School Board Candidate - Annie McMahon Whitlock

“I teach all day long about how important it is to get involved in your community, to teach young people about the responsibility of citizenship,” Whitlock said. “I need to walk the walk.”

By Justin Tiemeyer
Contributing Writer

For a typical candidate for the Lowell Area Schools Board of Education, an election run requires you to explain how your experience, outside of education and schools, makes you qualified for the board. For Annie McMahon Whitlock, it is a different game altogether. When asked if she has ever had a job that was not education-related, Whitlock responded, “Do service jobs in high school count? No, I really haven’t.”

After she received her elementary education degree at Central Michigan University, she started her first teaching job in Holland. From there, she’s been a curriculum director, ParaPro, and an education professor at both University of Michigan-Flint and Grand Valley State University. That is right: she teaches teachers for a living.
“My whole career has been in education in a lot of different ways,” Whitlock said. “Even in college, I worked as a tutor to make extra money.”

Before all of that, Whitlock was a Lowell resident and a product of the Lowell Area Schools system. LAS was a bit different back then; Whitlock went to Runciman Elementary, Cherry Creek was the middle school, and so on. It was a different picture compared to her current experience. After moving away for college and career, Whitlock returned to Lowell with her husband and two daughters, and the latter currently attend Cherry Creek Elementary School in second and fourth grade.

As for her motivations to join the school board, Whitlock spoke to both the small picture and the big picture. The small picture is that she wants to have an impact on her daughters’ education. The big picture: “I teach all day long about how important it is to get involved in your community, to teach young people about the responsibility of citizenship,” Whitlock said. “I need to walk the walk.”

Since moving back to Lowell, Whitlock has joined parent groups, she served on the parent teacher organization (PTO) when her kids were at Bushnell, she joined the parental advisory board, and she figured the next right step was to run for the Board of Education.

It does not take much to prompt Whitlock to geek-out about education, about the importance of literacy for a functioning democracy, and there are also the different types of literacy: media literacy, mathematical literacy, and civic literacy, just to name a few. She can just as easily dive into one of the many hot-button topics affecting Lowell Area Schools and give a well-researched opinion. Perhaps the hottest topic, which Whitlock has witnessed first-hand as an education professor, is the nationwide teacher shortage “It’s going to hit us eventually,” Whitlock said.

Evidence of a teacher shortage in Lowell is scarce compared to other districts, and this has a lot to do with Lowell’s impressive teacher retention rates. People who start teaching careers in Lowell like to stick with Lowell Area Schools.  In order to stave-off the problem that she sees on the horizon, however, Whitlock wants to convert the many interventionists, and para-professionals, employed by the district into full teachers. This can be fast tracked, she noted, by allowing them to use their work within the district as some, or all, of the hours required to get a teaching certificate.
If elected, Whitlock would like to use her expertise within the education field to explain the things that the board is doing, in terms that make sense to the public, and she is willing to try a bunch of different techniques for bringing transparency to the school’s dealing, up to and including, a regular column in The Lowell Ledger, if needed.

“Public schools are a government entity, which means they’re complicated, but we interact with them and send our most precious things there,” Whitlock said. “It’s really easy to fall into the trap of being fearful, but the fear of the public school system is unfounded.”

Whitlock believes that the vast majority of family and community members merely need some guidance, some education about the education system, if you will, in order to understand the ways the school system works for the children who attend. However, she does believe it is important to confront the misinformation coming from a small, vocal minority, people she believes are “trying to drum up fear about the public schools where the fear should not be.”

Whitlock chooses not to be fearful, and while some may call that courage, Whitlock believes that it is an obvious consequence of being informed. Rather than fear the effects of certain books on the minds of students, Whitlock trusts the librarians and media specialists the district has hired, and she trusts the policy already in place where parents may elect to keep their own children, and only their own children, from reading certain books.

“I don’t believe any books should be removed from the library, period, for any reason,” Whitlock said. “Every time we fight to remove a book from the library, it costs hours of resources wasted.”

Annie McMahon Whitlock is one of five candidates running for four seats on the Lowell Area Schools Board of Education. The official ballot for the Tuesday, November 5, 2024 election also lists Parker Liu, but Liu suspended his campaign on Tuesday, August 6, 2024, citing family obligations. Of the remaining five, there are three incumbents, and Whitlock is one of two challengers. In-person voting can be done on the Tuesday of the election or prior during Michigan’s early voting period, and many residents have already received their absentee ballots.