Early Voting

As early voting is underway in the Mayor's runoff, we talk to both Tim Kelly and Kim White about their plans for education.

Early voting is currently underway for the chattanooga mayoral runoff election between candidates kim white and tim kelly.

With the election roughly three weeks away, the candidates are making their last minute pitches to voters who haven't yet made up their mind.

News 12's kenan scott spoke with both candidates about their agendas for chattanooga's education system, and how they plan to implement them.

In the lead up to the april 13th chattanooga mayoral runoff election, candidates kim white and tim kelly sat down with news 12 to give a last minute pitch to voters, with early voting currently underway.

Education was a major issue for both candidates.

Mr. kelly emphasized the need to coordinate with hamilton county schools to expand early childhood education, as well as address issues like teacher pay.

"we only currently have something like 40 percent of kids coming into kindergarten in chattanooga knowing their letters and their numbers and their colors.

We can do a lot more expanding early childhood education, we can also do more cooperating with, in a proactive way, the hamilton county school system to use city resources to supplement school programming, perhaps even teacher pay in certain areas and city schools.

There's a lot more that we could be doing."

Ms. white expressed similar goals and said that, if elected mayor, she would set a benchmark of adding two thousand additional early childhood seats in her first term.

"we have sixteen youth and family development centers throughout the city, that really are not coordinated with the school system.

We're going to make sure that they're programmed properly, that we have after school tutoring, that we have reading programs. we're going to do what we can to actually bring on more early childhood seats and we're going to challenge area businesses to help us create two thousand more seats during my first term.

So i think that's the role that we could play."

While mr. kelly says that the mayor should play a central role in chattanooga's education agenda, ms. white emphasized that she would allow the county and superintendent to take the lead.

In chattanooga, kenan scott news 12