3 Seattle School Board incumbents being defeated

By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Voters have given the Seattle School Board a new majority after a year of controversy over the leadership of the state's largest school district.

Outspent by their rivals, the three incumbents on the ballot lost their bids for re-election in last night's unofficial returns. Incumbents Barbara Schlag Peterson and Steve Brown lost to their respective challengers, Sally Soriano and Darlene Flynn. In the closest, most expensive race, Board President Nancy Waldman lagged behind activist Brita Butler-Wall.

Irene Stewart trounced Betty Hoagland in the competition for a fourth, vacant seat.

"This is a pretty amazing moment for Seattle Public Schools," Butler-Wall said. "We are showing the city that school-bus drivers fight back, that teachers in classrooms will fight back, and that parents all over the city desire to have good programs for all children. ... We didn't run as a slate, but a slate has organically emerged."

Butler-Wall, Flynn, Soriano and Stewart hugged each other and posed for photos at Zoey's Blue Plate Bistro in the Labor Temple in Belltown. They said board member Mary Bass, often a lone vote, inspired them to run for office.

Choosing four of the School Board's seven members comes at a critical time for the 47,000-student district. For the past 12 months, the board has been faced with damaging budget errors, the departure of Superintendent Joseph Olchefske and the collapse of the search for his successor. Interim chief Raj Manhas was handed a one-year contract.

The new board now must pull together if it is to persuade voters to renew two education levies in February and avoid deep cuts in budgets.

Here's how the candidates reacted to the results:

District 1, North Seattle:

Incumbent Peterson, 56, a Pinehurst business manager, was being defeated by Soriano, 57. Peterson, who couldn't be reached for comment, ran on her record of supporting academic standards and using test scores to hold schools more accountable.

Soriano, who spent much of the 1990s working with the Washington State Fair Trade Campaign, pledged to lobby state lawmakers to place less emphasis on state test scores.

"The message about putting the bulk of education dollars into the classroom is resonating with voters," she said.

District 2, Green Lake, Wallingford and parts of Ballard:

Incumbent Brown, 46, a Green Lake resident, was losing to Flynn, 50, a Greenwood resident. A trial attorney and teacher, Brown was chair of the district's audit and finance committee.

After the district overspent its budget by some $35 million over two years, Brown led the effort to hire outside auditors but was dogged by criticism that he hadn't done enough to prevent the crisis.

"I think that voters and a lot of interest groups attempted to say that voting the incumbents out was the way to send a message of unhappiness over whatever in the school system was wrong or not up to snuff," he said.

Flynn, the neighborhood-development manager for the city of Seattle, said, "We haven't really won yet.... We've won a chance to try, to tap the untapped power in our schools."

She said the new board would aim to end inequities across the city in school quality. Parents will be able to send their kid to a quality school regardless of where they live, she said. "That's when we'll know we've won."

District 3, Laurelhurst and Northeast Seattle:

Waldman, 56, was locked in the closest race with Butler-Wall, 53, after being outdone nearly 2-to-1 in fund raising by the career educator.

During the campaign, Waldman said she wished the public knew that Seattle Public Schools are considered among the best in the nation.

The new board shouldn't try to dismantle the district's initiatives. "Most of the public thinks we're going in the right direction," she said.

Butler-Wall, who has tried to kick commercial advertising out of schools, said her first priority would be holding community meetings and updating the board's policies.

District 6 in West Seattle:

Irene Stewart, 45, was running far ahead of rival and former PTSA president Betty Hoagland, 48, in the race to succeed Barbara Schaad-Lamphere, who did not run for re-election.

Stewart is the former director of education for the city of Seattle and has advocated a bigger role for the district in early-childhood education.

She also had been critical of the School Board's decision to give Manhas a one-year contract.

"I'm not anxious to reopen the search at this time," Stewart said.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company