Dec. 10—MITCHELL — What does Roger Musick do the day after the Mitchell School District announces the Roger and Vicki Musick Foundation gifted $1 million to support all-day begindergarten?
“I’m getting ready to go out to eat and drop my car off to get new tires,” he said, “and then go out to eat tonight. A pretty typical day.”
Musick, 75, of Mitchell, spoke with the Mitchell Republic on Tuesday morning about what is believed to be the single-largest donation in school district history. Business Manager Theresa Kriese and previous business manager Steve Culhane couldn’t recall anything close to this amount, Superintendent Joe Childs said.
The Mitchell Board of Education on Monday night approved
to switch from half-day to full-day begindergarten beginning in the 2025-26 school year. The donation is expected to fund the expansion of begindergarten in the school district for at least five years.
“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t start it in the next year and have to stop it, so we’ve agreed to fund it for five years,” Musick said. “And the only reason we wouldn’t is if the state were to take over the funding, but doubtfully that will happen in five years in South Dakota. And at the end of five years, we’ll see where we’re at and what we should do from there on.”
Musick is founder and former CEO of Innovative Systems, of Mitchell, until his retirement in 2020. Innovative Systems builds and advances software for voice systems, television providers, along with invoice systems for telecom companies.
Musick was inducted as
a member of the South Dakota Hall of Fame
in 2018.
On Tuesday, Musick sent a Chat GPT, or AI-generated, text to the Mitchell Republic sharing all the benefits of the importance of preschool in the United States when asked to discuss more details on the donation. Included were early cognitive and social development; school readiness; closing achievement gaps; long-term life benefits; support for working families; and fostering independence.
Below are excerpts from the Mitchell Republic (MR) interview with Musick, edited for clarity:
MR: One of my questions, considering you use ChatGPT, and I’m sure you’ve messed around with AI quite a bit, is when you think about this donation and you think about how it helps the development of young kids. How important is it to you that kids have critical thinking skills going into the future with what will be an AI-dominated world that we’re going to be living in?
RM: No question, critical thinking and the ability to read and interpret and decide what’s true and what’s not true is going to be more important all the time. It’s very important today, but going to be more, more important.
The idea of preschool is to try to make sure all the kids kind of have an equal shot at it. We are in a lot of cases the kids that are all coming from homes that are less fortunate and so forth so this ideally this gives kind of all the kids and equal shot, and from everything I’ve researched it looks like the first two or three years of their school is maybe the most important two or three years of their school.
MR: What led to this donation? Was there a moment or a person? There had to have been something that triggered that you decided that you’d like to make an impact here.
RM: Yes, I had done some research on my own, and I had discussed it with Deb Olson on the school board, and then I started discussing it with the administration and they all seem very, very positive. I think it’s something the state probably should fund, but in South Dakota, we don’t so we’ve got to figure out a way to do it without the state funding.
MR: Actually, that was going to be one of my later questions because I wanted to try to lead into it a little softer, but I’m glad you said it. This is a tremendous gift obviously, but is it disappointing that a major donation like this is needed to ensure support for early childhood education in public school?
RM: Oh, it is. You know there are a number of states that do fund it pretty well and we’re just not one of them. It didn’t look like, to me, in the next couple years it was going to happen, so figured well, we’ll make it happen and see how it works.
MR: You’ve mentioned how great Mitchell’s been for you and how much appreciation you have for the community here. What do you see this donation doing for the success of Mitchell long-term?
RM: Well, I hope it stimulates other people that are able to give to worthy causes. I mean we’ve got a lot of worthy causes associated with the kids:
Big Friend Little Friend
,
Jodi Reiners runs a number of programs
at the high school, and we have a number of programs like that that are very worthy. Hopefully, it’ll stimulate other people to give money as appropriate with what they’re able to.
MR: Do you have a lot of confidence in the community long-term?
RM: I do yeah, and you know I went through the Mitchell school system. All my kids went through and I was very happy with everything. I had some great teachers. I take part every year and
the Kids Grant program
, which is also kind of exciting to see the enthusiasm of the teachers for doing little things to help their students, and I think that’s a great program also.
MR: So what have been your main hobbies and interest in retirement? What have you been up to?
RM: Well, I’m on a number boards. I’m on the board for the
Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)
mine out at Lead for the research center there and I’ve got the three companies that I own part of that I’m on the board for those, but I don’t actively manage them, but I’m on the board. So I keep myself plenty busy.
MR: But the majority of your time is spent in town, though?
RM: Oh yeah, most of my time is all in Mitchell. We go on a couple vacations a year but other than that, we’re in town all the time.
MR: Anything else that I’m missing on this topic that you think is relevant to mention?
RM: Just that, we’ve got a great administration and teachers, and we want to praise them at every opportunity we can.