Monday, May 13, 2019

I'm in the Race for School Board District 3




I'm still in the process of the getting everything setup. If you're interested in volunteering to help please email me via the contact button.   I will have an official website separate from this blog but for I'm not anticipating there will be a big impact on this site other than me putting it on the backburner a bit.

Our dinner conversation last night was around slogans and the kids feeding me sample questions on where I stand.  The idea we came up with was  "Consistency, Openness, Excellence".   Whether I win or lose I'm looking forward to this experiment in civic democracy.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...


That's wonderful news! Thank you for running. You can count on us to help.

-nh

Greg Linden said...

Thanks for running! School Board is a hard (and sadly unpaid) job, but an important one. We very much need people there who are dedicated to it and to the accountability role it is supposed to serve. Thanks for being willing to step up for it.

Linh-Co said...

Great news for Seattle Schools. We're right with you!!! Thanks for running.

Robert said...

Great news!

Anonymous said...

The school board should be full time. Use the money from the Ed Directors to make the school board full time and cost neutral.

Mr. Theo Moriarty

Michael Rice said...

Ben - I will be very happy to vote for you.

Anonymous said...

You have my vote as well! Good luck.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Theo. I agree but I would do it on an hourly basis. DeWolf shouldn't be paid nearly as much as Harris or Mack for instance.

Anonymous said...

Glad you're running! Any thoughts on promoting the ideas from Project Bright Idea? In short, this was a pilot program run in North Carolina where teachers were instructed on gifted teaching techniques and then applied these in their classrooms without any filtering in the student population. Results showed impressive learning gains from students simply by treating them as gifted, even though they hadn't previously been identified as such. I'd love to see similar methods implemented more broadly in SPS, which might help better serve students previously in the Spectrum program (those on the cusp of HCC).

-BrightIdea

Benjamin Leis said...

Thanks for all the notes so far. I'm particularly interested in getting volunteers lined up. So if you're up for that please email benfortheboard@gmail.com and I can start building up a list of folks.

Re: the last mail no I'm not familiar with it so I'll have to take a look. But in general I'm running to represent the whole NE and ultimately all the students in the district. So I'm going to be talking a lot about wider issues than I restrict myself to while running this blog. I deeply believe in the promise of the district and the chance to really improve things across multiple dimensions for all the students. The board has a particularly key role to play in this process through the policies and oversight it exercises.

Thanks again
Ben