Seattle City Council District 3 primary candidate Zachary DeWolf will serve as the Seattle School Board president after being selected this week by his counterparts.
The vote at the board’s Wednesday night session makes DeWolf an historic choice to lead the body charged with setting policies for the Seattle Public Schools system.
“I am incredibly grateful to serve as President of the Board; as the first queer, first Native and youngest President elected to this role, I deeply understand the awesome responsibility that has been given to me,” DeWolf said in a statement to CHS.
“Our Board and our District are committed to following through on the spirit and the promises of our current Strategic Plan by centering our students furthest from educational justice—I look forward to a critical year of progress that will have positive impacts today and seven generations into the future.”
CHS talked with DeWolf in September after his unsuccessful primary bid to challenge Kshama Sawant in the D3 race for the city council. The former Capitol Hill Community Council head has said his priorities are addressing issues of equity including Student homelessness and ethnic studies.
Leading the board, DeWolf will be faced with an immediate challenge. CHS reported on opposition forming to the board’s efforts to address racial inequity in the Seattle Public Schools gifted student program. The group is opposing critics of the program and Superintendent Denise Juneau who are championing a first step to reconcile racial disparity for advanced learning — an experiment eliminating the program at the Central District’s Washington Middle School. A first push at the change was rejected by the school board last month.
Seattle School Board members serve for four years and receive an annual stipend of up to $4,800.
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Expertise, qualifications and commitment have no place in today’s America, apparently. Abandon hope, all ye who enter Seattle with children needing education.
The group, EASEL, that formed is categorically not against change in th Advanced Learning program. What they are against is the Superintendent’s efforts to fundamentally dismantle it without resources, professional development and a piloting of that change.
Is bringing STEM by TAF a method to show you can bring rigor to the classroom without a cohort for AL? That sure wasn’t what the district said at first. And weird that the district – which is majority white for a program like STEM by TAF which is emphatically geared to minority students. The district had other choices with majority minority schools and yet chose Washington Middle School which has had tremendous upheaval the last couple of years include last school year with a disastrous principal placement.