A trio of candidates seeking county seats were campaigning for votes on Friday.

John C. Cooley, a candidate for county commission, and Rodney Hassler and Darrell "B.J." Gibson, candidates for school board, all spoke to the Scotland County Democratic Women's meeting.

The forum was part of a series of such meetings held by the group, each featuring a different group of Democratic and nonpartisan candidates for local office.

John Cooley

A former county commissioner, Cooley is running to reclaim the Spring Hill District seat from fellow Democrat Betty Blue Gholston.

He told the partisan group that he will bring the business experience he gained from running Cooley's Nursery to the Scotland County Board of Commissioners.

"I've made a payroll every week for more than half my life now," he said. "I know what it is for any business to meet those payrolls and other obligations. I think that's a big deal, especially in today's economy."

The farmer said that, if elected, he will tackle a pair of concerns people are talking about.

"The big issues on everyone's mind is jobs and taxes," Cooley said.

Those issues are made worse by the failing economy.

"These days are as tough as any I have seen... these are without a doubt challenging times. I don't have any silver bullets, I don't know the solutions.... I will take my experiences in life and apply them to what situations come and make the best decisions I can for the majority of the people in the county."

When asked about his views on the proposed county landfill expansion, Cooley said he opposes the measure.

"We would be far better to export clean water than we would be to risk contaminating the water for everyone here and everyone east of us," Cooley said. "I just don't think that we need a mega dump. We generate garbage here and it needs to go somewhere, but I don't think that would be a positive thing for a county."

Rodney Hassler

A retired educator who spent three decades in the Scotland County school system, Hassler said he wants to take the school system back to a community-driven institution.

"We've lost touch with the audience we teach," Hassler said. "The audience has changed."

The candidate said the issue is that school leaders are asking for help from outside the county without using the resources that are already here.

"We became very convinced in Scotland County that we always could go out of the county and purchase a solution," he said. "That there were smart people out there who always had a brochure, who always had a good tagline to say if you do this, test scores will go up, if you do this, Johnny will not drop out.

"This is a shift from when I got first here and the community took responsibility for leading the audience that they understood better than anyone outside the system."

He also feels there is a lack of unified purpose in the schools.

"I think we also lost a stability of purpose," Hassler said. "Over the years, its become very popular to talk about the Baldridge Method and how all the arrows need to be pointing in the same direction. When I reflected, I realized all of the arrows in Scotladn County do point in the same direction, the problem is, they are always changing the target... This is causing absolute daily confusion within the community, and also within the educational environment."

He said he wants to be a "change agent" for Scotland County Schools.

"Change is very easy; improvement is very difficult."

Setting a mission for the school system will be his top priority,

"The first thing we have to do is get our purpose well defined and that becomes our leading target," he said.

The second thing he wants is to enact "Hassler's ABC's," which stands for accountability, "build it from within" and "claim it."

"Why do we spend so much of hard-earned tax dollars to go out and have strangers explain to us why their product will help us," Hassler said. "There are tremendously good products out there and there are tremendously smart people out there, but they don't know our audience."

Darrell "B.J." Gibson

Gibson, a pastor, told the Democratic Women that he believes the school system has not changed to meet the needs of the modern student.

"When I look at the school system, I find that we are dealing with a different setting of young people," Gibson said. "Young people today are not like the young people of 20 years ago. The way that you approach young people and the way that we are educating young people has got to change."

A big problem is the lack of "rigor" in the curriculum, he said.

"When I was at Scotland High School, I was an 'A' student," Gibson said. I did very well. I was a leading student. When I graduated and went to UNC-Pembroke and I went to my first writing class, I wrote my first paper that at Scotland High School would have been an 'A'. When I went to Pembroke, it was not an 'A' – I won't tell you what it was.

"I talked to those who were my peers and who was in my class and I found out that what I learned was on a lower scale as to what they learned. When they left the school systems that they were from, they had been given greater challenges than what I had been given. What happened to my education is it was watered down to meet me where I was rather than held high to pull me up to where I needed to be."

He also said the school system has a large dropout problem that is being ignored by administrators.

"No one has come to find out where they are or what they are doing," he said.

Gibson believes it is easy to ignore.

"A lot of times, we feel that they are out of sight and out of mind; let them drop out, it's there fault. What ends up happening in the long run is we end up being the victims of those people who dropped out of school."