Crowded field of 9 in race for Washington state schools chief

The next state superintendent of public instruction will preside over a system of 295 school districts faced with chronic underfunding and big gaps in achievement among different ethnic groups. He or she will be responsible for distributing billions of dollars in state and federal money, and working with politicians as the Legislature tries to fulfill the state Supreme Court’s order to increase funding for public schooling.

Though the position carries no voting power, the person who holds it does make recommendations to the Legislature.

Current Superintendent Randy Dorn did a lot of that, using his post to sharply criticize lawmakers for taking so long to ramp up school spending.

Dorn announced this year that he would not seek a third term. Nine people are running to take his place — the largest pool of candidates since the 1996.

They include five current educators, a former school nurse and a legislator. They live on both sides of the state, and three are women, a switch from the 2012 primary election, when only men ran. One candidate, Erin Jones — a former teacher, district administrator and assistant superintendent in the state superintendent’s office — would be the first black woman to hold statewide office if elected.

The two who receive the most votes in the primary will advance to the general election in November.

Jones, Robin Fleming (the former school nurse), and Rep. Chris Reykdal, D-Tumwater, are the three top-funded candidates. Fleming has raised about $62,000. Jones has raised $98,000, and Reykdal has raised $146,000.

They’re already familiar with the state superintendent’s office. Fleming currently works in the office, Jones previously worked there, and Reykdal has worked with the office in his role as a legislator.

Three other candidates — teacher and retired engineer Ron Higgins, educator and historian Al Runte and teacher David Spring — have raised between $1,800 and $10,000. All three have previous election experience.

Higgins, who lives in West Richland, came in second in the 2012 primary for the superintendent’s post. Runte ran for Seattle mayor in 2005. Spring, who lives in North Bend, has made several bids for a state House seat in the 5th Legislative District.

The last three candidates — former teacher and school-board member John Blair, teacher KumRoon Maksirisombat and former teacher Grazyna Prouty — haven’t raised any money.

When asked why they’re running, Fleming, Jones and Reykdal talked about their childhoods.

Reykdal grew up in a poor family in Snohomish, and he says he was able to break the cycle of poverty because of public schools. Jones was raised in the Netherlands, where her white, adoptive parents taught at the American School of The Hague. She didn’t realize her race could be a barrier until she came to the United States for college.

“I saw that people who looked like me didn’t get the education I had received,” she said. “I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t go back home. I needed to stay in the United States and be a part of the solution.”

Fleming was raised by a single mother and had an older brother with Down syndrome. She worked as a nurse at Harborview, where she saw inequities and had to discharge homeless people with bags of pills she knew they would never take. She decided to “work upstream” and focus on student health in schools. Education and health are interconnected, she said.

“If we’re not paying attention to the condition of children as they walk in the school door, we will never be able to meet our vision at OSPI,” she said, referring to the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

The three also said they would put a greater focus on equity.

Reykdal would like to see the state superintendent’s office become more of a research center where data on attendance, test scores and discipline are analyzed, including by race and income level.

Fleming has studied how health services in schools can reduce health and educational disparities. By looking at who used those services in Seattle schools, she found that students who tend to seek health services are the same students at the highest academic risk. Her study also found that poverty, followed by race, were the biggest risk factors for academic failure.

Jones has held several state and school-district positions related to equity. At a candidate forum in South Seattle, she recalled her experiences with her three children. One of her sons qualified for the gifted program when he was in elementary school, and the person who gave the entrance test said he must have cheated. In high school, he was the only black student in his Advanced Placement classes.

“When people say we are in this post-racial place, that’s hard for me to swallow, because as a mom, that hasn’t been my experience,” she said. “Race absolutely matters in the system.”

The candidates differ in what they see as the most significant education issues facing the state — and how they would fix them.

While some criticized the Legislature, Reykdal defended his and other lawmakers’ progress.

“It’s pretty easy to be on the outside and take shots,” he said. “It’s much harder to be in the arena and try to come up with bipartisan solutions.”

Most of the candidates said they would take a less adversarial approach to working with the Legislature than Dorn, who has threatened to close schools and sued the state and several school districts over the use of locally raised levy money to fund educator salaries, which are supposed to be paid by the state as part of its constitutional duty to provide a basic education for all students.

If elected, Reykdal says he would introduce a bipartisan funding plan for the next legislative session in his first week in office.

Jones would “galvanize an army” of students to come talk to the Legislature.

“When I think about students affected by lack of funding, they’re poor, they’re in urban or remote areas, they’re brown,” she said. “The very people who are most impacted don’t have a voice.”

Spring said he would bypass the Legislature and ask the Supreme Court to repeal every tax break passed since 1996.

Maksirisombat, who lives in Seattle and has taught for 30 years in area districts, questions whether the education system is actually underfunded. He is calling for better management of the money that already goes to schools.

Higgins and Runte said their first action would involve the state’s health standards. Both object to elementary students learning that there are many ways to express gender. Higgins said he wants to “stop sexualizing education.”

Blair, a Vashon Island resident who has run for state superintendent twice before, says he is running not to win, but to promote his ideas about alternative forms of education.