Dr. McKalip will work hard for the “Better Schools” and “Lower Taxes”. He has a track record of success on each of these issues.
Better Results for Students
Support for Teachers and Teaching
Protecting Kids in Schools • Parental Control
Transparent Administration • Lower Taxes
Pride in America and our Founding Principles
Better Results for Students
Bartow County students deserve better results. Dr. McKalip will work to ensure that student performance is the best it can be. For too long our school system has tolerated poor results for our students.
We should never accept that fewer than half of students currently achieve a proficient or better results on the Georgia Milestones testing.
Dr. McKalip will work to:
- Emphasize academic success in reading, writing, math, science and history.
- Ensure that students are given necessary extra help to achieve higher proficiency.
- Prevent indoctrination of students with information that is inconsistent with the values of their parents.
Support for Teachers and Teaching.
Teachers are the key element to ensure students are learning. They must be allowed to teach and find JOY in teaching. They should be empowered to teach, not limited in their role.
Dr. McKalip will work to:
- Support more time instructing students.
- Remove unnecessary administrative burdens that take time away from teaching.
- Promote a paid work day for teacher preparation day after a routine long breaks (e.g. after Christmas holidays, spring break, etc).
- Ensure teachers don’t have to pay for supplies.
- Listen to teachers in routine teacher town halls with the board – or through anonymous feedback.
Protecting Kids in Schools
Our kids needs safe schools. That means safe from any physical issues but also safe from any social agendas that are not appropriate at their age.
Dr. McKalip will work to:
- Keep girls protected in sports and in their bathrooms from encroachment of biological males into their spaces.
- Remove obscene and graphic materials classrooms and from school libraries.
- Ensure that parents opt-in or at least can opt out of any curriculum that pushes a “gender ideology” attempting to normalize the alteration of a child’s biological sex medically, socially or without the parents full involvement.
- Stop violence in schools and work to ensure there are serious ramifications for those who are repeat offenders.
- Ensure students are not being indoctrinated with anti-America concepts extolling Marxism, DEI, and Critical Race theory or topics that devalue families and life.
Parental Control
Our Parents need to be respected in our schools. They should have a say over important matters of education, the books that their child is exposed to and other sensitive matters that are part of parental responsibility.
Dr. McKalip will work to protect parental rights to:
- Ensure parents can opt out of educational material they find objectional and work to require the system to require an opt in for some materials that are very concerning.
- Ensure parents can-opt out of medical treatment the school may seek to impose, as well as any “Social and Emotional Learning and Counseling”.
- Ensure Parents should be required to affirmatively approve participation in any survey or counseling for students.
- Ensure rapid and full transparency of the entire curriculum to the parents.
Pride in America and our Founding Principles
American students need to take pride in the heritage of our country to keep America a great nation.
Dr. McKalip will work to:
- Ensure that Bartow County Students are provided mandatory education on the founding principles of our nation.
- Understand how great our country is and how we have overcome so much to continue to work to become a “more perfect union”.
- Promote the founding principles of America including: Individual Liberty, Natural Rights, Limited Government, Consent of the Governed, Free Markets, Property Rights, Equal Justice and Rule of Law.
Transparent and Responsible Government
Our citizens are asked to simply trust a school system that continues to raise taxes and spending – without producing better results for our students.
The time has come for real transparency and accountability.
Dr. McKalip will work to:
- Produce full, detailed and frequent budget and spending transparency.
- Ensure the curriculum is transparent to citizens and parents.
- Ensure that School Board is informed, respected and takes on their rightful role as the chief policy forming body of the System.
- End the days of simply rubber-stamping everything given to them by the administration.
Lower Taxes
The citizens of Bartow have been suffering under never-ending property tax hikes for many years. This must stop.
The increased taxation and spending has not produced better results for students, but seems to have created extra bureaucracy and administrative expenses or to be misdirected to non-educational activity.
Dr. McKalip will work hard to:
- Cut property taxes for citizens.
- Dr. McKalip will work to explore and find unnecessary spending that does not support direct education of our students.
Dr. McKalip lead the 2025 effort to provide Property Tax Relief in Bartow County – an effort that produced an 89% “Yes” vote for that relief.