Through the first week of filing for the Columbia Board of Education, there are only two candidates in the race, just enough to fill the seats being vacated by current board President Jan Mees and former President Jim Whitt.
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| Mrs. Della Streaty-Wilhoit |
The first candidate on the ballot will be Della Streaty-Wilhoit, who retired a little over three years ago as director of science research for the National Park Service Great Rivers Midwest Region and visiting faculty at the Great Rivers Cooperative Ecosystems Unit at the University of Missouri.
Her goal if elected, Streaty-Wilhoit said in an interview last week, is to encourage more students, especially girls and minority students, to get into science and technology fields.
“We must continue to raise our bar of excellence and make sure that everyone understands that in order to be successful and find good jobs, we must train all of our students into those fields,” she said.
Streaty-Wilhoit and Brian Jones filed last Monday, the first day filing was open for the April 2 election. Filing also opened last Monday for one seat on the Boone Hospital Board of Trustees as well as for school board, city council and aldermen positions and other districts with non-partisan elections in April.
As of Friday, no candidate had filed for Boone Hospital trustee and 12-year incumbent and Chair Brian Neuner said last week he is undecided about another term.
Since retiring after 26 years working for federal resource agencies that also included the U.S. Forest Service, Streaty-Wilhoit said she has been looking for her next challenge.
“In all of that time I have been looking at where I could fit as my natural next step,” she said.
In 2014, she applied to be Missouri Commissioner of Education but did not make the list of five finalists of a search that resulted in the selection of Margie Vandeven.
“I was very, very surprised that I did not make the list of the final five,” she told St. Louis Public Radio. “I really thought my name would go forward because of all of the work I’ve done.”
Streaty-Wilhoit was born near Catron, in New Madrid County in the Missouri Bootheel. She received her undergraduate degree in personnel management at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana, and stayed there working for General Motors as a budget and cost analyst for 10 years.
She studied involvement of women and minorities for her MBA at Cardinal Stritch University and worked in Washington, D.C., for 12 years before returning to Missouri to begin a wildlife management program at Lincoln University for the forest service.
Streaty-Wilhoit received a doctorate from the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Missouri when she was 50, she said.
“It is never too old to get an education,” she said. “I am a life learner.”
After reading that Whitt and Mees would not seek re-election, Streaty-Wilhoit decided to run. She thinks the board does a good job of communicating its goals and has done a good job guiding the district.
She understands the issues that will come with deciding attendance boundaries for middle schools when a new building opens in 2020. Middle schools feed into the three high schools.
“Some people have moved into a neighborhood based on where they want their kids to go to school,” Streaty-Wilhoit said. “The parents don’t want to lose that education. What we need to do is to communicate and let people know that whatever school your child goes to, they are going to get a quality education.”
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