My Platform

First of all, my kids do attend public school. My youngest daughter is enrolled at Griffin in 6th grade, and my oldest daughter is enrolled at Tumwater High School in 9th grade.

We did homeschool for almost three years. My daughters were enrolled at Griffin from kindergarten through 2nd and 5th grade respectively. When Covid hit, like all parents, we had to evaluate our options. As much as we love Griffin, we believe that parents are the primary stakeholders in their child’s education. We place an extremely high value on education - we knew that distance learning via Zoom wouldn’t work for our kids’ learning style and had concerns that masking for long periods of time would be harmful to their physical, social, and emotional health, so we made the difficult decision to pull our children out of public school and homeschool them to get through Covid.

While we were homeschooling, our kids remained involved at Griffin in electives and extracurricular activities including school sports, school plays, field trips, and volunteer opportunities. Griffin is a very inclusive and welcoming school, and I would encourage all homeschoolers in the Griffin district to consider enhancing your students educational experience by enrolling in electives that might be more difficult to do at home like a foreign language, art, social studies, or drama. It’s a win for the school also because it increases their funding apportionment for partial enrollment.

Homeschooling was a great experience, and I believe it distinguishes me as a candidate for School Board Director. It allowed me to gain experience with creating curriculum, setting high instructional and learning goals, and executing learning plans for both elementary and middle school grade levels that produced assessments in ELA, Math, and Science high above state averages. I look forward to applying my passion for education, business experience, time, and resources to making sure Griffin School continues to focus on academic and instructional excellence so it is a place where all parents want to enroll their students.

The role of the school board is to set and adopt policy, formulate budgets to ensure the district is not operating unsustainable deficits, review and approve curriculum, assist contract negotiations, find alternative revenue sources to limit levies on the district, create high instructional and learning goals for staff and students, and to set the vision for the district and employ and evaluate the performance of a superintendent to execute that vision.

My experience has given me qualifications that meet this job description. Throughout my career I have worked for multiple fortune-500 companies (Starbucks Coffee Company, T-Mobile USA) in business operations managing store development projects and programs that involve negotiating with vendors on millions of dollars’ worth of services and materials, and formulating detailed schedules and budgets that deliver projects on time and for profitability. I have founded two successful small businesses, Urraco Coffee Company and FUZION Architectural Design. In both capacities I am responsible for performance evaluations and creating diverse team structures that produce high performance cultures. My homeschooling experience has given me a better understanding of the educational process and experience with developing curriculum and setting high but achievable learning goals. It is the catalyst behind my passion for helping kids achieve their full academic potential. This high value I place on education, combined with my professional experience, makes me an ideal candidate for school board director.

Diversity comes in many different forms. There is diversity of race, ethnicity, and culture. There is also diversity of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, income level, and experiences within the same group or subgroup of people who share a common cultural background or descent. All diversity should be welcomed and valued.

Until a handful of years ago, equity was only used as a financial term to define the monetary value of a property in excess of claims or liens against it. Throughout corporate America and academia equity is now used to describe entire systems that, by definition, do not treat people equally. Equity and equality are not the same thing - they are in fact opposites. Equitable systems account for someone’s characteristics like sex, sexual orientation, or race. A system of equality only evaluates someone’s merit or ability and does not factor a person’s immutable characteristics.

Inclusion aims to create a welcoming space. We all want to feel welcome, but to make people feel welcome we need to make sure we don’t offend anyone or make them feel uncomfortable, and that could lead to restricting certain ideas and speech. For a space to be inclusive, we need to be able to respect each other’s differences and points of view.

As School Board Director, I will be focused on supporting Griffin’s mission statement “Lifelong learners leading productive, healthy and responsible lives” by helping craft policies that create educational equity. At its foundation, educational equity is simply getting kids what they need to learn. We do this through the below strategies:

• Instructional Excellence: Focus on the basics of academic instruction, emphasize accelerated learning over remediation, and invest in the PLC+ framework to guide collaboration and data analysis to improve student learning.

• Systems of Support: Strengthen multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) to ensure students have access to intentional and effective academic, behavioral, and social-emotional support when they need them.

• Fiscal Stewardship: Manage and protect public funds and assets through efficient and effective use of available resources while investing in ongoing training focused on Cultural Competence.

I believe true equity will only be realized when academic assessments are the lenses used through which we view how resources are equitably distributed to meet each learner where they are in their academic journey regardless of their background, income level, ethnicity, or gender expression. This will ensure each student reaches their full academic potential and is on a pathway to being college and career ready, and prepared to compete for tomorrow’s higher paying jobs.

Creating a multi-tiered system of support is essential to implementing SEL. In the core classroom, 80% of students may not need much SEL at all, whereas 15% of students might require minor intervention that can happen inclusively right in the core classroom with little disruption to academic instruction, and 5% might need a more intensive intervention which could include an IEP or the implementation of a behavior plan.

The common misconception is that SEL replaces academic instruction. In reality, when systems of support are implemented properly, students develop social and emotional skills that help them focus on academic tasks. They learn to manage stress and reduce disruptive behavior, which in turn leads to a more conducive learning environment and improved grades.

For almost four years I have been a SafeSport Certified soccer coach for a girls’ youth soccer team, and I work with middle school kids one day a week at our church’s youth group. Spending time with elementary and middle school age kids has been an amazing experience and has given me a much better understanding of the issues facing our kids in and out of school that will help influence me as a Griffin School Board Director.