NCLM Southern City Volume 71, Issue 2, 2021

SOUTHERN CITY QUARTER 2 2021 18 bills and where they are. (Senator Burgin’s Legislative Assistant) Jessica (Daigler-Walls) is wonderful; she knows how I think, she keeps things in front of me all the time. The (legislative assistants) up here, people don’t give them enough credit for what they do, and we sure don’t pay them enough. I’m on a mission to try to get them raises. It’s a really specialized thing, being a legislative assistant. Not just knowing how the political process works but knowing the person- alities, the nuances, how to anticipate things when schedules are always changing. JB : The secretary of (the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services) and I were supposed to meet tomorrow. We’ve had to change it because a committee that I didn’t know I was going to present a bill in front of said, “We’re going to hear your bill tomor- row.” So, we’ve had to switch gears. Every day that I come up here I have a list, but every day is a new day that you just don’t know what you’re going to—but I kind of like that. I like being able to adjust. I won’t say I’m real quick on my feet, but being in business for yourself, you’ve got to be pretty flexible. When it comes to setting goals for yourself, and considering your self-imposed term limiting, what’s on your list of things to accomplish? JB : A lot of things, and lot of them are things outside of what I would normally delve into. I think education, I’m interested in looking at state year-round schools. Think about this, if we as a state decided to go with state year-round schools, we’d save billions of dollars in school construction, because we wouldn’t have to build a new school for probably six years. I want to pay teachers so well that there’s no question about education, and I want to hold them accountable. When I was in high school, we had photography. Does anybody offer photography any more in school? We cut out music, the arts, we cut out a lot of things that I think make life richer and more fulfilling for people. Year- round school, you get so many more opportunities. […] All the studies show that people being under (the traditional calendar), the summer hurts them. So just think. You’re coming back, you’re spending the first couple of months just trying to get those kids back to where they were. Whereas if we were in a year-round pro- gram, we’d be in nine weeks, be out three weeks, go nine weeks, be out three weeks. The folks who don’t like the idea are tourism (industry). [...] Here’s my argument. If you have people going nine weeks and off three weeks, you’ve always got people tracked out. To me, you’ve extended the season for vacations, you’ve tripled the amount of kids that are available during the year, because you’ve always got people tracked out. [...] I think that it’s just a perception, “It’s always been that way.” If we want to make a huge difference in education, I think there’s a way to do it. I introduced a bill. All I said is let’s do a study. I’m not big on paying for these big studies but I said let’s let the Department of Public Instruction look at these factors and see if they would work. That’s one of the things, these are long-term things. Health care is really where I want to live. Health care certainly connects to how a community flourishes and to the confidence levels of everyday people. JB : Mental health—we made the decision years ago to close a lot of the mental health facilities, like (Dorothea) Dix (Hospital in Raleigh) and everything. I think a lot of people are seeing By the Numbers: Legislator Q&A continued from page 17