Akron voters this week sent Rene Molenaur back to the Board of Education to serve her first full term, elected longtime public servant Barbara Sykes to a new role, and trusted Summer Hall to follow in the footsteps of her great aunt, the first Black woman to serve on the city’s school board.
All three women spoke to Signal Akron about their plans for office and what prompted them to vie for the chance to help make policy decisions for Akron’s more than 20,000 students.
Molenaur wants to tell the success stories of Akron Public Schools
Molenaur, who joined the board in May as an appointee, said she knew then she was qualified to serve, but now she’s sure she belongs in the job.
“I deserve to be here because the community put me here,” said the senior instructional designer at the University of Akron. “It feels amazing.”
Molenaur has a doctoral degree in education policy, with a focus on education technology, and said she first applied to be a school board appointee in the spring because she had always wanted to influence policy development. But she has a third grader and a Kindergartener, and said she knew how much work it would be to get elected. Ultimately, her time as a parent in the district made her want to contribute more.
In the months since her appointment, Molenaur said she has worked to update legal policies for the board, as the chair of that committee, including one that will create pathways for teachers to use AI tools like ChatGPT in their instruction at a time when it was blocked from all student computers. Professional development opportunities for the tool will also be available.
She helped interview candidates and select new Superintendent C. Michael Robinson. Through that process, Molenaur said, she realized that her particular knowledge base was valuable on the board.
“I realized I do have a lot to offer,” she said. “I have a lot of value. If I’m not here, they might be missing a critical perspective.”
In her full term, Molenaur said she wants to focus on increasing the amount of data available for decision-making as well as working to ensure that the policies the board does make are successful. She said she wants to prioritize usable data collection to help create more successful students.
And she said she thinks Akron schools need to do a better job of telling the stories of the district’s many successes. That, she said, will help lead to more improvements.
Molenaur said she is glad to know that she’ll have more time to influence the district’s direction.
“I’m so glad I now have four years to make sure policies matter,” she said. “I’m a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-go-to-work person.”
Sykes looks to create strong policies to help guide the future
Sykes, the president and CEO of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus Foundation and a former Akron City Council member and state representative, said of all her roles, she’s most emotional about this one.
Sykes is one of eight children who grew up poor in the South, she said, with a father who couldn’t read or write and a mother who didn’t graduate from high school. She said she saw the way her father’s world shrank because he wasn’t literate; her parents told her and her siblings that education was their path out of poverty.
“I know I am where I am because of education,” she said. “We didn’t do certain things because he wasn’t comfortable. This is emotional for me.”
Sykes said she’s a huge proponent of early childhood education and thinks more money needs to be put into pre-Kindergarten programs and other early learning opportunities. She would also like to see more attention paid to wraparound services in the schools because children can’t learn when they’re hungry, tired or worried about where they’re going to sleep that night.
She also wants to improve engagement from the adults in students’ lives, be they biological parents or others.
Violence, homelessness and other issues that seep into the schools are community problems, she said, but improving the schools will improve the community. Sykes said with better schools come better business opportunities for the city and more nonprofits.
“How our schools are functioning determines all the other great things,” she said.
She was drawn to the school board, she said, after reading recent coverage about education issues in Akron. While she no longer has children in the schools, she said the issues are too important to stop paying attention to.
Sykes would also like to see more competitive teacher pay. But she said she is most interested in creating strong policies to help guide the district into the future.
“You have to make hard decisions, but if you have policies in place, the policies answer the questions,” she said. “What does the policy say? If we don’t have one, let’s get to work on coming up with policy.”
Hall wants to be a role model, improve parent-teacher communication
For Hall, it was her great-aunt, Helen Arnold, who inspired her to run for the board. Arnold died when Hall was 21, she said, but “I would see her doing the work” as the first Black woman on the city school board.
“Her love for kids was something you can’t even explain,” Hall said.
She first ran for office in 2015, saying that she ran solely on passion and love. For this run, the community outreach coordinator for the City of Akron was more prepared. She spent more time learning the issues and figuring out how to speak out, she said.
“I want to be a role model and walk with pride,” Hall said.
She said her goals on the board are to improve academic excellence, increase safety and improve fiscal responsibility. She pulled her daughter, a fourth grader, out of Akron Public Schools in Kindergarten after feeling as though her concerns about her child’s learning weren’t being addressed. Hall said she doesn’t want other parents to have to make the same decision.
She would like to improve communication between teachers and parents, she said. Hall said she felt hopeless when her daughter woke each morning hoping for a substitute teacher.
She said her goal is to listen to concerns, not just hear them.
The relationships she has built at her day job can help build connections as needed with the board, she said. And Hall said she would like the board to consider identification badges for students as a safety measure, as well as expanding mediation programs to help cut down on fights.
She said she’s looking forward to working with the board to improve relationships with the community.
“I’m excited, I’m overwhelmed,” she said. “I’m all the emotions.”
