EVERETT — A Mill Creek family has poured nearly $500,000 into multiple political action committees as part of a campaign to unseat at least one member of the Everett Public Schools Board of Directors.
The money is set to be spent across all five school board seats up for election over the coming years. So far, the family has only spent money on one race, sending out mailers for Position 3 aimed at incumbent Anna Marie Laurence with vague allegations accusing her of risking student safety and fostering corruption in the district.
In an interview Tuesday, Laurence denounced the campaign’s claims as “absolutely false and untrue.”
It’s an unprecedented amount of money to be thrown into Everett school board elections. Over the past 10 years, only three Everett school board candidates have raised over $10,000 for a race, state disclosure filings show. Many raise no money at all.
The spending comes from newly formed political action committees, each named Committee for Educational Integrity for Everett Public Schools School Board, formed by James and Shelly Lee. They’ve done so because they believe a local robotics company is using the Jackson High School robotics team, 2910, as a de-facto advertising machine, having adults build the team’s robot while the owner of the business benefits from its success.
Those claims are currently the subject of an ongoing third-party investigation that the Lee family has declined to participate in. The family raised similar complaints with the district over the robotics team in 2023, but the district completed investigations regarding those complaints that found no evidence of wrongdoing.
The Snohomish County Tribune previously reported on the Lees’ spending.
‘The gloves come off’
In 2023, the Lee family filed a tort claim and an official complaint with the district, claiming Jackson High School’s team coaches exacerbated their child’s emotional distress, improperly removed them from the robotics team and fostered a team culture that prioritized adult contributions rather than student learning. The Lees’ child, Robin, uses they/them pronouns.
The Lee family declined to participate in the district’s investigations. At the time, James Lee offered to pay for a private investigator to undertake an investigation, but the district declined. There’s no precedent for a family footing the bill for a third-party investigation on behalf of the district, which would create an appearance of bias, district spokesperson Harmony Weinberg wrote in an email.
After reviewing documents and interviewing coaches, district staff, a parent and students, internal district investigations found no evidence to support the family’s claims, two reports said. The Herald obtained the reports through a public records request.
In an investigation report conducted by the district’s head of human resources, the team’s former head coach said Robin Lee tried out for the role of driver in 2023 and didn’t get the position. Not getting that role impacted them, according to the report.
“The student’s presence and participation dramatically shifted from September to October,” a summary from an interview with the former coach read. “Prior to that, the family was very excited about the student participating in robotics, which all changed with the driver selection announcement.”
The coach then met with Shelly and Robin Lee, who reportedly expressed disappointment in not receiving the driver role and said they did not want any other position on the team, the district response to the tort claim read.
In the following weeks, the coach began hearing reports from students who said Robin Lee “had been complaining that the mentors do not care about the students and do not acknowledge their efforts,” the district response read. The head coach also received two anonymous reports regarding Lee’s mental health and attitude toward the team, the tort response read.
After hearing those reports, three coaches reportedly met with Robin Lee and said their statements were “not compatible with a PR Officer position,” the role Lee held at the time. According to the tort response, Lee was not interested in continuing with the PR Officer role and wanted more drive time with the robot. The head coach, according to the tort response, expressed concern over Lee holding the PR Officer role when they didn’t want it.
Lee said the head coach stated he would replace them and said they were “disposable,” which the head coach denied, according to the report. The head coach then spoke with other coaches and school administrators. The district’s internal investigation found that the coaches and administrators made the decision to remove Lee from the team after they found Lee had made comments and taken actions that were “detrimental to the team.”
The investigation also cited the Jackson High School robotics contract, which reads that “team coaches reserve the right to remove me from the team at their discretion for any behavior running contrary to FIRST, district, school, and/or team requirements and expectations.”
FIRST refers to FIRST Robotics, the organization that oversees and operates the worldwide robotics competitions.
After the coaches removed Lee from the team, James Lee responded with an email asking the coaches to bring them back onto the team. In that email, included in the district’s tort response, he said the head coach at the time and other mentors were violating the ethics and rules of the robotics competition.
“I would like to see full reinstatement by Tuesday 2pm,” he wrote in the 2023 email. “At 2:01 the gloves come off.”
The district’s final report found no evidence to support the allegation that coaches fostered a team culture that prioritized adult mentors.
The amount of adult involvement that should be allowed in robotics competitions is a genuine point of contention for some who participate. A nonprofit Robin Lee founded to advocate for less adult involvement in robotics named StudentsFIRST has gained support from a number of teams across the country, according to its website.
But FIRST Robotics still allows contributions from mentors when both building and coaching. Its website says adult mentorship is part of the reason its programs are successful as students can learn by working hand-in-hand with experienced adults. The level of adult participation also varies year to year, according to the district’s response to the tort claim.
“FIRST Robotics Competition is not a program where youth build a robot exclusively on their own to compete against another robot built exclusively by youth,” the organization’s senior director wrote in 2024. “It is a program where youth work both with each other and with adult mentors who help them learn new skills and grow as individuals.”
In a statement, Weinberg said students lead the design, build and competition work on the robotics team. Staff and students interviewed in the district’s 2024 report also said that the Jackson robotics team follows FIRST Robotics guidelines when it comes to mentor involvement.
“Mentors provide guidance and ensure safety, which is standard practice in high school robotics programs across the country,” Weinberg wrote. “This information has been corroborated by mentors and national FIRST robotics staff.”
When asked about the district’s findings in 2024, James Lee said the fact the district turned down his offer to pay for an investigation meant the district was trying to control its results.
“Nobody turns down a free investigation that would save the taxpayers money if they genuinely believed an independent investigator would find nothing,” he wrote in an email Monday. “The board is well aware our allegations are true and rather than risk the truth coming out, is hoping to control the investigation. That is the only logical reason to turn down a free investigation.”
Weinberg reiterated that the 2024 investigation, which she called “formal” and “policy-driven,” concluded there was no evidence of discrimination, retaliation, violations of protected speech or defamation toward the student. She also said the investigation found the family was upset after the student wasn’t selected for the driver role, and their subsequent actions and comments undermined the robotics team.
“The family refused to participate in the investigation, so the information yielded by students, coaches, volunteers, and national FIRST robotics staff must be taken at face value,” Weinberg wrote.
That situation is also not the first time the Lees have alleged government wrongdoing. In 2015, James Lee, who had worked as a financial analyst for Snohomish County, alleged he was forced to boost car stipends for elected officials at the county. A third-party investigator hired by the county later found there was no improper government action.
‘A personal vendetta’
Laurence is a former prosecutor who serves on the board of a Seattle nonprofit. She’s also the daughter of former Sen. Henry M. Jackson, the namesake of Jackson High School who represented Washington in Congress for over 40 years.
In May, the school board appointed her to the seat after Caroline Mason, who had served on the board for more than a decade, resigned in March. Laurence is up for reelection this November.
The mailer campaign has been denounced by incumbent school board members and other candidates for the board seats as well.
Laurence has only been on the board for less than four months — she was appointed years after the Lees’ initial complaints — and has never communicated with the family, she said.
“I’m a volunteer here, just trying to do good work to help students in our community,” Laurence said. “Unfortunately, there are individuals who over-politicize a situation over a personal vendetta.”
A website paid for by the Lee family, known as Laurence Let Us Down, shows an image of a dilapidated playground next to a photo of Laurence. It says Laurence failed to act “when reports surfaced about school volunteers creating a harmful environment for students.”
“When student safety was at risk, Anna Marie Laurence did nothing,” it reads.
Roman Rewolinski, another member of the school board, said his first reactions to the campaign were confusion and shock.
“It doesn’t really say anything specific,” Rewolinski said. “It’s just the image of the run-down, almost fallout version of a playground, all blasted-out weird images. And the claims are just very vague, they’re confusing.”
At the bottom of the flyers and the website, a message encourages voters to support Tom Clarke, Laurence’s opponent in the election.
Clarke had no involvement with the creation of the campaign and was not informed of its content before it was released. He’s publicly distanced himself from it, calling the flyers “misleading,” “vitriolic,” “dirty,” and “excessive for a school board campaign,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
“I felt like they were appropriating my name by using my name on this,” Clarke said. “Even though it says who it’s paid for and it has the correct disclaimers, by putting my name on there, I felt like they were hijacking the message of my campaign and turning it into this negative thing. So I was really pissed off.”
Clarke first met with the Lee family in July, he said. They had reached out to him through a representative at their company, Fully Loaded Electronics, that sells specialized video game consoles used in places like waiting rooms, hospitals, hotels and correctional facilities.
At a meeting, the Lees raised their concerns with the robotics team and offered to support Clarke’s campaign, he said. Clarke said he empathized with their situation.
“If their allegations are true, and their child was punished for doing the right thing, I think that’s very sad and the district does need to look into it,” he said.
After communicating with the family back and forth for about a month, Clarke said he contacted the Lees via email asking them to stop offering support due to ethical concerns. Because the family had told him so much about their situation, he felt he didn’t want an implication for the Lees to expect preferential treatment from him if he was elected. He also said, if elected, he would recuse himself from matters involving the Lees.
Clarke never heard back after sending that email, he said. A few weeks later, the mailers started showing up.
James Lee said he decided to support Clarke because he met with the family to hear their concerns.
“We think the biggest step in better government is electing officials that care enough to want to learn more,” Lee wrote Monday. “Ms. Laurence never responded to many requests to meet and hear about the corruption we had witnessed.”
Although Clarke said he disagrees with the messaging in the campaign materials, he maintained the political action committee’s speech was protected under the First Amendment. He also said people who are worried about the mailers should focus on more important challenges facing the district.
“There’s real issues out there that people don’t take this much umbrage with,” he said. “I wish those people would stop being so full of (expletive) and actually start paying attention to the issues that matter in this school district and in this city and in this county, instead of clutching their pearls.”
Clarke also sent a cease and desist letter to the Lee family, asking them to stop using his name on the flyers.
“I don’t want to be a part of this tit for tat between two millionaires and another millionaire when I’m running to represent the working class families in our school district,” Clarke said.
‘It’s right here in Everett’
The Lee family still maintains that adults build the robots, the team silences critics and that the public funds going toward the program benefit one mentor’s private company. In a letter to a third-party investigator shared with The Herald, Robin Lee said the coaches removing them from the team left them “devastated.”
This year, the family asked to meet with the members of the school board to discuss their concerns. In emails to district officials, they’ve urged the banning of multiple mentors and the public rejection of the robotics team’s 2025 world championship title, the first it has ever won.
District policy states complaints regarding staff members need to go through higher-ranking staff for investigation, not board members. That’s because the school board governs through policy, Weinberg wrote in an email.
“It is the responsibility of staff to administer related procedures, including conducting investigations when needed,” she wrote.
People are allowed, however, to make remarks to the board via public comment at regular meetings to inform board members of issues in the district. Rewolinski and another board member, Jen Hirman, both said the Lee family has never made public comment.
“We encourage the public comment because that means we’re all hearing the same information at the same time,” Hirman said in an interview Wednesday. “… That is the best way for all of us to hear information at once, so you can’t have misinterpreted information.”
The Lee’s complaints were redirected to district staff. Staff offered to meet with the family, emails shared with The Herald show, but the family declined. James Lee said it was because staff is employed by the school board and “their job is dependent on agreeing with the board.”
“The administrative staff’s job is to pretend to be interested in the truth and then later write up a report that confirms what the board wants to hear,” Lee wrote.
The Lee family said they formed the political action committees as a way to spread awareness of what they see as a corrupt system set up to benefit one man’s business.
“The board allows adults to use tax payer money to build the robot on the Jackson High School robotics team. What’s next? This is no different than adult coaches putting on football pads and pretending to be a high school linebacker,” James Lee wrote in an email to The Herald. “It’s common sense that this isn’t how voters want their tax money spent. Our goal is for voters to know that the board is aware of this practice and is not doing anything to stop it.”
The district allocates about $63,000 annually toward each of its high schools for robotics programs, Weinberg said.
After complaints were redirected to district staff, the district opened a new third-party investigation into the family’s allegations in August.
When using a third-party investigator, the district makes a request to do so through the Washington Schools Risk Management Pool, a form of financial protection similar to insurance for losses like legal costs and property damage. The management pool contacts an attorney, who then selects an independent investigator. The cost of the investigation is covered by the district’s coverage agreement with the management pool, Weinberg wrote.
The district cannot comment on open investigations, Weinberg wrote. Board members also cannot comment on the investigation and are barred from meeting with the Lee family while it is ongoing, board president Traci Mitchell wrote in an email shared with The Herald.
The family declined to participate in the current investigation, as doing so would “give it a veneer of legitimacy which it does not deserve,” Shelly Lee wrote in an email shared with The Daily Herald. In a letter to the investigator, Lee wrote that the third-party investigator would be “financially incentivized to give school districts the outcome they want so they will bring more business to your doorstep.”
It’s unclear when the investigation will be complete.
The Lee family has contributed $489,000 to its five political action committees as of Thursday, state disclosure filings show. The Position 3 committee, focusing on the seat held by Laurence, has $145,000 in the bank.
Since the mailer campaign started, school board members raised concerns over the potential impacts the money the Lees plan to inject in upcoming elections. Right now, only one board member has been targeted, but others are preparing for similar campaigns.
Some board members lamented the use of such a vast amount of money on a school board election.
“I look at that sum of money and I think, boy, they could do so much good in the world, and they pick this,” Rewolinski said. “It does not compute for me.”
Current board members also said the spending served as a distraction from focusing on issues affecting students across the district.
Laurence, who has borne the brunt of the attacks so far, sees spending like this as a threat to local democracy.
“It’s unfortunate that this is happening in America today, where you see such an abuse of money and politics,” Laurence said. “Now it’s not just out there in America somewhere, it’s right here in Everett, it’s right here in our community. And it’s happening at the level of a school board.”
Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.
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