Seattle School Board Race Updates
District 6
Last night, the King County Labor Council voted to rescind their dual endorsement for Marty McLaren and Leslie Harris to a sole endorsement for Harris. It appears that Jonathan Knapp played a hand in getting the dual endorsement back in May but McLaren's apparent lack of support for teachers during the strike changed minds.
As well, Teamsters Joint Council 28 recently endorsed Harris.
District #3
Jill Geary received a unanimous sole endorsement from the 11th district. Six out of seven legislative districts have given her their sole endorsement and the 7th gave her a dual endorsement.
District #1
Some of you may recall that in the last school board election, that one candidate made claims that seemed to me to be embellished. I did some investigating and found that yes, she had embellished claims she made at forums.
This has happened again in District #1.
At the Hale High candidate forum last week, Michael Christophersen said that he was working with someone at UW on an NIH grant that would help provide professional development for teachers working with Special Education students. He that it was for $1.5M and he was told that if he didn't get elected, the grant would go away.
I did contact UW Communications and Media and they sent me onto the College of Education. It turns out the person he was working with is Dr. Virginia Berninger. She is well-known in her field of Educational Psychology.
Here's what she had to say in an e-mail to my query on working with Christophersen:
There appears to be a major misunderstanding. One of the aims of the funded grant (and I have no idea where $1.5 million came from because it is not accurate) is professional development of educators to translate research into educational practice. To achieve this aim, I have been working with Mark Ellison Taylor at UW Extension toward developing on line professional
development courses for continuing education credits. The goal is to offer these courses for the first time sometime during winter 2016. But these are open to any educators in the country and are not specific to the Seattle Public Schools.
Of course, schools in Seattle could participate if they were interested by contacting Mark Ellison-Taylor but in no way is this professional development related to the school board election.
I would like to make the facts clear.
1. It is absolutely not true that the grant will not be given if Mr. Christophersen is not elected. In fact, I have made it clear to Mr. Christophersen that I as a public employee cannot get involved Seattle Schools Community Forum: Seattle School Board Race Updates: