Election Day may be over, but there’s still more voting to come this year in one corner of DC. Four candidates vying to become the Ward 4 representative on the DC State Board of Education squared off at a recent forum on how they would tackle pressing education issues ahead of next month’s special election for the seat.
The candidates — Rhonda Henderson, Elani Lawrence, Frazier O’Leary and Ryan Tauriainen — faced questions from moderator and freelance journalist Rachel Cohen and audience members during a debate hosted by the Ward 4 Education Alliance on Nov. 8 at Powell Elementary in Petworth. Another candidates forum, this one hosted by the Ward 4 Democrats, is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 27, at 7 p.m. at The Kingsbury Center.
Last week’s event came just days after DC voters chose State Board of Education (SBOE) representatives for wards 1, 3, 5 and 6. A special election on Dec. 4 will decide who fills the vacant Ward 4 seat left by the July 31 resignation of Lannette Woodruff.
All four candidates have extensive teaching backgrounds in the District.
Henderson, who hails from DC and attended Bunker Hill Elementary School and Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, recently joined the finance team for EdOps, which provides business management services to charter schools. She worked at DC Prep’s Anacostia Elementary Campus and previously taught history to high school students.
At the forum, she acknowledged her endorsement from Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-charter political action committee at the forum in response to an audience question. Henderson also has support from Ward 4 DC Council member Brandon Todd, who encouraged his followers on Twitter to vote for her and on Tuesday morning was part of a crowd waving her signs at Georgia Avenue and Kennedy Street NW.
A DC native, Lawrence attended Wilson High School in Tenleytown and then worked as a teacher for 15 years in New York and DC, including the Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School. She volunteered with the Peace Corps, speaks fluent Spanish and lives in Brightwood with her husband and two sons, who attend DC public charter schools, according to the bio on her campaign website.
O’Leary has taught students for more than 40 years, including at Cardozo High School, Garnet-Patterson Junior High School and the University of the District of Columbia. He recently retired from Cardozo, where he taught Advanced Placement English. O’Leary has the endorsement of the Washington Teachers’ Union, which hailed his “extensive practical experience and knowledge of policy”; the Jews United for Justice Campaign Fund announced its endorsement of O’Leary this week.
Tauriainen is the director of early childhood education at Friendship Public Charter School, previously worked at Teach for America in Hawaii and has taught in all four quadrants of DC. The Washington Post named him “Principal of the Year” in 2016 when he was head of AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School’s Columbia Heights campus.
Cohen asked the candidates for one policy they would work to implement in order to address equity issues.
Lawrence said she would ensure that all schools have sufficient access to technology, stressing the importance of preparing students for college. “When we don’t have adequate technology and support for technology in our schools, it makes it very challenging,” especially for the administration of computer-based Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams, she said. PARCC tests in math and English language arts are held each spring for students in grades three through eight, and again when they’re in high school.
Tauriainen said he would address inequitable gaps in parental fundraising among schools, which he said stems from different socio-economic makeups of neighborhoods, by putting caps on the fundraising amounts raised by parent groups at DC public schools.
Henderson gave three policy examples: revising attendance policies, creating flexible pathways to graduation and increasing the city’s education budget. She said the SBOE should recognize that some students come from dysfunctional environments that can make it difficult to get to class every day but are following along with assignments. “Their life circumstances may be drawing them away from school,” Henderson said.
O’Leary said the SBOE should take a proactive role in fixing inequality in schools, but did not focus on a specific solution he would push. When Cohen pressed him for a policy, he offered an example about Cardozo Education Campus at one time lacking enough computers for PARCC testing.
O’Leary later said that one of the biggest problems is the lack of a “singular vehicle” that determines where students end up going to school. “Our children shouldn’t be forced to be part of a lottery,” he said.
The first audience member to pose a question asked the candidates how they would tackle teacher turnover and its root causes.
“Teachers aren’t allowed to teach,” O’Leary said, saying an excessive focus on test-taking creates undue stress.
Henderson said the next permanent DC Public Schools chancellor, yet to be named after the previous chancellor resigned amid scandal, will help set the tone for how teachers are treated. “Our chancellor takes a leading role in saying, ‘I love our teachers,’ and when they say it over and over and over again, that creates an environment that trickles down to our school leaders. Then we will begin to see a shift,” Henderson said. She added that she would push for transparency about data on teacher turnover.
For Lawrence, keeping teachers requires the city to provide schools with more resources and offer more training and professional development. He also encouraged an emphasis on “culturally responsive classrooms” where teachers get to know the students they serve.
Tauriainen said he would look into replacing the PARCC exams with an assessment system that would not place as much stress on teachers. “We have to allow our teachers to be creative and trust them to teach to get those test scores we know are so important because of the government, but we can do it without being boring.”
The candidates shared similar responses to several questions. In response to an audience member who asked about student safety at DC schools, all four said teachers should not carry guns. They also expressed a commitment to solving principal attrition, with Henderson backing increased tenure protections and Tauriainen calling for the school system to provide more resources to principals by scaling back on six-figure salaries “created at the top each year that are not necessarily supporting our teachers or our principals.”
This post has been updated to include the Jews United for Justice Campaign Fund’s newly announced endorsement.
Why couldn’t they hold this inevitably low-turnout election on the same day as the rest of the city’s elections? The resignation was more than three months before Election Day. Now the city will have to pay for another election, and the seat will probably be decided by a couple hundred voters.
I am appalled that a mailing for Rhonda Henderson quotes Brandon Todd as saying,”she understands the urgency to provide a high quality education for every children to succeed ..” Really? every children? when you are running for School Board? This careless proofreading does not make me confident in her abilities as a teacher much less a member of the school board.