Polk County is a diverse community. Not nearly as ethnically diverse as a major metropolitan center like New York or Chicago, but when it comes to opinions, it’s not hard to find representative samples from across the political spectrum. Nowhere is this more in evidence than at a Polk County school board meeting.
So it seemed like a good idea to kick off this podcast by exploring the state of our county’s schools, which, are still ranked among the top performers in North Carolina. What I needed was someone intimately familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of our schools but with the freedom to talk about what’s working and what’s not without fear of retribution.
Leslie Rhinehart was a public school science teacher for almost 20 years — about half of that time with Polk Schools. She has a master’s in chemistry from UNC Charlotte. In 2017 she was a finalist for the Presidential Award for Mathematics and Science Teachers and she’s also been a finalist for a Burroughs Wellcome Foundation math and science teacher award. Both of these are pretty big deals for teachers. In 2019, she was Polk County’s teacher of the year.
But then she accepted a position at Blue Ridge Community College, where she now teaches chemistry. She graciously agreed to be first guest on Polk Lore to talk about why she joined Polk Schools and why she left. We discuss why a rural county like Polk enjoys a school system with such a good reputation, what’s changed over the past few years, the impact of covid-19, the double-edged sword of Common Core, and why we should be paying more attention to what’s happening in raleigh when it comes to the future of education. If you have any experience with Polk Schools — as a parent or a teacher or a student — you’ll probably finding yourself nodding in agreement at several points in our talk, which was recorded earlier this spring at Blue Ridge Community College. For further reading, follow the Public Schools First Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/publicschoolsfirstnc
