Tonight, at the Fountain Hills Unified School District Governing Board’s first meeting of 2021, the board will return to full strength with Dana Saar officially taking his spot at the dais.

Saar has been a Fountain Hills resident since 1982, and to say he has some experience on governing boards would be a gross understatement.

“I was on the governing board here (FHUSD) for 14 years,” Saar explained. “I was on the advisory committee before that, but my first year as a Fountain Hills board member was in 1996, and then I was elected to the community college board. That term lasted 10 years.”

Saar said that it was not too difficult for him to be persuaded to rejoin the FHUSD Governing Board.

“It’s Fountain Hills,” Saar said. “I have been here forever, and I have 30 years invested in the district and I want to make sure it is doing what it is supposed to be doing.”

Despite a significant amount of time passing since he was last on the local board, Saar said that the district is still experiencing some of the same issues his board experienced back in the day.

“Some of things are things that I would have said 14 years ago,” Saar said. “To be honest, I am under the opinion that we are an underperforming school district. I’m older, so maybe I talk to a different group then other board members do, but they are disappointed for lots of reasons. Some are legitimate and some not, but the bottom line is that they are not as supportive as they used to be.”

What worries Saar about these reactions to FHUSD is that voter-passed overrides are a big reason FHUSD can operate the way it does. Saar worries that the next override could fail if the community has lost faith in its district.

Another issue that Saar wants to address is the number of students in town that choose to go elsewhere for their education.

“I am a big ‘choice’ person,” Saar said. “But I want to make sure that Fountain Hills schools are part of the choices they’re making. To way more people than I would like, we are way down the list in their choices.”

Saar also believes that local schools could be utilizing their assets better to produce more revenue.

“We have three parcels of land that I think we need to think outside the box on so that we can supplement income revenue, and I don’t mean selling it,” Saar said.

Along with being on more then one governing board, Saar also is a computer programing teacher at EVIT. As a teacher, Saar has experienced firsthand the hardships that COVID-19 has inflicted on the education world.

And while Saar wants to get schools back to how they were before the pandemic, he also understands that everything has changed.

“But there are good reasons, not just COVID, down the road that there will always be students who, for whatever reason, are not able to come to class,” Saar said. “Whether it’s illness, family issues, all kinds of things. Technology has really matured, and I think that we need to use that as an opportunity because we are never going back to the way things were before March.”

The FHUSD Governing board will meet in the District Learning Center tonight at 6:30 p.m.