In the election that ends Tuesday, voters in Bulloch County Board of Education District 7 are deciding between two candidates with strong ties to the Southeast Bulloch schools. Incumbent board member Heather Mims hopes to see projects through to completion, including a “scary” big plan for her high school alma mater.
She faces a challenger, Lisha Nevil, in the nonpartisan race. Early voting concludes Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m., at the Elections and Registration Office in the County Annex, 113 N. Main St., Statesboro. Bulloch’s 16 Election Day voting precincts will be open 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesday.
Mims, in her eighth year on the board, was returned to the position of vice chair in January by a vote of the board members, having served as vice chair at least three previous years.
“I want to continue on the board because I’m one of the few non-educators on the board, and I feel l have a lot to offer as being from a different walk of life than maybe some of the other board members, and I would love to be able to see some of the projects that we’re in the middle of be finished,” she said in an interview.
Before being elected to the BOE the first time, Mims had worked as a substitute teacher and served as an appointed school council member.
She and husband Greg have been married almost 29 years and have five children, three of whom have now graduated, one from Georgia Cyber Academy – the online public school – and two from Southeast Bulloch High School. Another will soon be a senior at Southeast Bulloch High, and the youngest is about to move up from SEB Middle School to the high school.
As a board member, Mims has often spoken from a parent’s perspective. Besides being a non-educator, she is the only board member who has never had a career, she stated in a follow-up text. “Raising my family has always been the most important job I could ever have,” wrote Mims, who is now 47.
Otherwise, she does things with crafting skills such as sewing and embroidery, and has recently started working for Virginia Luxe Marketing and Design, based in Statesboro.
A 1995 graduate of Southeast Bulloch High, she also completed a two-year diploma program in accounting at Ogeechee Technical College.
One of the projects the Board of Education is involved in planning is a new Southeast Bulloch High School, proposed to be the largest, and most expensive, school yet in the Bulloch County Schools system. Its construction would be followed by conversion of the current high school to be SEB Middle School and repurposing of the current middle school as an “upper elementary” school as the district adds capacity.
Mims remarked that, if re-elected, she might not see the Southeast Bulloch construction completed in another four-year term.
“I will honestly have to say it’s a bit scary,” Mims said. “When I graduated from there in 1995, our graduating class had a little less than 100 students, and at that point (the high school) had eighth grade, so we were sitting at around 500 students, and to go from that amount to what we’re looking at, 3,000 students, 2,500, it’s scary. It’s very scary. Change can be good; change is scary; change is necessary. But I’m excited about it, excited and scared if you can be all that at the same time, just to see what opportunities open up.”
Also in the board’s planning, the new school could accommodate more career-oriented classes with input from industries on careers available to students.
“So they can get right out in the workforce, almost, from the high school,” Mims said. “They’ll be that much ahead of the game.”
Safety and raises
She notes that one focus of the board in her current term has been on improving school safety. The steps taken include working with the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office to expand the number of school resource officers to more campuses and tightening visitor protocols, the rules on who other than faculty, staff and students can enter a school, and how.
“We’re just trying to keep our kids a lot safer, and I know families that it’s been kind of difficult from the parents’ side because we feel so locked-out, I guess, and not included so much,” Mims said. “But it has definitely been a good move to try to keep everybody a lot safer.”
She sees pay raises for teachers, which the board and superintendent have expanded to all school employees, as another accomplishment.
“We’ve had some raises that we’ve been able to implement to our teachers, who are well deserving, and they deserved so much more … and we make sure that everybody’s covered, even if the state hasn’t put it in their budget and passed it along to us,” Mims said.
Right now the board is looking at expanding raises again beyond a $2,500 teacher raise funded by the state this year, but the first version of the school system’s fiscal 2025 general fund budget showed expenditures topping $159 million. Staff members showed cuts to spending in a few areas.
“We are looking at $20 million more in the budget this time around than last year, and we are asking lots of questions and there’s lots of discussions going on as to how we can scale that back even more,” said Mims, who noted that increases some things, such as insurance and retirement plan costs, cannot be avoided.