Voters have until Tuesday, Nov. 5 to make their decisions for the general election. NSPR has been interviewing candidates vying for seats on the Chico Unified School Board. In Trustee Area 2, James Bishop is running against Gayle M. Olsen. He spoke with NSPR’s Ken Devol about his background and how he would address some of the issues facing the school board if elected.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tell us more about your background and why you are running for this position.
I grew up in Chico, went to Sierra View Elementary and Bidwell Junior and Pleasant Valley High School. Met my wife at PV. We've been married for 35 years, have eight children together.
I was originally pretty involved in scientific research. I ended up going into medical physics, software development. I did that for over a decade, but during that time I always liked to explain things to people, to teach. I eventually did go to what's now called CORE Butte Charter, originally called Camp Deville Academy, taught there for a year, and got teaching credentials at that time.
So I've always had kind of a foot in that. I also taught at Butte and Chico State. I just, I love it. But my professional career was elsewhere. I never did teach full time in the classroom, except for a couple instances.
So then, if you look at my website, there was this crazy 10 years where we went off and I was in Nigeria and China and North and South Korea and all kinds of crazy stuff. Then when we came back, we were kind of exhausted, and I was thinking about not doing anything for the rest of my life, except making money.
When 2020 came around, we kind of got engaged back in the culture and stuff, and that led me to speaking at the school board meetings quite a bit, and I ended up on the CORE Butte Charter board. So I've been there for over two years, and now this is just sort of the next step in helping parents, being involved.
What do you see as the most pressing issues facing schools in Chico?
I am concerned about the fiscal stuff. I have a business background, and it's natural for any organization, whether it's a business or a school, if it has a monopoly, if it doesn't have competition, it just isn't good for it. So I think a lot of the intuitions, especially of board members who are deep inside the school system or connected to the union, they don't have, in my opinion, the right intuition about this.
I will always be really encouraging and supportive of private schools and charter schools and homeschool because the schools are really suffering from a lack of competition. I would also support vouchers. To me, this is just very obvious.
So one thing that I will plan to do is try to shed some light on the sort of financial – I don't want to go as far as say, mismanagement – but it's just a malaise in the financial thing. There's no bottom line. You know, there's always more tax money. You can always have a bond, like we do right now. And I think people are getting increasingly frustrated. It's like, wasn't there a whole bunch of money that came into the school system? Where did it all go?
The other thing that has been an issue, the thing that's drawn me into the school boards, is it's like the schools of education think that they're like these ideological boot camps that are sending these social justice warriors to kind of go to war with the parents. It's like there's this sort of distrust. I'm not saying this is all across the board, but yet, there's more of it than I think is helpful, and so I'd like to just get more focused on academics and undercut some of the energy for the ideological stuff.
Some of that comes from the state of California. It's in the curriculum, so I don't know. People will often tell me you can't really do anything about all this stuff, because there's federal and state laws. And so my answer to that criticism, which I think is quite valid, is that most people have no idea how powerful it is to just say things that are true in front of people.
Another thing I'll often hear is, you know, people don't care, they don't come to the board meetings, there's so few parents that even care. And I'm like, well, for the ones who do, the parents, the community members, the teachers who show up and are willing to speak, I'm going to make sure that their voice is sort of amplified and that they go away feeling courage.
Maybe the reason people don't come to school board meetings is because it's such a discouraging, miserable experience. Another thing people are probably thinking right now is that the school board meetings are long enough, you're going to make them even longer if you do all this stuff. We just have to accept that.
What would you say sets you apart from the other candidates and why should people vote for you?
What sets me apart is having this professional background, being involved in business, being very concerned about innovation, not really having the traditional mindset of just accepting the way that schools have run for ages.
Right now we have, I don't know, 25% you know, of the kids have competency in verbal or less than 50% of math. I can't remember the numbers. But there are problems, and I think that there's plenty of solutions to be had, but we need a more innovative, competition friendly environment for those to flourish.
Editor’s Note: The most recent assessments from the California Department of Education show Chico Unified School District students performed above grade-level standards on English Language Arts and slightly below grade-level standards in Mathematics. In both subjects, they performed better than the statewide average.
