Community weighs in on director of school’s search

WLAF provides a link to the survey HERE for those unable to attend Thursday’s event

By Charlotte Underwood

LAFOLLETTE, TN (WLAF)- A looming budget deficit, low teacher morale, zoning issues, overcrowded schools, problems with buses running consistently and more were topics of conversation at Thursday’s community input day regarding the search for a new Campbell County Director of Schools.

The event started at noon at The Grand on Central where school board members, community leaders and business leaders gathered for a light luncheon to discuss the search and fill out a survey regarding search criteria preferences in a new school director.

Tennessee School Board Association (TSBA) representatives were facilitating the conversation and handing out surveys from noon until after 6pm.

At 2pm, members of the central office staff, supervisors, principals and assistant principals stopped by, while classified employees came at 3pm.

Following that session, teachers stopped by at 4pm to offer their input, and at 6pm, it was open to the public to drop by and fill out the survey and to have their opinions heard by TSBA representatives who will use the survey answers and the input to create a hiring metric for a new school director.

One of these questions included what are problems and challenges that a new school director will face.

Teachers spoke up about multiple items including zoning issues, overcrowded schools, low teacher moral and the need to unify the mountain and the valley schools just to name a few, with the budget deficit being a main concern as well.

Campbell County High School teacher Candace Anderson brought up “the zoning issue”, saying she felt it tied into “behavioral problems which tie into attendance at certain schools.”

“What are we going to do about zoning, are we going to start zoning schools, I think that needs to be looked at and the first thing on the plate for the new director is what are we going to do for zoning, as it is nonexistent. We cannot go by voting or what the commission is or what the district is right now, that is absurd; our bus routes are all over the place, we have busses passing each other, so the zoning in general for this county needs to be looked at and the director might need to say, let’s break away from what the county is doing and let’s come up with our own school district zoning because the county zoning does not always make sense or line up,” Anderson said. She said this led to the schools like Jacksboro Elementary School being overcrowded, while other schools like White Oak had low attendance. She said each school faced its own set of challenges that needed looked into by the new director.

“At Campbell County High School, our sports teams are suffering because we are being put in districts that we don’t belong in because our alternative school is connected to our high school, which is increasing our attendance, but those kids don’t even qualify to play sports, so we can’t use them and our basketball team and our football team are in brackets that they don’t belong in … how are we accounting for these children in all of these different areas and why can anybody just be put in any group without any kind of organization,” Anderson said.

Campbell County High School Advanced Placement (AP) Liaison and School Data Coach Ann Browning agreed and said that zoning tied into the discipline issues, especially at the elementary and middle school level.

“If you get in trouble at this school, we will just pull you out and go to the next school, that happens a lot,” Browning said.

A Valley View Elementary School teacher weighed-in and said she saw both sides and that the school literally did not have room available at the school. She reported astronomical class sizes, and that some of the schools had more kids than ever.

Browning said Campbell County High School struggled with having enough teachers.

“We are currently without an Algebra 2 teacher, so those students that were scheduled to be in that class have now had to be filtered to another teacher, so he has 35 students in his Algebra 2 class three times a day … when we had a teacher retire last year, they just cut her position, so that made the Junior and Senior English classes maxed out,” Browning said.

CCHS’s Josh Parker chimed in and said it all goes back to the budget and that the budgetary issues were going to be “the biggest challenge.”

“That’s going to be the biggest challenge, enrollment is down, costs are high and if you had better zoning in place, maybe parents wouldn’t be passing four schools on the four lane, because, it’s like LaFollette Middle school is 50 kids short of having a full time librarian, well if you look at the numbers, probably close to 50 of them are at other schools, even little things like that affect our budgetary issues, so the budget is going to be the biggest thing,” Parker said, adding that “everyone’s priorities needed to be on the same page.”

Anderson said zoning was “tied into Title 1 funding and Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) funding.

“Our smaller schools are dying, because they don’t have these Title 1 funds and our overcrowded schools can’t get enough funding and it’s zoning, zoning, zoning” Anderson said.

Teacher retention was also an issue mentioned and that many teachers had been lost to other school districts, especially Anderson County.

Jellico History Teacher Johnny Massengill said teachers were looking for leadership.

“Whoever your director is going to be, first off, I think every teacher in the county is looking for leadership, they have to have a spine, they have to have a backbone and be able to make hard decisions, and they have to let the principals do their jobs. Attendance is an issue we have talked about that; parents have to be held accountable and don’t undercut the needs of the principals let them make the decisions,” Massengill said. He said he had been at Jellico “a lot of years” and he was the only history teacher in that building.

“I teach U.S History, World History, Econ and Government, my classes are maxed out, yet they tell us that we don’t have the numbers to get us another teacher in there, yet we can build a multi-million-dollar sports complex, that’s a problem,” Massengill said.

Several teachers said that board members were not in the schools enough and they “needed to be more in tune with what’s going on” before going and making their decisions in meetings.”

Some teachers said that they felt that teacher morale was low and that there could be trust issues for teachers with the new director and that something would have to be done about teacher morale. There were echoes that the new director needed to be “approachable and needed to know and understand the community, and to have fairly recent classroom experience.”

“You need somebody that can unite both sides of that mountain,” Massengill said and multiple teachers agreed.

“We need someone who is going to be in the schools, have their staff in the schools, someone who can bring us all together. We’ve all got skin in the game and at the end of the day it’s the kids that matter,” Parker said.

The Tennessee School Board Association (TSBA) wrapped up the community input event a little after 7pm.

School Board Chairman Jeffrey Miller said he felt the day had gone well and that it had been well attended, including eight of the school board members who were there. During the noon portion of the event, several county commissioners attended, as did the county mayor and the deputy county mayor. The LaFollette City Mayor was on hand, as were numerous business leaders. Representatives from Roane State Community College, and Tennessee College of Applied Technology attended as did members of the Campbell County Chamber of Commerce, local bank leaders, Criminal Judge Zach Walden, Becky Aiken from Woodson’s Mall and others.

“There was a lot of feedback from these people, and we appreciate them and we appreciate them coming. We are trying to set a precedent that allows everyone to have feedback and input on this decision. Even though we can’t elect a superintendent anymore as that was done away with by the state legislature and now the board appoints, this process that we did today, allows these groups of people to come and give their feedback and it allows the criteria to be established by them that we will use to pick the finalist.” Miller said, explaining that the TSBA will look at the feedback from Thursday’s meeting and will “use that criteria to select the top three candidates that match the best.”

After that, the board will interview those three candidates and decide whether to hire them or not.

“It just puts it in the hands of the people more and that is what I am trying to do and what the board is trying to do; I think there was good feedback today. I am enthused about it, and I think it was a good thing,” Miller said. He said he believed that there was a good turnout of principals and administrators that stopped by at 2pm to make their voices heard as well.

“We wanted this process to be as transparent as possible. We are trying to change the perception that it’s only us and that we are doing things political; we want people to have a vested interest through their feedback. Ultimately, it’s the people and their kids that this affects and of course it affects staff and it is important to me that staff takes part as well,” Miller said.

He also said that a link to the survey would be made available online today for those who were unable to stop by at the event so they could still have their opinions heard. The survey answers will go straight to the TSBA, and the survey will be open until Tuesday evening.

“I want this to be a fair process, it’s the vision we have laid out and I hope, in the later years, after I am gone, that they will continue to do this because it instills trust back in the people we represent and that’s what we need,” Miller said. (WLAF NEWS PUBLISHED-01/16/2026-6AM)