Over a dozen individuals showed up for a Walker County Democrats meeting July 27 to discuss the state of public education in their county and across the state.
The meeting was called and led by David Boyle, head of the county’s Democratic Party. Boyle said he was trying to get the party up and running again in the county, after several years without an active committee.
“I kept running into liberal-minded people in the grocery store who would tell me they don’t have a place to talk about the issues,” he said during the meeting.
The meeting included a panel of four local educators to address the group’s concerns regarding the county’s education system. Among the group’s chief concerns are how the county can better serve underprivileged students and those with special needs, whom they fear are falling by the wayside. The panel featured Austin Cope, a science teacher at Chattanooga Valley Elementary, Jason Alspaugh, a history teacher at Ridgeland High School, David Cofield, a retired teacher from LaFayette, and Jim Barrett, president of the Walker County Association of Educators.
According to Niche.com, an aggregator for school and education data, more than 70 percent of Walker County Schools’ students are on free or reduced lunch. And AdvancED, an international nonprofit that works to improve schools and school districts, found that nearly 15 percent of the school population was comprised of students with disabilities when the group studied the district in 2016.