Published January 12, 2017 at 2:07 pm
Isaacs says a first-impression of American kindness motivates him today
by Tad Johnson
Sun Thisweek
Dakota County Tribune
Sachin Isaacs
When a 19-year-old Sachin Isaacs arrived at the Amtrak train depot in Winona, Minnesota, in 1999, the two suitcases he had brought from India had been jostled around so much during the ride from Chicago that they had burst open and scattered his clothes.
Isaacs admits that it was a pathetic sight, which was compounded when the emigrating college student’s ride didn’t show up and he didn’t have anyone else to call.
After Isaacs sat at the station for about an hour as the clock neared midnight, the only other person there – the station master ready to close up for the night – approached him.
Isaacs explained as best he could, being fairly new to the English language, that he was in America for this first time on a student visa and his ride hadn’t arrived to take him to Winona State University.
He said the only contact he had had with the school was through dean Mary Thorn. The station master cracked open local phone book, found seven Thorns, but no Mary.
The worker started with the first Thorn on the list and called four more Thorns before finding Mary and her husband, Buzz, on the other end of the line.
In the middle of the night, Mary and Buzz Thorn drove their pickup truck to the station, placed Isaacs’ two tattered bags in the back and ferried him off to the only dormitory that was open at the time.
“That one gesture has impacted me for a lifetime,” said Isaacs, the newest member of the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School Board. “She didn’t know me. She picked me up at a very late hour and possibly influenced the trajectory of my life as a human being by that one act.”
Isaacs was among one of the top newsmakers in Dakota County in 2016 as he won on Aug. 9 a seven-way race for a School Board seat, vacated when longtime Board Member Rob Duchscher moved out of the district in March.
Isaacs, who was unable to gain a seat in 2015 against three incumbents, won the contest handily as he earned 28 percent of the vote. He outdistanced his closest competitor – Wendy Brekken – by 9 percentage points.
He said the fact that he ran the previous year was a boost to his campaign as people were familiar with him during the second campaign’s door-knocking phase.
Among the reasons he said voters likely supported him were that he is the parent with school-age children, he represented a diverse perspective as a first-generation immigrant and he earned the endorsement of the teachers union – Dakota County United Educators.
Key issues
Now that he’s in office, Isaacs says he wants to address three key issues.
He plans to focus on reducing the academic achievement gap between minority and white students, addressing food insecurity and improving community engagement.
They are all interrelated, according to Isaacs.
Statistics show that many students who are not achieving well in school are minorities receiving free or reduced-price lunches based on federal family income guidelines.
Some of these students are coming to school hungry, as poverty in Dakota County has increased along with the percentage of students receiving the free or reduced-price lunches. One district school reported a four-fold increase in such students in the past 10 years.
Isaacs says that research shows that students facing food insecurity at home won’t be ready to learn at school or continue the learning at home.
He advocates for expansion of The Sheridan Story program, which can provide students in need with food to take home in a discrete manner using donated funds of $180 per year per student.
The Minneapolis-based nonprofit started working with District 196 two years ago. It has identified 950 district students who are in need of the program. As of November, about 550 students had been sponsored.
“It is the solvable problem,” Isaacs said. “With a little bit of support, we can help these kids out of that atmosphere and get them to focus on education.”
Isaacs says the second way in which the district can close the achievement gap is to find more ways to provide homework help for minority students.
Since parents are often addressing multiple issues such as extended work hours, multiple children at home, mealtime and bedtime routines or a language barrier, homework can get lost in the shuffle.
Isaacs said after-school homework help in the buildings and at home needs to be expanded. He said the one-to-one iPad initiative makes tools like Facebook and Skype more possible in linking students at home to homework helpers throughout the district.
“These are the things we must do,” he said.
That leads Isaacs into his third initiative, which is to increase community engagement.
It starts with getting all parents involved in their child’s education and extends to making sure support staff and community members assist in creating a culture where learning is valued.
“Ultimately for the success of the kids, the key stakeholders need to be invested,” Isaacs said. “In the whole-child initiative, each stakeholder needs to do their part to help students attain the best life they can, achieve their goals and reach their potential. Learning doesn’t start and stop in the classrooms. It happens throughout (the day).”
He said there are many retired people in the district who could serve as ideal homework helpers, and the recruitment of volunteers needs to increase.
Isaacs is taking to the coffee shops and other sites throughout the district to do his part in increasing community engagement.
He encourages district residents to offer their views, suggestions or talk about their experiences with the district during his monthly listening sessions.
“These ideas will happen when there is more free-flowing dialogue,” Isaacs said. “I’m ready to do my part to help catalyze this relationship to what it can be.”
To find out where and when the sessions are held, district residents can go online to Isaacs’ Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/SachinISD196.
Background
Though Isaacs is not the first person with a diverse racial background elected to the board – Board Member Art Coulson is part Native American – he is a visible minority in his complexion and accent.
He said the symbolism of that is important.
“Young people should be able to look at positions of leadership and see that diversity,” Isaacs said.
As a first-generation immigrant, Isaacs said he will bring a different way of thinking to board discussions.
His perspective of many times being the only minority in a classroom or even an entire town, as was the case in the small Wisconsin town he spent his college summers at, he says will result in better policymaking.
“The robustness of the discussion will result in better outcomes for our children,” he said.
When Isaacs was growing up in India, he was being groomed to work in the successful retail industry business that was owned by his father.
But Isaacs said he wanted to do something different.
That’s when he embarked on his quest to become an American college student, where he landed at Winona State. The school had made the best scholarship offer, which he had to earn to keep by maintaining a high grade-point average.
In school, he met his future wife, earned a bachelor’s degree in business and went on to receive a Master of Business Administration from the University of St. Thomas.
He said his view of numbers through the lens of economics will allow him to see the story behind the statistics and strategies to address problems.
The senior product manager of clinical assessments at NCS Pearson is the only School Board member with children currently in district schools. His oldest daughter is a first-grade student at Glacier Hills Elementary School of Arts and Sciences and his youngest is still in preschool.
He said this will also bring a different perspective as a parent whose children are on the receiving end of instruction.
He also has the perspective of a parent who recently made the choice to move into District 196 because of the schools.
He said it was the district’s triple A philosophy of educating students well-rounded in the arts, athletic and academics that attracted them.
To see the AAA in action, Isaacs is on a quest to spend a day in every district school in the 2016-17 calendar year. He had visited six out of 31 as of mid-December.
He said so far he’s been impressed with the learner-centered environment in the classrooms with a non-commoditized of imparting education that finds the best way for each student to learn.
“One of the things I have seen is the personal investment,” he said. “I have been deeply impressed at the personal accountability that our teachers take for each of their kids. … It shows the amount of depth of caring that educators have and the responsibility they feel in trying to make each one of our kids live up to their fullest potential.”
Isaacs said he’s hoping the kinds of successful strategies and efforts being made by teachers become shared throughout the district.
As one example he saw four English composition students working on a joint writing project where each student wrote a part of a larger work. While each student had to write their own piece, that had to collaborate in real time using Google Docs to ensure the different pieces worked together as a whole.
“This shows the students that critical thinking is a process and used not just in science or mathematics,” Isaacs said. “Projects like this, this is excellence, this is a world-class education. … This gives our students global readiness to go out in the world with a competitive advantage.”
Tad Johnson 