Everett School Board: Six candidates address controversies, student achievement
Published 5:48 pm Friday, July 31, 2009
Everett School District leaders have come under fire for secretly recording a teacher in her classroom, racking up more than $200,000 in attorney fees related to legal battles over student newspapers and hiring a new superintendent without giving the community a chance to comment on the finalists.
Six candidates, including several critical of these recent district practices, are vying for two seats on the Everett School Board.
The final four will be determined after the Aug. 18 all-mail primary election and advance to the Nov. 3 general election.
One race is for a seat being vacated by Sue Cooper, whose quarter century is the longest board tenure in the district’s 118-year history.
In the other race, incumbent Karen Madsen faces a challenge from two candidates who pledge change.
Everett is an unusual district in that members serve six-year terms. Most districts have four-year terms. Everett also has “at large” positions, meaning candidates can live in any part of the district.
Everett is one of the state’s largest districts with 26 schools, more than 18,000 students and a $188 million annual operations budget. The position pays $50 a meeting up to $4,800 a year.
Here is a look at the primary contests:
Position 3
A pastor, a mechanical engineer and a retired urban planner are vying for the seat being vacated by Cooper.
Jeff Russell, a pastor at Central Lutheran Church, has served on the Everett Public Schools Foundation and the district’s Career Technical Education Advisory Committee and has been an assistant football coach at Evergreen Middle School where his wife is a teacher.
Russell, a University of Washington graduate, said the district needs to repair relations with the teachers union and he “would make a real commitment to more collaborative and more transparent decision making.”
“The suppression of school newspapers, the videotaping of a teacher, I fail to see how these increase graduation rates,” he said. “The board chose to do a more closed process for selection of its superintendent. Given what transpired over the past one and a half years, it was befuddling.”
Russell said he would bring a passion for vocational education to the board.
Pam LeSesne, a retired Navy captain with a mechanical engineering master’s degree, said she was encouraged to run for the school board when she was a volunteer at her son’s middle school.
LeSesne, who has tutored students, said she believes high school students should have an adult mentor besides their parents. Her mother was a teacher who stressed the importance of a good education, but not every child gets the same support.
“An 80 percent graduation rate here in Everett is better than the state average but to me that’s not good enough,” she said.
At the same time, LeSesne said she wants to make sure all students are challenged so they can reach their potential.
“My bottom line issue is I don’t want math and science to be watered down,” she said. “I want to make sure our kids are prepared, not just at the (college-level) advanced placement level but all kids.”
Bennie Walthall, a retired urban planner and architectural designer for the federal government, said his wife, Shirley, a retired principal who in 1965 was hired as Everett’s first black teacher, inspired him to run for the school board.
Walthall said the district needs to recruit more minority teachers to serve as role models for minority children. As a child growing up in Texas, he would see black teachers who succeeded and led him believe he could, too.
“It’s not just black people, but all people of color share something in common in this community,” he said.
The same holds true for students growing up in poverty, he said.
“I was so poor growing up you had to spell it with four o’s,” he said. “Just because you are poor doesn’t mean you can’t learn.”
Walthall, who has a public administration master’s degree, also said he wants to see more aptitude testing to help students identify strengths and he would encourage more professional training taught by teachers within the district instead of outside consultants.
Russell has a Web site at jeffrussell4everettschools.webs.com; LeSesne’s site is www.electpamlesesne.com. Walthall does not have a campaign Web site.
Position 4
Madsen, president of the Washington School District Directors’ Association, is facing opposition in her own back yard.
Running against her are retired teacher Annie Lyman and district watchdog Jessica Olson.
“Somebody has to change what’s going on there,” Olson said. “I think they are making a lot of poor decisions like taping a teacher in the classroom. You try to show what happened and the board is either silent or they try to justify it.”
Olson, who has had an autistic son enrolled in the district, said she has filed frequent public information requests to make sure his rights are enforced. Some of her requests have ended up in court. She is member of the Washington Coalition for Open Government and would press for policies providing quicker access to public records.
Olson, a University of Washington graduate, said she favors more emphasis on phonics instruction in the early grades and traditional math. She also said she would be an advocate for parents with children with special needs.
Lyman, a retired Northshore School District teacher, said she was troubled by the way the district enforced policies allowing prior review of student newspapers from school administrators.
“They had the policy on the books for a long time,” she said. “Historically, they weren’t enforcing the policy. That is one policy I want to see changed.”
The decision by district administrators to put a camera in the classroom ceiling of a Cascade High School teacher who helped students publish an underground newspaper “just sealed it for me,” she said.
Lyman, who has a master’s degree and served on the Everett Public Schools Foundation Board for six years, said she would work hard to promote more public participation in district decisions and would invite union leaders to give a report at each school board meeting.
Lyman also said she would try to reduce the term lengths for Everett School Board members from six to four years, which she believes would provide more accountability. She said the district must offer a solid vocational education program and should do more to promote “green policies,” such as composting.
Madsen, an educational consultant who taught high school science for 10 years, said her goals are to see the district recruit more minority teachers and employees, increase early childhood education programs and improve graduation rates.
“We are pushing on 80 percent, which is a good number compared to the state, but it’s not good compared to 100 percent,” she said.
Her budget priorities are to maintain class size goals with teachers, keep new programs that are improving student achievement and preserve teacher training.
Madsen, who has a master’s of natural sciences degree, has been on the school board for 12 years and has led school levy and bond campaigns every election since 1996.
She defended the board’s method of choosing a new superintendent. Unlike most districts, the board did not name a handful of finalists who could be interviewed by parents, taxpayers and school staff. Madsen said the board’s selection process strengthened the pool by providing confidentiality to candidates and made it easier for the new superintendent to take over without groups within the community disappointed that someone else wasn’t chosen.
“It’s the responsibility of the board to hire a superintendent and this was the way we chose to fulfill that,” she said. “It was a tough decision, but we got amazing results.”
She said an agreement reached with the teachers union requiring teachers’ knowledge of video cameras in the classroom “was an excellent decision on both sides.”
Olson’s Web site is www.jessica4everettschoolboard.com; Lyman’s is www.Lyman4schools.org and Madsen’s is www.karenmadsen.org.
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446, e-mail stevick@heraldnet.com.
Position 3
Name: Jeff Russell
Age: 47
Occupation: pastor
Name: Pam LeSesne
Age: 53
Occupation: Mechanical engineer, retired Navy
Name: Bennie Walthall
Age: 71
Occupation: Retired urban planner
Position 4
Name: Annie Lyman
Age: 67
Occupation: Retired teacher
Name: Karen Madsen
Age: 57
Occupation: Educational consultant
Name: Jessica Olson
Age: 42
Occupation: Homemaker
