Earlier this week, we wrote about ongoing strife on the Seattle School Board, which was revealed in a staggeringly negative evaluation based on interviews with board members themselves as well as senior district staffers. Among the laments is the contention that board micromanaging is driving talent away from the district. If so, it’s not driving away school board candidates.
A array of hopefuls have lined up to replace two outgoing board members: long-timer Michael DeBell and board president Kay Smith-Blum. They include activists, the development director for the Museum of Flight, a government relations consultant and a recent recipient of a PhD in educational leadership. And there’s some difference of a opinion about whether micromanaging is a problem, one that reflects an ongoing debate about the role of board members.
“At times, the board has focused on micro-issues,” says Suzanne Dale Estey, a former economic development director for the city of Renton who recently formed her own government relations consulting firm. Estey, who is running in DeBell’s District 4, covering a swath of northwest Seattle, says she’s “very concerned” about the board’s inability to stay at the right “governance level.”
She adds that the “lack of teamwork on the minutia” distracts the board from its crucial fight for more state funding and hints that board meddling may have something to do with what she calls “dramatic” staff turnover. District figures show that since 2006, it has had four superintendents, six CFOs, eight heads of HR, and seven special education directors. “It’s just crazy,” she says.
One of her opponents, Dean McColgan, the Museum of Flight staffer and a former Federal Way council member and mayor now living in Seattle, not only believes that the board “should not get involved in “the day-to-day management of schools” but contends that board members should strictly limit their interaction with district staffers “All questions should go to the superintendent,” he says.
Vying to represent Smith-Blum’s District 5 in central Seattle, education PhD and consultant Stephan Blanford and repeat candidate and former tutor LaCrese Green also condemn micromanaging.
But District 4 candidate Sue Peters, a freelance writer and parent activist opposed to what she calls “corporate education reform,” including high-stakes testing and charter schools, questions the micromanaging tag. Under prior Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, she contends, “we had a board that seemed to rubber-stamp everything that staff and Goodloe-Johnson did. I certainly don’t want to go back to that.”
She elaborates that families are often faced with district decisions that come down from faceless bureaucrats. Families’ school board representative is the person they know, the person they are naturally inclined to turn to with questions and concerns.
And if the board member in turn asks questions of staff, she says, “I don’t have a problem with that.” She adds, “If my constituents ask me about an issue that concerns them, it is my duty to bring it up.”
