to
other religions throughout the curriculum. And I know as a

(02:48):
student growing up, I actually went to Christian schools growing up,
and some of our world religion classes discussed our world
history classes discussed religion pretty regularly, just because in other
parts of the world, religion is influential in their culture
and their academics as well.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
So how big of a difference do you hope this
curriculum will make? What is it about this curriculum that
supposedly is going to make it easier for your students
to learn?

Speaker 2 (03:19):
So to make it easier for the students to learn,
What I think is so important about this curriculum is
that it's rigorous, so it's challenging for students. They have
challenging vocabularies, they have challenging pieces works to read. It
really makes the students kind of dig deeper and read

(03:40):
materials that aren't as easy to read as you would think.
So I think it's really important that we raise the
reggor level of rigor in our schools, that students need
to read and think a little bit more. It's also
about it's a classically based curriculum, so we're going to
look back more classic literature and things of that nature
that some of the newer things that have come up.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
I assume, like anything else, you'll be judging this year
by year and taking a look at the test results
and to see how this is impacting the students and
then make further decisions down the road as far as
how you go about your curriculum going forward.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yes, yes, it's you know, it's really important to the
board that we have a strong level of literacy. You know,
we've got a lot of a lot of students that
are struggling with literacy right now, and we really want
to make sure that that is addressed and we're going
to be watching growth really closely. Growth is really important
to us not just the test scores, but how much

(04:37):
has this student grown over the school year as compared
to last year?

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Where are they?

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Where are they compared to where they were at the
beginning of the year. So we're going to be watching
that really closely with this curriculum, and I expect to
see really really.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Good numbers here, all right, and we'll check back with
you and see how those numbers turned out. Thank you, Melissa.
Appreciate it, Melissa so much. Right, you bet. She's with
the conrae Id School Board.