Maren Norton, an attorney with Stoel Rives LLP, faces Dan Mann, incumbent and owner of the tanning salon business Tropical Tan, in the Nov. 6 general election for Shoreline School Board.
Norton said that a year ago, she started going to board meetings and became concerned at what she heard.
“I want to be a different voice, add a different perspective,” she said.
Mann said he wanted to finish the job he’d begun.
“It’s been tough, but we will have a balanced budget by the end of the year,” Mann said.
Of the district’s budget, Mann said officials are mandated to build a reserve and not just break even.
“We have to balance that with maintaining class sizes,” he said. “We still have the lowest trigger points than other districts — the overloads of the beginning of the year have been taken care of.”
Norton said that because the district still has more to cut to balance the budget, it should look at suggestions made by the DACPO committee, the advisory group that recommended closing schools last year.
The committee came up with changes like moving to a K-8 model, among other things.
“We need to look at those cuts now so we don’t (have to take it) from teachers and classrooms,” Norton said.
Keeping cuts out of the classroom should be a goal, she said.
Mann and board members Mike Jacobs and Jim Leigh have faced criticism for overseeing former superintendent Jim Welsh’s mismanagement.
“The buck stops with the board,” said Norton, who said the current board is partially at fault for what happened. “The board needs to be asking questions a lot earlier than the current board started asking questions.”
Mann said he started asking questions at his first meeting, despite being a junior board member.
“You’re one member on a board of five,” he said. There was a “systemic unwillingness” with that board and with previous boards to look critically at the administration, he said. The current board did ask Welsh to leave and hired financial consultants to sort out the budget after problems became apparent, Mann said.
Things are not over for the district, Mann said.
“We need to reach out to the teachers, have regular communication between the teachers and the board,” he said. “They don’t feel respected.”
He said the district could have communicated much better about the labor and classroom overload situations of August and September. He said the overload issue was a “misunderstanding” between teachers and district officials. He said the district had fewer split classes than last year and the district had not increased class sizes, and that teachers still got a cost of living adjustment (COLA) from the state.
Norton said there’s still a lot of concern in the community and work needs to be done to rebuild trust.
For example, staff members were asked to absorb their own cost of living increase the same day administrators approved a COLA for themselves, she said. When growing up, there was a time when the family was supported by a SESPA member, and she knows what an impact a COLA makes, she said.
“It didn’t sit well, and it shouldn’t sit well with people,” she said. “Yes, we had to find the money but we also had to think creatively. It wasn’t handled right.”
There are many other issues to be dealt with in the future, like the land bank, she said.
“We’ve taken a step in the right direction with the balanced budget,” she said.
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