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​In this era of mass incarceration, there is a school-to-prison-pipeline system that is more invested in locking up youth than unlocking their minds. That system uses harsh discipline policies that push Black students out of schools at disproportionate rates; denies students the right to learn about their own cultures and whitewashes the curriculum to exclude many of the struggles and contributions of Black people and other people of color; and is pushing out Black teachers from the schools in cities around the country. With this analysis, educators in the BLM at School movement developed these demands for the movement:

End Zero Tolerance. Focus our Schools on Restorative Justice.
The use of zero tolerance in public schools stops now. The over-policing, out of control suspensions, and expulsions must be brought to an immediate end. To rebuild our structures, we will focus our resources on restorative justice-the organic appointment of community leaders; mediation and processing; and equitable perspectives on rehabilitation. Ending zero tolerance and focusing our schools around restorative justice will honor an autonomous voice and vision for students, staff and faculty.

​ Nine U.S. cities demonstrate a rapid decline in the number of Black Teachers: Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, DC. This leaves a mighty burden on the Black Teachers and Service Providers who are left behind and viewed as "disciplinarians." Racist policies in schools and biased skills exams eliminate Black and Brown teaching candidates. We must increase teacher retention and opportunities for teachers of color.A classroom is incomplete if there is only one history taught to its students. The exclusion of Black History and Ethnic studies curriculum ends now. Our students of color deserve to feel empowered in the classroom, by seeing themselves in the curriculum and reading materials. Black History and Ethnic Studies must be included in K-12 classrooms. To effectively do this, all teachers are mandated to participate in university and certification programs before blindly infusing Black history or Ethnic Studies into their curriculum. This will ensure that these changes occur with informed tools and dedication. Black Teacher Pushout Ends Now! Hire and Retain Black Teachers in our Schools.

​The elimination of Black teachers is an aggressive push towards homogenizing education in America, creating the School to Prison Pipeline, and honoring the pervasive system of racism from which our country gains its roots. Studies show that students excel academically when they are taught from someone in their own racial group. This message of inequity negatively impacts our student's aptitude for learning and limits the scopes of their dreams. Our Black Teachers need our support and deserve to no longer be abandoned.

​
​ Black History/Ethnic Studies Mandated K-12
Fund Counselors Not Cops
Our newest demand is simple: children need counselors not cops. Schools today spend an enormous amount of their financial resources hiring school resource officers and local police officers. These same schools often lack enough counselors for students to receive the support they need. We have seen videos of horrifying interactions with police officers and Black students in school and each week we hear of Black people having the police called on them for simply existing while Black. The reality is our schools need counselors for children. The amount of racial trauma and adverse childhood experiences Black students experience continues to increase. We demand that schools provide counselors who have manageable caseloads that allow them to provide quality service to all students.

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National coalition organizing for racial justice in education.

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Governor of WA - https://www.governor.wa.gov/

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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee's 2021 inaugural address

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Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of WA - https://www.k12.wa.us/about-ospi/superintendent-chris-reykdal

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A Vision for Dual Language Education in Washington State

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Interim Superintendent Seattle Public Schools - https://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_s_new/interim_superintendent

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Diversity in Seattle Schools with Dr. Brent Jones

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Current School Board District 6 - West Seattle
https://www.seattleschools.org/district/school_board/meet_the_board/district_six

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King County Council member Joe McDermott

"She's a veteran school board member now, with an eye for detail and a take-no-bullshit-from-anyone-including-Timmy's-mother kind of attitude. At a time when SPS is facing many multifaceted crises, someone with Harris's experience is required."
Stranger Endorsements July 17th 2019
- I was elected in 2015 and have served on its Ex. Committee, as Vice President and am finishing my second term as President -

I ran on the themes of Transparency, Trust & Equity before and am again -

We've made progress but not enough and not fast enough - our 53,000 students deserve better in this, one of the richest, fastest growing and most well educated cities in the country.

Our Boards have worked collaboratively and collegially with staff and have hired a new Superintendent, adopted more curricula in four years than in decades past, emphasized and budgeted for more professional development for our teachers and staff than ever before, adopted a responsible Capital Levy's with a focus on high needs schools, the maintenance backlog and will have opened 8 schools on time and on budget. The voters agreed overwhelmingly. This, in the midst of ongoing funding crises.

I was the lead on the historic Memorandum of Understanding with the City of Seattle and co-chair of the Community Engagement Task Force, and Superintendent Search process - all big lifts and all successful.

We've done hard work supporting our Race & Equity policies, training and passed an extraordinary 5 year strategic plan that focuses on underserved students and operations.

I have regular community meetings - often times with lasagna!

Seattle is my home, I live in the Delridge/Highland Park neighborhood with my husband of 33 years, I was a student of SPS, my daughter was a student of SPS and this week will be a UW Graduate. My foster attended Middle College High School - it saved her life - as well as many others.

I am a litigation paralegal working with victims in my day job which also prepares me for analytical thinking and teamwork.

People say this is a thankless job - I vehemently disagree - we get thanks with every student that achieves and or is helped by our capable staff and community - it is an honor and privilege to serve - I want to keep my job and build on our successes and reach higher with my colleagues and team.

I ask for your vote.

I would be grateful for your endorsement.

We can do so much better for our kids and families and communities.

I am running for reelection the SPS Board because I don't believe the status quo is good enough.

Leslie has attended board and committee meetings at the central office for over 10 years. She has attended Directors' community meetings in all parts of the city. She has worked on other Directors' campaigns. She understands the commitment for what is essentially a volunteer position. She has served on PTSAs at Pathfinder K-8 and at Chief Sealth. Leslie's services on numerous boards - local, state and national, make her a great fit and she understands policymaking and fiduciary duty. Her 30 years as a litigation paralegal researching facts, law and reverse engineering systems on behalf of victims and changing worker safety laws will allow her to get to the heart of the issues.

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Re-Elect Leslie Harris for Seattle School Board - "Transparency, Trust, Equity"

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King County Council member Joe McDermott Stranger Endorsements July 17th 2019 - I was elected in 2015 and have served on its Ex.

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Current School Board District 5, which includes Capitol Hill, International District, First Hill, Leschi, Madison, downtown and the Central Area

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2019 City of Seattle Primary Video Voters' Guide: Zachary DeWolf, Candidate, Council District 3

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School Board District 3, which includes NE Seattle.
https://www.seattleschools.org/district/school_board/meet_the_board/district_three

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School Board District 1 - northernmost part of Seattle, including Northgate, North Beach, and Olympic Hills. https://www.seattleschools.org/district/school_board/meet_the_board/district_one

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Liza Rankin, candidate for Seattle School District 1, Director District 1

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School Board District 7 which includes Southeast Seattle - https://www.seattleschools.org/district/school_board/meet_the_board/district_seven

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The only person with K-12 teaching experience on the current Seattle Public Schools Board of Directors represents District 7, which covers the South End - and he is currently teaching virtually during a pandemic. Each weekday at 3 p.m., after Brandon Hersey says goodbye to the 21 members of his online second grade class at Rainier View Elementary School in Federal Way, he pivots and puts on another hat. Then, until about 10 p.m. each day, Brandon Hersey reaches out to his constituents in District 7 and does the never-ending work of a school board director. Even though that job is unpaid, Hersey does not take it lightly.

"My primary concern, even though I am a district-wide, citywide elected official," Hersey told the Emerald in an interview, "is how am I making this system better for the kids down this way? You know what I'm saying?"

Hersey, a resident of Rainier Beach, says he's not just passing through or on his way up a career ladder. He's seen a lot of well-meaning people contribute to the status quo rather than achieving the change they seek by doing just that. "If you're just on an 'upward trajectory,' going from being a teacher to a superintendent," Hersey says, "every move that you make is moving you farther and farther away from the students who are actually impacted by your decisions."

Although it's not uncommon for elected officials to mask their ambition with platitudes about how grounded they are, Hersey's current day-to-day life as well as his past career decisions provide the receipts for his efforts to connect people and policy.

Despite struggling with dyslexia as a child and becoming an "at risk" teenager, Hersey found strong, stabilizing mentors and ended up graduating with distinction from the University of Southern Mississippi Honors College, where he was the school's first African American Truman Scholar. A Truman-Albright Fellowship brought him into the Obama Administration as a policy analyst working on children and family issues. It was during this time, Hersey says, that he learned how decision-making worked in government, and he grew disillusioned with the process - even during a presidency marked by hope for racial justice.

"I was incredibly frustrated that the vast majority of people who were making policy for my community - at a national level - had never worked directly with communities [like mine]," he said. "I was sitting around a table with a bunch of folks who had gone to Harvard or Yale for both of their degrees and had never spent time in the South or in marginalized communities. We [were] developing policy that wholeheartedly affected how and why specific communities were being served. And I thought that there was a major disconnect there."

That community he referred to is Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where Hersey grew up in a family full of teachers. His grandmother and great aunt taught preschool, and Hersey's sister, formerly a teacher, is now the vice principal of the high school that she and Hersey went to - the same school where his mother once taught AP government. Before she passed away, when Hersey was 12, his mother gave him some stark advice: "If you become anything, don't become a teacher." She warned him, he says, of both the "workload" and the "minuscule pay." Yet, weighing these warnings against the fact that teaching was, Hersey says, "Just in my bones and in my blood," Hersey decided to get off the career ladder and return to his roots.

Working at Rainier View Elementary School in Federal Way, it didn't take long for the ex-policy analyst to become acutely aware of the systemic nature of the problems facing his students. He quickly noticed how limited his influence was on the twenty or so students in front of him. "I saw kids coming in and coming out due to rapid gentrification and a lack of affordable housing," he observed. "I would build a relationship with a kid for two or three months, and they would be off to another school in our district or maybe even to a different state, depending on what the housing policies were at the apartment complex where they lived. Or I would begin to build a really strong relationship with a kid in second grade, and then they would get passed on to a teacher who didn't have the same cultural competencies as I did. And all that work that we put into building a real sense of self and belonging - especially in kids of color and especially in Black kids - would effectively be undone. And so what that said to me was, I need to give everything that I have in my classroom. But I also need to be seeking other opportunities where I can influence policy to make sure that kids have somebody who's looking out for them not only in the classroom but also in the boardroom."

Hersey initially got involved in his union, becoming the Federal Way Education Association Political Action Committee (WEA-PAC) chair. When longtime District 7 Board Director Betty Patu - the Board's only ex-educator - suddenly resigned in 2019, Hersey accepted an appointment to the position.

Though it's hard to imagine a more difficult time to be a school board director, Hersey is holding to his principles and those involve engaging his constituents in the South End. "We are out here trying. I'm not saying that I'm going to be in a place where I have the complete answer for every situation. I very rarely do, but you know who does: community. And that is how I will continue to show up to this work. As long as folks continue to engage with me, I am willing to go as hard as I possibly can for them and their children, because that's the only way we are going to dismantle these systems that do so much physical and intellectual harm."

Hersey has been part of some early successes during his first year and a half as a Board director, much of which have involved reaching out for community input. After identifying a part of the SPS budget that was "discretionary," members of the Board engaged a broad group of students, parents, and community-centered groups to be a part of a participatory budgeting process for these funds. When it became clear that the community's top priority was restorative justice, the Board allocated funds for the district to hire a Restorative Justice Manager. Additionally, when Rainier Beach High School students Angelina Riley and Kidist Habte started a petition to remove School Resource Officers (SROs) and School Emphasis Officers (SEOs) from SPS, the Board initially proposed a one year moratorium. But after engaging with student and community groups, the Board decided to suspend the district's relationship with the Seattle Police Department indefinitely.

Yet while praising fellow Board members for these examples of community responsiveness, Hersey also acknowledges how thankless a job being a school board director can be. "There's a legacy of muck that gets thrown around because everybody loves to hate Seattle Public Schools ... But the only thing people are more mad at than Seattle Public Schools is change within Seattle Public Schools. It puts us in a unique position where we get slammed for upholding the status quo, but then we also get slammed for not doing so."

A recent example of an especially painful change within SPS is the redistricting that precedes the long overdue 2023 renovation of Seattle's most crowded middle school, Asa Mercer, which serves 87% students of color. Students graduating from Hawthorne and Kimball Elementary Schools - who would normally go to Mercer Middle School - will attend Washington Middle School and Aki Kurose Middle School starting in September 2021 instead, as a result of redrawn middle school attendance boundaries.

Though this has come to a head during a pandemic, and parents have complained about insufficient notification of this change from the district, Mercer's enrollment began to exceed its physical capacity more than a decade ago. Instead of initiating redistricting, past school boards decided to continue adding portable classrooms as enrollment grew. In part because Mercer has been a notably diverse, award-winning school, it has continued to draw families into its attendance boundaries - even as almost one third of its students learned in portable classrooms. The temporary location for Mercer's program during construction - Van Asselt - falls short of being able to house Mercer's roughly 1,200 enrolled students, and so something finally had to give.

After hearing the contentious testimonies of 16 Kimball and Hawthorne parents at a Board meeting on January 27, the Board voted unanimously to adopt the boundary changes. Hersey, who had spent 25-30 hours fielding concerns during the week leading up to the meeting, was very familiar with parents' concerns about the plan.

In fact, he'd already readied a Recommended Motion - an amendment to the Board vote consisting of 12 measures designed to mitigate the harm done by the move. Those measures included guaranteeing students wouldn't be separated from their siblings, ensuring that Kimball students would receive yellow bus service to Washington for at least two years, and establishing regular family check-ins starting in October "to ensure the transition goes smoothly" and to encourage "broader family engagement in future decision-making processes to avoid so much confusion and harm going forward." Hersey's amendment passed, and he says that delaying redistricting for Mercer any further was never an option. But even though he did his best to proactively address the community's concerns - even using his lunchtimes, fielding late-night calls, and taking calls before school started in the morning - Hersey says he still received hate mail.

While Hersey knows that part of his job as board director for SPS is to make decisions on behalf of a district that has not earned community trust and that those decisions can't possibly produce an ideal outcome for everyone, he seeks to remain accountable. "As much as people want to engage, I'm here, willing, and ready. What I would ask is that folks come along with me and continue to hold me accountable."

Hersey says that when he's faced with difficult decisions, he approaches it this way: "I distill it down. Is this decision going to perpetuate racial injustice, or is it going to take a step toward eliminating racial injustice?" Since he's still a classroom teacher, Hersey's 21 students are on his mind when he's in the boardroom, to guide him, to make sure he's avoiding "equity detours," and to keep him focused on getting their needs met.

And, they inspire him:

"I think that we have to operate with the same courage that our Black and Brown babies have every day walking into a building where they know they're going to be oppressed, where they know somebody who's gonna say something sideways to them, where they know - even if they can't articulate it - harm is being done to them in a significant way. If our kids can have the courage to stomach that, and survive that, and to thrive through that, and to matriculate out of that ... then we as Board directors have to have the same courage and political will to meet their demands and dismantle that system in order to develop one where all students can feel safe, loved, and receive a world class education."
Editors' Note: This article was updated after publication to address an error in the spelling of of Kidist Habte's first name, which originally appeared here as "Kidest." We apologize for the error. We also changed Aki Kurose "K-8" to Aki Kurose Middle School.
worked as an educator and curriculum developer in Brooklyn, NY; Douala, Cameroon; Busan, South Korea; Quito, Ecuador; and Seattle, WA before settling in Dunlap (just north of Rainier Beach). He writes about education for the South Seattle Emerald . You can contact him through
Featured Image: Brandon Hersey, a teacher at Rainier View Elementary School in Federal Way, is the South End's Director on the Seattle Public Schools Board. (Photo: Scott Faris)
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Brandon Hersey: The South End's Director on the Seattle Public Schools Board

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The only person with K-12 teaching experience on the current Seattle Public Schools Board of Directors represents District 7, which covers the South End - and he is currently teaching virtually during a pandemic.

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School Board District 5
District V, which includes Capitol Hill, International District, First Hill, Leschi, Madison, downtown and the Central Area

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My name is Michelle Sarju and I am running for Seattle School Board, District 5 because I believe that every child - and I mean every child - should have access to a high quality public school education.

Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, I was raised in a large extended family of people who risked their lives by speaking up for what was right. Surrounded by social workers, nurses, law enforcement officers, teachers, and relatives who proudly served in the Armed Forces, my family instilled in me a love of learning and the spirit of public service. Finishing homework and practicing piano was a requirement before I could go out and play.

I attended public schools from middle school through graduate school at the University of Washington. Only twice did I see a teacher who looked like me in my entire K-12 education. I experienced racism and discrimination in the classroom, but thanks to my own resilience, I persisted. Our students shouldn't have to operate in resiliency mode just to succeed in our public schools. We must do better for our kids.

My experiences in public schooling informed my future work as a Midwife, Social Worker, Maternal-Child Health professional, PTA member, and public servant. I will continue to work hard to identify the challenges facing Seattle Public Schools and I will be a collaborator with others to come up with effective and enduring solutions.

For 34 years I've called the Central District home, and as a Seattle Public Schools mom I have experienced both the promise and the failure of our public schools. As a parent I was constantly put in the position of advocating for basic fair treatment, when my child faced disparate punishment compared to their white peers. Education is a birthright, and every child deserves a high quality public school education that supports and validates their quest to learn.

Far too often, demographics like race, zip code, socio-economic status, different abilities, first language, or the location of a child's school determine the quality of education a student receives. This inequity is unacceptable.

This past year has pushed our students and their families into survival mode, as they have had to navigate the virtual classroom and face the physical, emotional, and mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When it comes time to re-enter our schools, our kids will need a champion who will put their needs first. We must consider what will be needed to help students successfully transition back to the classroom:

When we say that we believe that children are our future, we must follow that with action. We must align our policies and resources with the notion that every child should have an equal chance to succeed inside our public schools.

As your School Board Director I will collaborate with parents, students, my fellow school board directors, and district administrators to ensure that all our Seattle Public School students from kindergarten to 12th grade receive the kind of education they need to be successful in school and life.

Our children really are our future, and they deserve a high-quality public school education!

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Meet Michelle - Michelle Sarju for Seattle School Board

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My name is Michelle Sarju and I am running for Seattle School Board, District 5 because I believe that every child - and I mean every child - should have access to a high quality public school education.