School Board candidates talk funding, equity, community engagement

With a guaranteed three, and potentially four, new faces on the Seattle School Board this fall, the composition of the seven-seat council is sure to have a different look come November.

The eight candidates (a group that includes just one incumbent) fighting for the four open spots faced off on Thursday, Oct. 8, at Seattle First Baptist Church in Capitol Hill in a wide-ranging debate that touched on funding, student testing, the impacts of the McCleary decision and efforts to close the achievement gap.

The most pointed comments of the night came from the two people battling to represent District VI, which encompasses West Seattle: sitting board member Marty McLaren and challenger Leslie Harris.

As the only incumbent on the ballot, McLaren spent most of the evening defending her record on the board.

She said the maintenance backlog in the district is steadily shrinking and that Seattle Public Schools (SPS) is “way ahead of the curve” compared to other school districts.

McLaren, a former teacher, also strongly voiced her support for Superintendent Larry Nyland, calling him the district’s best in nearly 20 years and said that multi-tiered systems of support are being put in place to address inequities within the current system.

“A vote for me is a vote for continuity, progressive change and stability,” she said.

Harris, meanwhile, said the issues she was running on were transparency, communication and trust and that the district needs to tap into the brainpower of the city as a whole for solutions.

“We live here, we live here right now and we need to get busy,” Harris said.

A longtime volunteer and litigation paralegal, Harris said she was distressed by the capacity problems facing the district and raised concerns over the state Legislature potentially pushing for mayoral control of the school district, something she said the current board doesn’t seem to understand as a possibility.

In closing statements, McLaren painted Harris as polarizing and divisive, while Harris responded by saying that those in favor of continuity shouldn’t vote for her.

“Am I a change agent?” she said. “You betcha.”

District 1

The two candidates for the District I seat, held by Sharon Peaslee, predominantly focused on issues of equity within SPS.

Michael Christopherson emphasized the importance of addressing the needs of students with dyslexia and said there’s a “huge amount of injustice” toward those with learning disadvantages, while Scott Pinkham said SPS has lost its connection with a large, diverse community.

Christopherson, an electronic engineer and the father of three SPS students, said he was highly suspicious of the idea of the city government becoming more involved in the district’s day-to-day operations and warned that a “levy swap” proposal to address the McCleary decision would force the district into finding a new form of taxation to raise revenue.

For Pinkham, the director of the University of Washington’s Minority Scholars Engineering Program and an American Indian Studies lecturer, one of the main issues currently facing Seattle schools is a failure to involve the community in the decision-making process, making people feel disengaged from the process.

Pinkham said the district also needs to raise teacher pay to the point where they can live within the city,and become a more involved part of the communities they work in.

He also mentioned the need to close the achievement gap and for schools to respect and embrace the differences of students to make everyone feel welcome.

“We need to heal from the inside,” Pinkham said.

District I runs south from the Seattle-Shoreline border, covering most of North Seattle, including Lake City, Northgate, Broadview, Haller Lake and Matthews Beach.

District II

In the District II race to replace School Board president Sherry Carr and serve Greenwood, Green Lake, Fremont and Wallingford, Rick Burke and Laura Obara Gramer focused on different strengths they would bring to the board.

Burke, the president of an Interbay-based engineering and manufacturing business, emphasized his business background. That experience, he said, has allowed him to become an effective manager.

Burke touched on the need for more funding, but said the school district needs to do a better job at making decisions and efficiently using that money and noted the need to conduct better outreach with the community.

“If we’re not providing stellar customer service, we have to be held accountable for it,” he said.

He also that the No. 1 issue with addressing inequities is the amount of learning happening during the school day.

“If the learning isn’t happening in the classroom, we’re creating this inequity,” he said.

Gramer said she could bring the perspective of a parent of children just entering the SPS system, along with that of someone more involved in issues of difference, as a member of the Deaf community.

“These children don’t know how to react to someone who’s different than them,” Gramer said.

Throughout the night, Gramer also repeated calls to improve transparency and communication throughout SPS and mentioned her experience in bringing the community together to advocate for deaf and hard-of-hearing programs.

District III

For District III (which encompasses Wedgwood, Roosevelt, Laurelhurst, Montlake and Eastlake), the race is between attorney Jill Geary and former Seattle PTSA president Lauren McGuire to take the seat being vacated by Harium Martin-Morris.

Geary said the district has a capacity crisis and far too many students to reasonably accommodate students with the current amount of space. Beyond that, there isn’t enough communication between the central office and each school.

“We have a district of silos,” Geary said.

Regarding the role of standardized testing, McGuire said tests should show where improvement in the curriculum is necessary and shouldn’t be a punitive element for teachers and students, while Geary said it’s unacceptable how entire schools can be disrupted just for the sake of testing.

Geary was pointed in her focus on closing the achievement gap, saying suspensions need to be eliminated in the early grades and that it’s crucial to get kids in the classroom and to give general education teachers the resources they need.

She also said the school board has not advocated as strongly as it should at the state level: “We are the 900-pound gorilla in this state.”

McGuire said with levies comprising 26 percent of the district’s budget, there needs to be other funding sources in the future, such as an income or capital gains tax.

She also took the current moratorium on elementary school suspensions a step further, saying she wants the ban on suspensions installed at secondary schools, as well.

“The stakes are too high for our high school students,” she said.

The debate — presented by the League of Women Voters of Seattle-King County and the Seattle PTSA — is available to watch in its entirety on the Seattle Channel website (www.seattlechannel.org.).

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