As he jumps from college into the real world, Iowa State senior Gentry Collins is taking another leap of faith — into the political arena.

Collins, graduating in May with a political science degree, officially announced Tuesday morning his candidacy for the 62nd District Iowa House seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Bill Bernau.

He said improving primary and secondary public education is his main goal.

“We’re known around the country and around the world for our quality of education, but that quality is beginning to slide,” he said.

Collins cited achievement test scores, workforce preparedness and college readiness as three areas in which there has been a recent decline.

“Our public schools in grades kindergarten through 12th aren’t doing the job they once were,” he said.

He said salary raises and higher expectations of teachers and students are necessary to reverse the current trend.

“You need to give some incentive for the good students to go into that field [of teaching],” he said, noting that Iowa’s teacher salaries have lagged behind the national average.

Collins said he supports an in-the-works proposal to hike wages by as much as $5,000.

But he added that the increase in pay would be accompanied by higher standards for teachers.

“You don’t solve the problem simply by throwing money at them,” he said.

Collins also voiced his disappointment with attitudes toward elementary instruction.

“I don’t think we’re expecting enough out of our students,” he said, suggesting a return to the A-B-C-D-F scale for third through sixth grades. In many schools, seventh grade is the first time letter grades are used.

“By simply allowing students to get through on a pass-not pass system, we’re not allowing the kids to be challenged who ought to be challenged,” he said.

Collins had high praise for the three Regents universities. He described schooling at ISU, the University of Northern Iowa and the University of Iowa as “absolutely world-class education and very affordable.”

He said he had no major changes in mind regarding higher education, because “our public universities do a pretty good job.”

Collins articulated three simple steps dealing with the hot-button hog lot controversy, which promises to be an issue once again in this year’s legislative session.

“Absolutely, without any questions, we need statewide environmental regulations,” he said.

With county control, there would be “99 different sets of regulations instead of one everybody can count on,” he said.

The second initiative would be the reduction of nuisance suit protection, Collins said, which would allow residents to more easily sue next-door hog lot operators.

As the laws stand now, “there’s nothing you can do about it” when corporate pork producers become bothersome, he said.

His third idea is statewide zoning. Collins portrayed Iowans as “anti-hog lot,” and he said allowing individual counties to decide whether a producer can build “would kill the hog industry, which is absolutely critical to Iowa’s economy today.”

Collins, who grew up near Detroit, Mich., said “politics was always a topic of interest” for him.

He said his grandmother’s school board campaign in Ohio was one of the first times he became directly involved with politics.

After an internship in the Iowa House and jobs with both Bob Dole and Mike Mahaffey’s campaigns in 1996, Collins said he was ready to run for himself.

“Some of the candidates that had run in the recent past hadn’t done the job I thought I could do,” he said.