Election Day brought a new face to Richland 2 school board. Meet Lashonda McFadden
Richland 2’s newest school board member has a few ideas on how to improve schools.
Now, following the 2020 school board election, Lashonda McFadden has a chance to implement some of those ideas as the newest board member of the fourth-largest school district in South Carolina.
Voters elected McFadden alongside two incumbents, Lindsay Agostini and Monica Elkins. McFadden earned the third-most votes, 21,652, in the 10-person race, according to SCVotes.org. She defeated incumbent James Shadd by roughly 4,000 votes.
McFadden works as an administrative assistant at Prisma Health, chairs the school improvement council at Lonnie B. Nelson Elementary and has a referral website called CUBE Referral Agency to help connect businesses in the area.
“It’s my little pet baby. It’s not a business,” McFadden said, likening it to the yellow pages. “My page is basically a reference page.”
Tennessee native
McFadden, 39, is originally from Tennessee, where she received a degree in business from East Tennessee State University. She moved to the S.C. Midlands because her husband was finishing his degree at South Carolina State University. After graduating, he found a job at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and they moved to a house in Lexington County, but, “It just didn’t seem like home there.”
So McFadden said she and her family moved to the Spring Valley area.
“When we entered into Spring Valley, there was just a calmness,” she said. “It felt like home to us.”
Though Richland 2 is the largest school district in the S.C. Midlands — with an enrollment of 28,000 students, Richland 2 has more students than Clemson University — McFadden is from the countryside.
“I’m from a rural area where we had a lot of room to run free,” McFadden said. “Having a bit of land was important for me.”
Her four children attend school in the district. Her oldest, Justice, attends Spring Valley and is in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Her middle children, Liberty and Noble, attend E.L. Wright Middle and the youngest, J’Lin, attends Lonnie B. Nelson Elementary.
New ideas
As coronavirus has upended traditional schooling, educators have been seeking to bring long-needed reforms to the American education system.
McFadden is one of those people, hoping to introduce policies that focus on life skills and allow high-achieving children to move ahead of their grade, she said.
One of those ideas: McFadden thinks virtual learning should have a long-term place inside South Carolina classrooms. Children who are ahead of their grade in a given subject should be allowed to take more advanced classes virtually, even if those classes are housed at another district school, she said. Students who are struggling academically should take in-person classes to maximize one-on-one interaction with teachers, she said.
She also said classes that focus on practical skills, such as paying taxes, managing personal finances, nutrition, self-defense and self-confidence, should be added to schools’ curricula.
“Now is a great time for us to start thinking about these things,” McFadden said.