David Spain’s Vision for Johnston County Public Schools

jonathan-breeden_1_08-26-2024_131822.mp3: angles and i anyway i’ll i’ll let her do all that i just i’ll just talk alright alright are we ready yep okay three two one hello and welcome to another edition of the best of johnston county podcast i’m your host jonathan breeden and on today’s episode we have johnston county school board candidate david spain he’s here to talk to us about a little bit about his background where he went to school used to be a teacher and some of the things he’d like to see done for the johnston county public schools if he is elected on november the fifth but before we get to that i would like to remind all of you as i always do to like subscribe or follow the best of johnston county podcast wherever you’re seeing it whether it be on apple spotify youtube linkedin tiktok twitter or any of the other social media pages of the best of johnston county podcast the best of johnston county podcast comes out every single monday so we’ve had a lot of great guests and we’ve got a lot of future guests a lot of great guests coming up in the future so please go back and listen to some of the previous episodes with some of for my more popular ones included donald o’meara some realtor out of smithfield our county commissioner chairman pat patrick i mean chairman butch water and county commissioner patrick harris those are all ones we’ve got a lot of positive feedback anyway so go back and listen to those be listening to the future we got a lot of great guests that are gonna be on and i think you’re really gonna enjoy it if you love johnston county as much as i do this is the podcast for you welcome david thank you jonathan alright no problem i appreciate you coming out here to the cleveland community to help record this podcast just tell us your name where you from david spain i live about five miles from here okay i live off of highway fifty in this area and i’m in district four for the school board race which is a new district and everybody across the county votes for all districts this this year so i live close by so it didn’t take me long to get here well that’s cool that’s cool and you know i don’t know if everybody realized it but this is the first year that the john skate school board is being elected by districts right one of the reasons they went to districts was because nobody from cleveland was on the johnston county school board right i mean we had teresa grant for a while and everybody loved her but after she got off we we haven’t really had anybody who lived in the cleveland community on the school board and so by going and then there were other areas there was nobody from the really from benson meadow for a long period of time because most of the voters are in clayton and smithfield and cleveland too and they seem to vote for the people they knew there and it was harder for people in other parts of the county so i was excited to see them go to this district system they got the legislature to run the bill because now there will be somebody on that board from all parts of the county to speak for those schools even the more rural parts of the county and somebody to speak for cleveland correct we need that voice not only do i speak for cleveland and down towards mcgee’s crossroads but you know i’m gonna speak for the whole county i look at the whole ball of wax not just my area but our area needs to have some focus we need to have that voice and i like the idea of the districts well and we’ve had commissioner districts forever yes and i think that has worked well for us but what always kinda got me was there for a while you had three of the commissioners live within about four miles of each other because the districts seem to all meet in smithfield and that’s where they sort of lived so anyway it’s not quite that way now but it was for for quite a it was for quite a while but so anyway where’d you grow up well i’m from virginia originally i moved here fifty four years ago to cary so i went to cary high school and graduated from high school there we used to play a lot of the johnston county schools going up and through high school and then later on when i coached after after cary i went to campbell university graduated from campbell with a health and physical education degree and a a science minor from there i went right into public school teaching my first job was in lee county in sanford then i went from there i had an opportunity at east wake high school in out in wendell and then from there i went down to bladen county bladenboro which that high school is no longer there it’s part of east bladen now i mean west bladen now east bladen we played against so i’ve been in very rural areas for high schools but i i really enjoyed that and i was a not only a teacher but my first day hired in lee county they said you need to go get a chauffeur’s license and i said what do you mean you have to drive the buses so back then the coaches had to drive the buses we had to drive the buses for all activities now we could also see through the bus floors on a lot of those buses back then so there was no heat on some of them and i played in cary and there was no heat and i mean we were just on a wing and a prayer so so i’ve seen growth but i did get my license i coached down there and i still carry my chauffeur’s license to this day so when i haul people around i tell them i’m a chauffeur but but it was fun and i i learned a lot in lee county and it grew i got an opportunity opportunity and i coached football wrestling track girls basketball and i was actually i was a strength and conditioning coach i got involved in that in college and i was in that early area of strength and conditioning before they even knew anything about strength and conditioning and then from sanford i went to east wake which we had a stellar in fact at the primaries i saw charles bradshaw charles and i coached against each other and coach avery from south johnston i knew him for years so i’ve known a lot of the coaches in the johnston county area coached against them played against them whatever and followed them and then from east wake i got an opportunity to go down to bladenboro and went down there where i coached football and girls basketball and was athletic director so i have a lot of responsibility behind that i think you know one of the most rewarding things of coaching and teaching was the development of young people not only physically but also emotionally and spiritually i’ll give you an example i used to teach what’s called physical education pupil instructors so pepi program in wake county i was part of it as a student and then later taught we got seniors and we took seniors and they went back into the middle school to teach physical education and also to converse with the medicals middle middle school kids we also got into special needs kids and we worked with them for a whole year and took them to special olympics they actually helped those kids and well they were young adults and they brought them through and helped them go through graduation at the end of the year and you talk about a motivating and a very emotional experience so a lot of that and then the other thing was taking kids on recruiting trips and just you know paying for that recruiting trip taking them and driving them you got to know the kids but you got to know the coaches so i did that for eight years i was trying to move into the community college they were expanding at the time and that didn’t work out and i had a job offer from a sales company or a company in tarboro and they were looking for a sales rep and i got into that for a couple of years and then took an opportunity into the pharmaceutical industry where i’ve been the last thirty four or thirty five years selling products and educating doctors and health care providers on the use of products so that’s kind of been my my career yeah well and you you currently work for merck i i think and you one of the you vaguely work with hospitals i think you told me yes and one of the drugs you work with is is an anesthesia drug correct so explain a little bit about like that i find all of that kind of stuff fascinating the last twenty some years i’ve worked in the surgical anesthesia marketplace and i’ve had a number of different drugs come through there in fact three or four of them were market setting drugs that changed the face of how doctors would treat you and actually identify new areas where it not only made surgery safer but it helped with pain management and got people out of the hospital sooner so it was an overall economic the most recent drug i have is the best way to describe it for most people is to tell them it’s a narcan for a paralytic when you go in to have surgery they’re gonna paralyze you so you wanna breathe again right i do so to get you breathing in less than three minutes they’re gonna give you my drug and they’ll wake you up with less than three minutes of that paralytic being gone and that’s a advantage to not only anesthesia but the surgeons and the hospitals themselves so it not only saves money it makes safety for the patient so that’s kinda what i do now well that’s cool that’s cool so do you travel the country you travel the state no i have all of eastern north carolina in my career i’ve done i’ve done eastern north carolina for the past well i started in wilson but i’ve covered almost every hospital in north carolina at one point there was a time where actually before i came to merck i was with a company called ucb and this was in the epilepsy marketplace now you talk about understanding special needs and kids with special needs and i’ll be willing to bet you that seizures are going undetected in our public schools today because seizures are very different we need to raise that awareness and look at that and i think a lot of that is adhd and things whatever but that was a very interested marketplace and i i was there i was a what to call a population health partner i looked at avenues to make health care more accessible and bring more equity among health care and help outside of just the drugs themselves and i covered multi states oh that’s pretty cool that’s pretty cool so when did you move to johnston county well i moved five years ago my wife and i had a family farm just over the line down forty two about four miles from where i live now my wife’s family is from johnston county her cousin teaches here they’re all from johnston county the pleasant grove area the we were connected with that area and the churches down there on another thing but we decided to get out of out of farming and we were getting kind of too old we were niche farmers we were small farmers we did it all my son my wife and i we attended three farmers markets we work with north carolina a and t on on growing mushrooms so i could be called a fungi and i have a t shirt that says that but we were one of the first mushroom growers in the state we were probably the largest shiitake grower in the state so we cover durham farmers market which if you’ve not been to the one of the best farmers markets it’s durham and carrboro we’d started north hills and my son actually took it over at eight nine and ten years old and ran it himself and my wife went to cary which became western wake but we did mushrooms we did quail we did goats i was a member of the johnston county goat growers association we did bees we did pawpaws if you’re not familiar with pawpaws look into that fruit it’s a missed fruit they’re actually in season now if you can find it it tastes like a banana mango we did ducks and chickens and if you’ve not had a duck egg you’re missing it we did ducks and chickens for meat and eggs we raised loofah we raised elderberries we raised oriental persimmons figs so we did a lot of niche products my wife also made goat milk soap we did our goats for meat and but she had some dairy goats that we did for that we didn’t get into the cheese we just were not too big or not able to do that because we kept it kind of niche and we didn’t want to go into debt small farmers don’t have a lot of money and i did not quit my job so i did that on the side but mushroom growing is is fun it was very intensive but we enjoyed it over the time and then we decided to downsize and johnston county was our first goal to come here but we wanted to come to kind of it kind of worked out that we came to this area and we just love it up in this area well i i love it in this area too i you know i’ve came here in two thousand and i’ve been right here in this living and working in this community the the whole time so well i think i think that’s kinda fascinating so you really even know you weren’t living in johnston county you’re only a couple miles away you were involved in the johnston county stuff so who’s your what’s your wife’s family’s names what’s your maiden name my wife’s family was saul’s saul’s is very much around wake county and even into johnston county there’s all kinds of saul’s and her mother’s family were markhams that were in johnston county okay so we have a real big connection to this to these two counties in this specific area which they all really through churches and organizations they all knew each other so you know it’s amazing people grew sweet potatoes together and went to the tobacco markets and all of that so yeah well i you know i i know a lot i know van sauls the attorney and a lot of the people because i went to church at providence presbyterian church on two ten at mcgee’s crossroads for ten years okay and so met a ton of great people down there richard jones and you know jones farm supply and he’s also he has propane and i mean just a lot of great people down in in in that part of the county as well well that’s cool so i mean you’re living your life you move to johnston county you’re you’re you’ve got your pharmaceutical business but you then decide to run for school board why you know i was a public school teacher and to be honest with you i don’t think a lot of things have changed across yeah there’s new technology and stuff but i still see some of the same things and across the board from when i was there in the eighties through the nineties following public education it’s the same things that keep cropping up and if you look at the numbers the numbers are not stellar in north carolina even though we have a tremendous community college system and a tremendous college system so why is our public education for k through twelve not performing at standards plus the fact that my wife and i decided to homeschool we we did that first because we saw a deficiency in the in the schools in in around the garner area because that’s where our son would have gone we started that because we wanted to give him an advantage and tailor his education which is happening a lot now across the country they’re tailoring their education for kids based on kind of their learning styles which i think we need to look at as we did the home education we learned what he was missing in the quality that we could give but we also turned it spiritually we wanted to develop that spiritual part of our son and our family as we went along and walked with him which allowed us a lot of opportunities because from there we got involved in the first lego league if you’re familiar with the first lego league starts at really young and goes my son was on the state championship team in north carolina but actually could not go to worlds because they left north carolina out that year so they ended up going to another tournament but they did that two or three years and then you go to the next level of first he did that we were able to be to do homeschool football i coached homeschool football and helped develop their tackle football around raleigh in that area we were able to do abro where abro is american belarusian relief organization where we brought kids over from belarus to get them out of that nuclear toxicity for summer which actually prolonged their health and unfortunately the president decided to cut that off because somebody in another part of the country went against the rules and then a lot of other things we were able to take part of the the veterans constitutional oratory contest and came to johnston county as part of that and they still do it which a lot of kids don’t know about and great scholarship so it gave us a lot of flexibility to do outside things in fact he participated in in christian youth theater as they call cyt in the garner area very famous around a lot of homeschoolers but also a lot of churches so he participated that for years so he developed a a really a love for stage and theater you know we could do we found that we could do a lot of things in a short period of time with high quality education but also give us flexibility to farm to teach that entrepreneurial spirit and to just take advantage of other avenues out there that’s what we do you know it’s great and i mean a lot of great information there in that answer the first program which is i f i r s t and i wish i knew exactly what that stands for it’s still out there i have been involved with it and they still have teams now when you get into high school they build robots yep and these robots go around and they shoot balls and they climb walls and they run into each other kinda like battle bots like you see on tv and they get points based on how well their robot runs autonomously somebody drives it for a while and the robot has to do you know seven to ten different things and it is absolutely amazing they did several of the state competitions at campbell right when i was on the board of the johnston community college when i was on that board and johnston community college helped sponsor that with campbell and i went down and participated in that with lieutenant governor dan forrest was there and and even after i wasn’t involved with the college i wasn’t on the college board anymore i still go if i can find out what it is because i just love to go and watch the robots run into each other take my kids it’s a ton of fun so that program is still out there so just search f r s t robots or any kind of competition they have he also talked about christian theater spiritual twist i don’t know if that’s true that’s it yeah spiritual twist spiritual twist right spiritual twist is still involved in garner my my daughter was in that program this summer i just went to a print print production of ben hur that they just did and so if you are interested in any kind of christian theater spiritual twist and garner would be loved to talk to you and have you it’s a tremendous program a lot of really good people there so this is great i mean those are two things that i’m extremely familiar with that that you did and and a lot a lot of good people with spiritual twist a lot of good people involved in the first program and those competitions and you know they went to costumes and and it’s like a it’s like you know they they knew chants it’s like going to a football game except you’re going to cheer for robots that run into each other so it’s kinda cool one thing about that is it starts at a very early age there’s three levels of it and you’re talking a lot about the advanced high school level which really is education in itself because they have to use math skills they have to use welding skills they have to use all these skills the one my son participated in most was kind of the intermediate and they have to get a they get a mat every year with all these challenges and you have to learn to program a computer and build a robot to solve that so you learn it’s a different way of of learning and it challenges you to do a lot of different things but all those programs and if you’re really into sports at the time when my son was coming up in years before we couldn’t participate in in in in sports and in schools so we started developing our own sports leagues and that’s where homeschool football came in and it really helped a lot of kids and it’s grown since that time and a lot of lot of places have the the the the teams that they support yeah and and we’re fortunate we homeschool our children and there are tons of my son plays basketball for the south lake savers and there’s tons of other homeschool groups that we play in other private and public schools around all over north carolina actually so there’s a lot a lot of lot of opportunities out there it you know for people and it’s great you’re talking about those things because we’ve been involved in several of those things ourselves but let’s talk about the why you decided to run for the johnston county public school board i i i mean i know you you homeschooled your son you saw some good things you were a school teacher yep but i mean what was it i mean given the somewhat dysfunction of the current board i i can’t imagine anybody really wanting to run but i’m glad people did well you know to be honest with you jonathan it was on my heart for a long time and and i’ve been involved in on the on watching education in north carolina and i keep scratching my head about a lot of things that they’re doing and it just we just keep spinning our wheels in certain instances and over the over the months before december the filing god just kinda put it in my heart that if i need to get off the sidelines i can’t keep complaining anymore i’ve got to do something and i was listening to a lot of podcasts and things of of men across the country who were taking that role and stepping up to stand in the gap for their children to make sure that the future generations get the quality they deserve and the other thing is i feel like i think sometimes we’re doing a good job i think the teachers are trying to do the best they can but i think there’s a sometimes a disconnect overall in our whole education system on how it’s run and i wanna try to bring a fresh approach and really see where we can take johnston county and get it back to that pinnacle that it was a few years ago of leading not only the state of north carolina but be a model for the rest of the country and that’s why i wanna step up a number of different reasons well and and and we were and we had tremendous leadership with doctor croome who arguably is one of the best superintendents in north carolina possibly in the whole united states at the time and now he’s head of mount olive college and he’s done a great job for mount olive i’m a huge fan of doctor crooms i don’t think we’ve had quite the leadership that we’ve had since since he left us a few years ago so but i know you got a platform you got four things you’re trying to work on what are those so the first thing let’s talk about what’s really in the news right now and i think it comes to the heart of what’s happening in our schools and that’s the title nine if you’re familiar with title nine i was in high school when title nine nine came out there was very little girls sports there was some but there wasn’t a lot of really funded girls sports in high school and that was a that was a disservice to our our females but since that time with title nine and title nine affects not only female athletes but also can affect males on how this current administration wants to use it title nine is thing is that girls need the equal right to have sports to play against girls we don’t need to have males with gender identity saying they are females to participate in that let’s take the example of the volleyball player in the western north carolina who severe took a severe concussion because a male was playing volleyball that hurt that kid there’s a girl in connecticut she trained and was one of the top sprinters in the state on track to get a scholarship until they allowed the gender identity of of males to come over and participate and that took away her chances of winning the state races that she wanted to win because she couldn’t compete there’s a number of different things so title nine is an attack and i will mention this north carolina is the only state thanks to josh stein that did not file lawsuit to stop the biden administration reconfiguring thirty nine words to fifteen hundred pages of a new law this is the only state so we’re under attack however north carolina school districts can file with a group if they join these members and they can slow it down but let’s start at our school systems and put that policy in right but the legislature passed a law that says men are not gonna be playing women’s sports in north carolina or at least they they did well hopefully that’s gonna hold i’m sure it’ll probably get the federal the federal is gonna if if they well the supreme court’s already ruled august that that they need to stop this and cannot implement it but if you’re taking federal funds they can implement it here even though the state has passed these rules that’s coming from the federal so we have to look at that and how we can stop this as you know a lot of this doesn’t follow the procedure and the federal will trump it so i i wanna reinforce not only the title nine and this and protect our girls because it will open restrooms it’ll open college dorms it’ll all open all of this if you just claim you’re a female right so we need to have sure protection and part of this is also the parents’ bill of rights which people need to read and understand their bill of rights but i think that’s number one is really protecting our females and making sure they have equal but opportunities across the board without having to worry about males right and i know one of your things is school safety what what are your plans for school safety well safety is a a number of different things in that you know number one we need to look at how we’re funding our our our schools as far as srr ro officers are concerned but we need to have a uniform policy across of what can guide our whole system of what you can and cannot do and enforce it across the system teacher safety we need to hold that policy and make sure teachers are safe and don’t have to worry about that we also allow need to allow the teachers to have a mechanism to speak up if they need to without a fear of reprisal so that they can voice their concerns to the right people without having to fear that they’re gonna lose their job or they’re gonna be treated differently or whatever because we need to have that teacher feedback we need to hear from from really boots on the ground what’s going on what do they need to do cell phones cell phones well you can see a lot of different in in studies out there about mental health and cell phones i actually read us an interesting article that said that cell phones were not the number one cause for mental mental health they’re a contributor and they distract in school so they need to be monitored but not having free playtime was one of the biggest things that helped destroy kids’ mental abilities in school drug education read a podcast or listened to a podcast the other day fentanyl is killing kids left and right across this country and it’s being hidden in various drugs that they’re getting at these parties and kids are taking it thinking or even at college or or they wanna stay up and and and it’s been laced in there and they’re dying because they don’t know how much they’re getting one girl lived and one girl died when they split a tablet because the other one had that we need a comprehensive drug education and then another part of safety is inappropriate books in our library age specific inappropriate all of these come to to health and safety and just overall discipline in our schools to make sure that every child in north carolina gets the rights to their education as spelled out in our constitution right and you you know being a conservative you wanna be physically responsible sure with the taxpayers’ dollars we asked bush lauder this on a previous episode the johnston county school system enrollment has gone flat it has been flat for the last four three to four years but yet the county has funded the school system from seventy nine million to a hundred and seven a hundred and eight million i think this year and a new bond and and a new bond but yet we’re still got the same number of teachers but that’s what the school board’s asking for i i i don’t understand it i i had a but i’m not making the budget decision i know and and i i applaud number one i applaud the commissioners you know there there need to be kudos however we do need to have a better look at what the budget is and where that money is going so i’m proposing and harnett county did this a comprehensive line item budget that’s big that’s less than what i just saw the recent budgets about this many you can’t tell where the money’s going a line item easy to read publicized budget that everybody in johnston county knows where that money is going so that we can appropriate the money to the teachers when they need it and not buy things that will never be used or put in a closet or whatever when they spend two or three hundred million dollars or two or three hundred thousand dollars or whatever the case is on whatever and they’re never used or they’re inappropriate so we need to drill down on this because we need to have we need to raise scores but save money we need to be judicious be conservative about the where it’s going but get the best bang for our buck when we spend it and make sure it’s going to the right places teachers don’t need to spend money out of their pockets we need to get that money into there let’s give them the programs that they can better use let’s get it to where the children will benefit most because it’s all bottom line it’s all about kids it’s all about the kids and how they improve themselves because they’re the face of johnston county and that’s what i’m looking at is a comprehensive budget now along with that is that comprehensive budget will put the funds where it needs to go so that we can raise scores and attainment you know about the i ninety five i forty alliance with businesses coming here that that they’re doing down there they’re going to need needs to be jobs for these kids and they need to have a firm foundation on a classical education that’s back to basics so they can either go to trades they can go to an apprenticeship they can go to jcc they can go to a job not everybody needs to go to college and i’ll be honest with you college is draining our kids and putting them in debt and there’s very few really professions now that really need college anymore go get your these professionals get the basics to be a productive citizen in high school preparing you for that next move where you can get out and make a great living so that’s go along with the other thing is scores and attainment and providing these companies that come in and the companies already here like novo nordisk and grifols and all the other companies that are coming in adequately prepared individuals that are ready to move into that workforce and they can provide stay here in johnston county and even help them with farming we’re losing our farming kids need to be able to learn to farm again and be productive with that so i i kind of answers two questions no it does it does i mean you’ve got you’ve got a lot of you’ve got a lot of great ideas and it sounds like you clearly thought about all the things that you want to that you want to do when you get when you get on to the on to the school board so we’re sort of wrap this up here sure what is the thing you love most about johnston county you know i love the ruralness i i think that’s funny i like being out in the country and i know it’s growing but the people are the salt of the earth here because they grew up in a rural community where they knew each other they went to church together they had that community atmosphere and that’s what’s going to make schools better is continuing that community and building that community and fostering going forward i think i like the community the best thing of all well that’s great that’s great i love the community i love the people but really this is a tremendous it’s a tremendous place and even though it has grown so fast it still has a small town feel to me yes and and and i go places i don’t recognize anybody anymore and that’s not how it was when i first got here so cool well we would like to thank david spain for being our guest on this episode of the best of johnston county podcast he’ll be on your ballot on november the fifth he’s running against april lee it’s a one on one matchup between him and april lee they were the top vote getters in the primary for district four so be looking on the ballot it’s you gotta keep going it’s gonna be on the back of the ballot because the front of the ballot is gonna the president and all that so make sure you finish your ballot and go all the way to the end how can people get up with you my website is there it’s david spain for joco dot com and then i’m on facebook i’ve got two sites on facebook it’s it’s david spain and then it’s david spain for joe for joco alright so that’s how you can get up and learn more about david spain and his campaign and if you wanna help him with his campaign he’d be glad to accept any volunteers or donations you wanna give if you like what you heard or have any future questions for him definitely reach out to him and and like i said if you like what you heard he is on the ballot november fifth for the district four race of the johnston county board of education and make sure you keep voting he’s gonna be at the very end of the ballot and all those races on the back of the ballot are just as important as the races on the front of the ballot so i encourage everybody to finish your ballot and vote all the way down till you get to the end of the races until next time i’m your host jonathan breeden