SEEKING A SEAT
Shaun Wiggins is a Saratoga Springs School Board trustee candidate
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. >> Shaun D. Wiggins is one of three Saratoga Springs School Board trustee candidates running on the Saratoga Parents For Safer Schools (SPFSS) ticket.
His background is diverse. Wiggins’s professional career spans across the private and public sectors, having served as a Clandestine Service Officer in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a senior leader within U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, and as an executive in both Royal Dutch Shell and the General Electric Company (GE).
A businessman who has lived in Saratoga Springs since 2012, Wiggins and his wife Salima and their two children located here from the Netherlands when he came to work for GE. He handled some of the largest crises in GE Power headquarters in Schenectady until 2015, when he opened his own business, Soteryx Corp. in Saratoga Springs, in 2016.
His primary focus was external relations and crisis management.
Wiggins spoke about his personal motivations for running, his background, and what he believes he can contribute on a variety of issues.
•••
How you the skills you use in business applying to your assessment of what is needed in the Saratoga Springs School District.
“My company is focused on protecting and promoting businesses, through risk management, and operational resilience. The
risk management portion is setting up policies and procedures to make sure an employer and the employees are doing the right things, because if there are no policies, companies can’t hold someone accountable for something.
“What we do crosses industries. It doesn’t matter if you are working at a bank, in the healthcare industry or even in education, there are tenets that every organization and individuals must have as well. You have to look at the greatest risks, address those risks through policies, procedures, and training, making sure you can avoid that risk, if possible.
“When people do bad things, accidents or acts of nature happen you have to mitigate that risk while keeping the business up and running. So with that, that’s the protection part, on to the promote part.
“Because you require information or data to guide you through this world of risk and crisis mitigation. You need to know what’s happening and what people think so you can adjust your messaging and activities.”
••• Meaning to your internal or external customers?
“Both. You say that because you work for the Saratogian. You don’t want to read in another paper something that is happening here. That’s a key point.
“Your external audience is your most important audience, typically, because they’re almost like family so you almost want to communicate with them first before you go internally. It erodes trust and faith if they have to learn from someone else when you’re right here.
“With that comes the audience engagement. Some people say it’s PR, some say it’s marketing, but it’s really communicating internally and externally good things and how bad things are being resolved.
“Again, it’s protect and promote so data analytics is one pillar of four pillars that we do.”
••• In many ways, this is a period of change. When change happens, some welcome the idea, some don’t. “That’s exactly right.”
••• You have entered this race at quite a pivotal time.
“Like GE-from what I heard in the “good ‘ole days to what it was when I arrived-two completely different worlds. I worked for the CEO of GE Power at its headquarters in Schenectady. It was GE Energy.”
••• Another one of your skills is crisis management. What is your take on school security concerns. Is there more?
“There is more. To step back from the organization that endorsed me, I consider myself a bridge builder. I focus on asking “What are the facts?” We have to learn to take the emotion out of it because emotion causes us to do things that really aren’t for the common good or may not be for the common good but good for one side or the other. We have to ask ‘What is the larger issue?’
“Talking specifically about school safety, it’s the safety of the children, the teachers. In today’s world, that’s all the way from global to local, we’re in the information age, the age of data.
“We face fact, opinion and fiction. Working through we have to sort through to find the facts. Working by opinion is weighted information, working from fiction is completely false, and there to mislead people, I want to focus on the facts. I announced my candidacy on April 1.”
••• This occurred after Connie Woytowich made the decision to run independently from the SPFSS ticket.
“The organization has a plank that is common with mine, which is school safety. I do have other issues that I’m interested in. Because they had a slot and we had a common plank, I said I’m fine with that.
“I am my own candidate; we’re running on a ticket, but really is just a safety ticket. There are other platforms that I focus on.
“One is infrastructure. We need to look at it and make sure it’s fine.
“No matter what we talk about, it’s going to boil down or ladder up to budget. No one is really talking about that. I’m not saying budget as a platform, but no matter what else, we have to look at the budget.
“It’s something we have to put out there now, because frankly, some hard decisions are going to have to be made. Part of my background is to dig deep and find out where are we now? Where are we trying to go?”
••• What it will take? “Yes, and what is the appetite and tolerance to get there. That’s part of the bridge building. We are going to have to change how we do the school budget structure.”
••• You said some hard decisions will have to be made. Such as?
“Let’s look at this. I’ve done my preliminary data crunching - over the last four or five years, the student population has essentially remained the same. It’s only fluctuated 100 or so up and down.”
••• What is that number (of students in the Saratoga School District)? “Around 6,300 or so.”
••• Would that total represent every school in the Saratoga Springs School District?
“Yes; K-12. That’s not a lot, but if you look at the budget, there has been an increase in the budget over that time. We are in a budget crunch now.”
••• Be specific about the years represented
“The years I’m looking at are from when I arrived in 2012 or so to present.”
••• What is the last year they have numbers for and your source?
“Last year (2018), from the New York Department of Education. Those numbers confirm the student population is pretty consistent. But when we look at the budget, it’s pretty tight. It means that money, if we go back to 2012, 2013 and we had the amount of budget we have today, we would say ‘Wow-that’s a lot of money.’
“You sort of have to go down rabbit holes with the data. I’ve started to look at the demographic break down of the students.”
••• Please clarify. Meaning neighborhoods?
“The schools themselves. One percent of the student population are homeless. They have no place to live. I look at that because I know some parents are concerned about those — I heard this from a teacher at the last school board meeting who said ‘When you talk about “those” students, who are you talking about?’
“Students of color, students of non-resident origin, or students who are homeless?”
••• Is it your sense that those groups you named are being categorized into one?
“I don’t know; I’m trying to find out. At the middle school, specifically, the teacher gave an impassioned presentation to the School Board. I had to speak after her and that was a tough act to follow because she was saying the middle school has some challenges. There are parents who don’t want ‘certain elements’ of students in that school.
“If that’s the case, we need to look at that. With great affluence comes responsibility. We have children who are there who are homeless.”
••• They might spend one day at the food pantries, SOS, Code Blue Shelter, Wilton Food Pantry or Franklin Community Center where working families that aren’t making it come regularly for food.
“In that home environment or lack there of, you have several things on your mind. Where am I going to get my next meal? My mom is sick and we don’t have money to pay for that. They have pressures.”
••• School is the last thing they’re thinking about. We’re speaking about Maple Avenue Elementary School?
“That’s correct. We took our son who is in the National Honor Society down to Code Blue. He is not foreign to that at all. We’ve lived in a lot of places; Houston is one, with a large homeless population and a lot of poverty. It needs to be put in front of people to be aware.
“If you don’t open yourself to find out what’s out there besides my world, you’ll never know and that leads to not caring. Diversity can make us better people, bring in new ideas and ways of thinking and help with change.”
••• We are still speaking about the same issues in a different language.
“It’s sad, but it’s the reality we live in. I feel we have a responsibility to step in. My son did a lot of work at Code Blue. That will shape what he thinks about people who don’t have means in the future. He will see that by the grace of God…He’s 17. He’s Shaun D. Wiggins.”
••• What is the next issue on your list?
“I want to tie budget into transparency. Part of the genesis of why I want to run is my daughter is at Caroline Street School where there are three third grade classes with 19 students each. The School Board proposed to combine those into two classes with 28 students each for the fourth grade. Studies show that teacher to student ratio is not optimal for education.
“We came here because although taxes are higher, you get what you pay for. We can go and live elsewhere; I pay dual taxes, for my business and home. You expect the schools to be top notch. A group of parents and I descended on that last school board meeting and said ‘Hey-time out. What’s going on here?’
“We’re a group of friends whose kids go to Caroline Street, and we heard the plans. It is a budget issue. It turns out that when the six grounds keepers were let go, there was one SRO that was hired and we found that the cost savings was close to the hiring of that new person. Loss here, gain there. A shifting of the budget.
“For that class combining, the savings was $87,00 and a SRO receives $97,000 annually.
“You can find other places in the budget, but that’s an easy one to look at. There are five or more Assistant Superintendents in our school system. They’re making over $100,00 plus. For the size of our district, I’m looking into the data to find out is that an anomaly?
“You have to looking at median income so the comparison is apples to apples. Maybe we are top heavy-do we need that?
“It’s about change. Just because we’ve always done something doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it does mean that perhaps you can do it better. That’s where I feel I can come in having not been involved in the entire school board system other than my kids going there, coming in from the outside with a corporate background to ask do we need that many people at the top? “••• Has anyone brought that up? “Not that I’m aware of. There was one Board member who was elected on class size who was very open at the last meeting with the Caroline Street parents and said ‘I was shut down. I tried to come in to make a change and it didn’t work.’”
••• Is that blocked by the administration, by school board members?
“I don’t know, but it’s a data search. I’m not an expert. I’m running on a common sense platform. Let’s take the passion out of it. It’s great to be passionate, but not when it comes to decision making for a community.”
••• You have until May 21. This is an unofficial ticket. How the names will appear on the ballot?
“There is a lottery that will determine how the names are listed. They are trying to be fair. Just remember: Shaun, Dean, Ed. There’s only one of each of us. We don’t appear in chronology. I’m a Democrat; the others are Republican.
“I’m my own candidate, but we have joined forces on this one issue. We agree that we need that security in the schools, so I’m okay with that.
“This is a public entity; there is an Assistant Superintendent for Communications. So why can’t the School board simply summarize where we are and push that information out to the parents? It should not be placed on the parents to do the work.”
••• The paradigm shifted in how people get information quickly. Is there agreement on what those methods would be?
“People feel it’s out there. If you’re a public servant, how difficult is it to write a summary-call it Budget FYI. We have a vote coming up. It will be too late. We can’t wait until the next budget year.
“I’ve heard from friends of Board members saying they can’t get anything done. I was almost accosted by someone saying “I heard a nasty rumor.” I said you mean my joining with SPFSS? The far left hates them, the far right loves them. Those are two dynamics that not even with a crowbar can I get them to come together. That’s from the national to the local level.
We live in a world where anything can happen. I don’t want to wake up and say I should have, could have, would have. I say the election is coming up; if you don’t vote for me, vote for somebody because the School Board represents the values of the community. If you don’t vote go home, I don’t want to hear anything you have to say. You have a voice.”