In March 2025, I gave my first public comment to the PLSAS Board of Education.
Though my comment had been spurred by a specific situation within the district at the time, I had hoped to speak to a larger issue I had been witnessing since I began attending meetings.
Up to that point, I had been troubled by much of the dialogue I had heard while board members discussed the district’s financial situation. Attending meetings those first few months was a blur, but at some point I do recall being able to identify certain patterns.
In particular, there were many times when a question would be asked, even though it had already been answered in a previous meeting. This happened so frequently that even I reached a point where I was able to answer the question. Not only that, but there were times when the answers were openly questioned by members at the table, and it was clear that there was a significant lack of trust amongst the board.
So when I gave that first public comment in March, I wanted to be sure that I articulated what I saw as the root cause of the district’s troubles. The full comment is on the district’s YouTube channel if you want to watch it. A few lines from it have stayed with me more than the rest.
I remember listening to the speakers [from the previous meeting] and thinking to myself there is not one thing that I have in common with these folks. For me, in that moment, what I decided or what I was thinking was right, and what they were thinking was wrong.
And as I have had time to reflect, one of the speakers spoke about his concern for his daughter's future and the education that she was receiving. I share those same concerns when it comes to my two children. Well, now we've got something in common.
And maybe that's all there is. Maybe we have vastly different views on what that looks like and what it should look like, but we share that core belief.
[W]e are all the hero of our own story. The unfortunate byproduct of this means that people who express different views or support different causes are viewed as the opposite of us. We cast them as the villains in our story.
This cannot be how we interact with each other in this world. We need to be able to trust, regardless of what a person's beliefs are, trust is a choice. I choose to trust that the school, and the administration, and this board are making decisions in the best interest of our students and educational professionals. I choose to trust that parents have the best of intentions for their children. I believe we all must work together effectively with understanding, compassion, empathy, and mutual respect if we are going to achieve our goals for this district.
We can't demand answers we've already been given. Trust is not the complete absence of doubt. It's entirely fair to dislike an answer, but not liking an answer gives us three choices. Accept it, bring evidence against it, or offer something better. What we don't get to do is ignore it, argue with it empty-handed, or reshape it to fit our narrative.
I wish those were hypotheticals, but over the past year and a half I've watched all three play out again and again.
Asking questions is absolutely (read that again, absolutely) part of the job. My struggle is when those same questions get asked again somewhere else, as if the answer never happened. What should be a simple exchange of information at the board table is somehow ignored and the question shows up a week later in a public post or a different meeting, unchanged and with no acknowledgement that it was answered.
When the repeated question gets pushback, and people ask for specifics (which resource, which classroom, which positions), there's nothing there. The discussion moves away from sharing evidence and shifts towards nothing more than sharing a perspective.
May as well watch two children argue about something by saying “are too” and replying “are not!”
That whole cycle plays out, and then starts all over by asking the same question again. This is where we diverge from questions being a routine part of the job, and find ourselves more in the neighborhood of accusations. First it's the number that is disputed. When that claim doesn't hold up, it's the trend. When the trend isn’t an issue, it's whether the data can be trusted at all.
And when anyone points this out, it gets called healthy disagreement. It’s defended as though they are holding the district accountable.
None of this is disagreement. This is not what accountability looks like.
This is just plain not listening.
Now hold up a moment. Before I’m accused of arguing empty-handed myself, let’s discuss how this plays out.
The district is asked about auxiliary positions (or administrative, or central office, or support staff, or superfluous, or whatever you want to label them) that can be cut. In response, they recap all the cuts made and articulate what the tradeoffs would be to see further cuts in this area. They provide that answer, and the evidence, yet the argument for these cuts continues to be made.
The answer was ignored.
The data was argued without evidence.
The goalposts were moved and the process started all over again.
Eventually, district leaders identified and compared administrative staff with other districts for two weeks between meetings. The effort even included meeting with leaders from a similarly sized district, and an hour of board time to present information on a question that had been endlessly repeated, to attempt to definitively prove that the claims about “administrative bloat” were not accurate.
While I found that conversation and the data presented to be incredibly useful, I can’t help but think of it as a tremendous waste of resources. Not because of the information that was produced, but rather the precious time and resources that could have been used to provide something of actual value to our students and teachers.
For as much as we continue to hear the call to optimize resources, I can’t help but quote Alanis Morissette:
Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?
The district is asked why we’re spending money on furniture and not classrooms, and the whole thing plays out the same way. The answer (because this money is used for community education and early childhood programs) is ignored. The information that was shared to explain why (that state law restricts Fund 4 dollars to those areas) is questioned. Not because of new or contradicting evidence, but because it’s hard to justify spending like that when class sizes are so large.
Finally, all of that is repackaged as an attack on board members who voted to approve the furniture, when classrooms versus furniture was never a choice that existed in the first place.
Again! Imagine what we could be accomplishing if we didn’t have to spend the time answering these questions!
So why do these same questions keep getting asked? Why do these assertions continue to be made?
I wish I could tell you why. Unfortunately, I’m not capable of answering that question.
Heck, it would probably be ignored anyway.
Although, I do have a working theory.
If you're not particularly interested in someone's answer, you're far less likely to engage with them in a meaningful way. So instead of talking with people we might disagree with, we talk with the people we already agree with. We call it an echo chamber, but we rarely stop to think about what it actually does.
Research cited by Dr. Sherif Badran in a recent post on viral content points to a few reasons we share what we share. Sharing lets us express ourselves, connect with others, and gain status. And emotion is what pushes us to hit the button. Did something online make you angry recently? Odds are you engaged with it. You probably told someone about it, too. Then they got angry, and told someone else.
Every time that message gets passed along, it changes a little. Each person reads it through their own identity and adds a bit of themselves before handing it off. A few shares later, it barely resembles where it started.
That's how we end up building totems of people we don't actually know. We stop talking to them and start talking about them, inside our own groups, about how awful "that side" is.
I'm guilty of it too. During my public comment in March 2025, I talked about my experience of sitting in a room full of people and deciding I had nothing in common with any of them. It took one dad talking about his daughter for me to realize I'd built a totem out of everyone in that room. We wanted the same thing for our kids. We just disagreed about what it should look like.
I'd love to tell you I learned that lesson once. I still catch myself doing it.
And this is where it stops being abstract. When enough of us stop trusting the answers, we start questioning whether the district needs what it says it needs. That's how a levy fails. That's how a district ends up in years of cuts that land on students. That’s how a community becomes a place where an entire group of people is demonized because we don’t see the world the same way. All because we’re not listening to each other and we’re too damn interested in proving our view is the right view.
I said it in March 2025 and I’ll say it again today.
This cannot be how we interact with each other in this world.
You see, democracy might be a spectator sport at the federal and state levels, but here at the community level? It’s critical work.
I’m not elected to do whatever the community wants, nor am I elected to be a rubber stamp for the district. I’m elected to be a bridge between the two. It’s my job to listen to district proposals, engage with community feedback, and weigh all of that to make a decision that I believe is going to benefit the greatest number of people in our schools.
As I sit and write this on the penultimate day before the election, it has quickly dawned on me that I sure picked a complicated topic to ride off into the campaign sunset with. A discussion of this magnitude certainly deserves a larger space (and someone who is far more adequately prepared) to do it justice.
This is a conundrum I’ve been wrestling with for a while now. Engaging with each other and working together for the betterment of our community doesn’t just happen. I know we can’t be everywhere at once, and with work, school, family, sports, hobbies, travel, and gosh darn it, maybe a nap if you can find the time, it can be awfully tempting to rely on others to keep things moving.
Tempting as it may be, there’s far too much at stake for us to just passively sit on the sidelines. If we want to move things forward, we’ve got to do it collectively. We have to engage with each other. We have to listen to each other. Most importantly, we have to understand each other.
To that end, I’ll be shifting gears a tiny bit. While the campaign blog may be ending, I’ll be starting something personal in an effort to continue sharing my perspective and, perhaps even more importantly, continue to hear yours.
I’m not entirely sure what that’s going to look like right now, but I’ll probably think of something.
Until then, thank you for everything. I’m still absolutely dumbfounded and honored to have been elected to the PLSAS Board of Education. I still don’t take your trust for granted, and I’m still trying to make sure I earn it every day. I’d be so entirely grateful if you allowed me to continue for a while.
Don’t forget to vote on November 3rd to support our schools and make sure you flip the ballot over!
Take care, folks!