The Ubiquitous They - Steve Messina

How long have you lived in Benicia? I’ve lived in Benicia on and off my whole life. My father was in the military, so we moved around a lot. He was in the Marine Corps.  I moved back to Benicia to stay about 17 years ago. I have a lot of family in town, and having spent time growing up here and having had the opportunity to live many other places, I have a broad perspective of what many places are like. Of all the different places I’ve lived, I find that Benicia is the best. And that’s the reason I wanted to come back here and raise my children.

What made you decide to run for the Benicia school board?  I could see that there were two serious issues that I wanted to help address on the school board. One was our slipping test scores. Fifteen to twenty years ago Benicia schools ranked in the top 8% state wide. In the most recent survey we were only in the top 29%.  I want to reverse that trend and move it back where it was. The second was some of the financial difficulties.  We are fortunate in that we have somewhere close to $30 million-plus dollars to spend on educating our children. I know we can do a good job. I know we can spend our money wisely. I want to bring some transparency to the process, I also want to stabilize us, so it’s not always this woe is me, cut, cut, cut. Lets look at the cup from the other end. We’ve got all this money to spend. Lets consider how can we spend it wisely and provide a good solid education for our children.

What was the biggest surprise when you when you joined the school board? I don’t think there were big surprises, it was pretty much what I expected. I went in pretty much with my eyes open and I knew what the challenges would be. The only thing is, if I want to contrast it to my years of public service with the City is that the education code is more rigorous than the codes that apply to the cities and municipalities in terms of some of the things you can and can’t do.

Besides the budget, what impact would you like to make while serving on the school board? It really is the budget process: what we do and how we do it, and the API Test scores. We are already doing what it’s going to take (to make that happen). It takes focusing on the curriculum, the core, what we teach and how we teach it, and making sure that the kids are ready.