Supporting early learning

Marty Bassett has been a superintendent of a school district in Pinal County, Arizona since 2017. A long-time champion of early learning, he launched a pre-K program with financial support from Ørsted, which has built the nearby Eleven Mile Solar Center. Here, he speaks about the relationship between the community and Ørsted.

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I grew up in rural Nebraska, where my mother ran a private pre-school for 25 years.

I followed in her footsteps, working in several rural communities in Colorado before becoming superintendent of the Mary C. O’Brien Accommodation District here in Pinal County, Arizona. We have a pre-school, and an A+ rated elementary school, as well as a high school offering academic/occupational education. I love this part of the country. In a rural community like ours, you’ve got to come together for the benefit of everyone. We’ve got great teachers and great students here who are doing just that.

Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve always believed in the importance of helping children get an early start to learning. When we were coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw that a lot of our younger students were struggling because they’d missed so much school. We decided that to avoid the slow start of our youngest students, we would start up a pre-school that would give them that important extra year of education. And it’s been successful, but since we don’t get any public funding for it, a lot of families couldn’t afford the tuition. I reached out to Ørsted, which was building a solar farm nearby and had already been helping our local schools. I told them about the scholarship fund I was starting, and they were really generous, donating to help our schoolchildren in need.

I think it's a mutually beneficial relationship. We can offer our land resources and the fact that we get a lot of sun here, and they can build their clean energy project. In return, they’re supporting the schools and other community functions as well throughout Pinal County.

Personally, I’m a supporter of clean energy—we can always use more energy! If you have a good community partner, as Ørsted has proven to be, it’s a huge benefit to the community. I’d encourage other rural communities like ours that if they have resources in their areas, they ought to seek out a partnership with Ørsted. The more industry we get in our area, the better it is in a lot of ways—through the financial support, the increase in clean energy use, and the possibility that our students might be the Ørsted workers of tomorrow.