Kevin Vick’s history in education naturally led him to being a leader. Starting with a successful tenure at Doherty High School in Colorado Springs more than 20 years ago, he has spent the better part of his career advocating for his fellow educators.

Starting first as a member of the Colorado Springs Education Association, Vick has since successfully run for vice president of the CEA in 2018 and this year begins his tenure as its new president.

As the new face of the statewide union representing more than 40,000 education professionals, he hopes to bring their voices to the forefront of education discussions, increase partnerships and collaboration efforts and improve long-term funding for public education in Colorado.

“It’s kind of a difficult job to describe, in a way,” Vick said of his new role. “But it basically means that it’s my job to find avenues to get my colleagues voices to as many spaces as possible where education policy is being made.”

The Gazette sat down the CEA’s new president to learn more about what led him to this new position and where he hopes to see public education in the years ahead.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

You’ve been acting as president since July 7. How’s it been going so far?

It’s an interesting transition. It’s a lot of new information, a lot to take in. Even though I was just sitting next door in the vice president’s office, the role here is quite a bit more comprehensive.

What originally brought you to Colorado in 1993?

When I originally moved to Colorado, I was living in the Vail area and I was managing a ski shop and I always describe it as being an excellent lifestyle but not really purpose-driven or a way to make an excellent life. So, I decided I wanted to do something more purposeful and something that would make a difference and so that’s when I decided that teaching and education would be a good way to do that. I got my credentials through UCCS and started looking for jobs in that immediate area, and that’s when I got hired by Doherty High School in 2001.

Tell me a bit about your time/experience as a teacher.

When I first got hired, I jumped right in. I became the adviser for the mountain bike club, I also spent six years as a varsity football coach there and I started the environmental club; we called ourselves “The Treehuggers Society.” If you’re in a place like Colorado Springs, you may as well own it.

So, I was really involved with school life. I was also a department chair and worked with my colleagues in a variety of ways.

What led you to joining — and ultimately leading — the CSEA?

l think it was around 2008-2009, where I started feeling like I not only wanted to support and help my students but also support and help my colleagues as well. So that’s when getting interested in being part of the association a bit more and being more engaged with the union, that’s kind of when that took off.

I ended up really getting engaged through being asked to be part of the bargaining team. It coincided with the great recession and trying to figure out how we were going to manage as a district — I think it was at the time — a $28 million shortfall and how to do that without catastrophic results to the district.

And so, through that initial effort, I was invited to be a part of several district-wide committees. And working in partnership with district leadership, we developed a way to make it through the cuts with minimal job loss, minimal salary loss and make sure the district was able to have all of its capacity for serving kids.

Through that initial work (in D-11), I sort of became known amongst my colleagues as a leader and then that led me, relatively quickly, to being elected as vice president. I spent three years as vice president and then ran for president after that and spent six years as local president at CSEA.

How have the needs for educators changed throughout your time as a union leader?

Colorado Springs is, I think, working through some of the same challenges that a lot of districts in Colorado are facing in that it is difficult to hang on to educators right now, and that puts a lot of strain on the educators right now that are in schools. So, part of our big initiative is to make sure that we are getting enough resources statewide to be able to provide adequate supports for all districts.

What are some of the things you’ve noticed over the years with our bigger school districts like Jefferson County Schools or Denver Public Schools and our smaller, rural districts?

I think a lot of our school districts are afflicted with the same sort of circumstance, but it hits them in different ways. So, because of sheer volume, a district like Jefferson County, for example, has the size and the volume of educators to be able to manage through the loss of, say, one school psychologist. In a rural area, they’re lucky to have one psychologist.

Just finding adequate numbers of people to do the work for what people are compensating is a challenge.

As far as needs or conditions for workers, what has improved? What hasn’t?

Fortunately, we are kind of riding a wave of improvement in salaries these days. And I think that, in some ways, has made some real life-changing opportunities for people in education. Particularly, in our support staff ranks where some districts have been able to create wage increases that amount to $4-$5 an hour. That, for families that are living on that kind of income, is really substantive to be able to improve people’s lives that way hopefully give them a little bit of breathing space.

I do also think there are also some real opportunities in Colorado with how we look at student success. There are a lot of states in the nation right now that take a lot more comprehensive approach to viewing student success as opposed to our narrow kind of standardized test score approach and because of the way they are looking at student success, they are generating some really good outcomes that Colorado should take a look at.

What are some of the initiatives and accomplishments the unions have achieved throughout your tenure you’re most proud of?

When I came in as vice president because of my experience and success in Colorado Springs with negotiations, I was fortunate enough to have our president allocate that overall part of our work overall to me. So, one of the things I really enjoyed was building out a comprehensive bargaining program where members can explore a lot of different types of bargaining practice and improve their skillset and also giving a lot of people education around how school budgets work and things like that. So that, I feel, has been really successful in helping educators make some of the gains that they have been making over the last several years. 

What else can be done to support educators?

That’s a big question. Obviously, understanding that education in Colorado and educators are woefully underfunded even with recent increases and that there’s a lot of improvement that Colorado can make in that area still. And I think also an understanding that there has to be a way where we can relieve some of the stress that has been creeping into education as a profession. The stress comes in a variety of ways: conflicting expectations, initiatives that oftentimes don’t make sense and that are implemented in haphazard ways.

And I think this time that we’re in right now might be a really good kind of take-stock moment in education because we have put a tremendous number of different initiatives and programs into the system. There was recently an audit of pieces of the education system but I think we can take even more stock of where we’re at and get better at taking a look at what is working but also take a look at what’s not working. And when we see stuff that’s not working, we either talk about ways we can partner to improve it or ask, “Is this really needed or can we get rid of it without diminishing the outcomes for students?”

Because right now, so many things have been added and no analysis has been done on how these pieces fit together or how how they are supposed to interact and that creates a huge amount of overload and conflicting priorities, so I think it’s now a really good moment to do that. 

How do you see yourself and the CEA engaging with parents across the state going forward?

Yeah, we have a number of partnerships with a whole variety of parent groups and actually we are partners with a number of business groups. So, we have a number of community partners, not just parent partners, that we try to maximize to make sure that our communities provide mutually beneficial solutions to how we can improve our schools.

I would say that there is a high degree of partnership and favorability that has solidified over the past few years. Educators are continually rated as one of the most trusted voices in any community and, for our part, I think educators are realizing the importance of reaching out in the community and making more substantive connections with not only the parents of the kids in their classroom, but the overall community as well. That’s been one of our main objectives, as well, is to make sure that we are providing as many opportunities as we can for our educators to experience other coalition groups and things like that. 

How do you see public schools addressing or adapting to the rising trend of families “choicing out” for home-schooling, online academies or other alternatives?

I think what we’ve come to see over the last few years is that charter schools have kind of become a mainstay of the system over the last few decades and I don’t see them going anywhere or that overall system changing.

I think, potentially, what may happen in this space is that people will start to understand just the incredible level of skill and quality that our educators have in the classroom and the level of expertise that they have in the classroom and understand that, really, the best opportunity for people is being in a traditional public school.

As much as that sector is growing, 85% of our students are still attending their neighborhood traditional public school so we have to make sure that the system, overall, is set up so that we are making sure that the vast majority of our students are getting as much support as they need.

I’ve heard concerns from some parents and teachers about the push toward privatizing education. What are your concerns?

When you get into managing schools so that they improve on the stock exchange instead of improving in the education sphere, that, I think, presents some very concerning incentives in our overall system. What is your priority? Because, obviously, if you’re in the private sector, the incentive has to be that you’re profitable. And oftentimes in those situations, the bottom line then becomes “What’s going to make us money?” as opposed to “What is best for students in the classroom?”

I’d like to hear your thoughts on some of the other national topics currently surrounding public education:

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in public education?

I think — like any tool we have — used wisely in the hands of a skilled educator, it can benefit and enhance students a lot. I think the potential for misuse for other not-as-productive uses is really high right now. In fact, NEA just passed a whole policy statement on the uses of AI in education.

The other thing I’ll basically say, just in general, is that I consider education to be the most human thing that we do. And you look at the last 20 years, there have been a number of efforts to de-humanize education in a variety of ways, whether that is the standardization movement or whether that is to computerize it online, all of this stuff. And I think that what you continually to see is that, time and again, coming back to the fundamentals of us being together, human interaction, is the most effective way to educate students.

Chronic absenteeism?

I do think we have to dig in a little bit more on all the reasons (for chronic absenteeism), but I think one of the traps that we get into in education is thinking that there’s one solution to some of these problems and so we start looking for silver bullets or singular, isolated solutions.

And I think, particularly when it comes to why kids are not coming to school, that has a number of different causes for it. Whether it’s challenges at home, taking care of siblings, the mobility or instability in their home life, all of that all the way through simply the challenge that educators have in trying to make education novel, fun, interesting, exciting when they are locked into sort of pre-packaged, standardized curriculum.

When I first got into this, there was a wide variety of opportunity for me to be creative … in my classroom and in my delivery. And I tended to be a popular teacher and part of that popularity was that I was engaging and interesting and that I always provided interesting lessons that were of my own creation.

A lot of the push these days is in the area of standardizing curriculum, creating sort of cut-and-paste lessons, making sure that all the teachers are on the same page of a lesson plan all at the same time. That kind of mechanical, for lack of a better word, approach to education tends to lend itself to be not very fun to be in a classroom for a long time. So, I think one of the solutions we need to look at is to create more autonomy for educators to make school more engaging. 

School safety?

Again, hugely multifaceted and even the word “safety” has multiple connotations. One of the things we are trying to do this year is — and we actually passed a bill called the Educator Safety Task Force out of session last year — understanding the multifaceted and multidimensional aspects of “How do we make sure schools are safe?”

We wanted to get our best experts and practitioners in the room to have in-depth discussions, do a lot of research and come with a comprehensive list of solutions, not do the singular “silver bullet” type of approach.

What misconceptions or misunderstandings remain about teachers’ unions, do you think?

One of them is that we are wholly a partisan organization. We work with anybody that wants to work with us and we are very interested in partnership. We work with a variety of groups all the time in different aspects of education. If we can get together and have a conversation and partner about what our potential common goals are, we are very interested in having those conversations and those partnerships. So, that’s certainly one.

I will say another is that all our membership basically believe the same thing. We often get tagged as all being all the same thing. We are a big cross-section of our population, like any other big group of people, so our membership is very diverse in beliefs, very diverse in all the categories, I guess. We are a cross-section of the population like anybody else.