North Beach School Board candidates discuss visions

With a majority of seats on the North Beach School Board up for grabs in the 2023 election, two pairs vying for two separate seats met at the Ocean Shores Lions Club on Wednesday evening to answer questions and deliver their platforms to the public.

Candidates are hoping to lift the district away from turbulence of the last few years plagued by the resignation of a superintendent, lawsuits and budget problems. The school board will be working with the district’s new Superintendent Jim Shank, who took over this summer.

Races for three school board seats will appear on voters’ ballots in November, but only two are truly contested. When Susan Rogers accepted a teaching position with the North Beach district a few months ago, district policy disqualified her from holding the District 5 seat she filed for in May, meaning she would have to resign if elected. That leaves Robert Doering, who already holds the seat after his appointment earlier this year, as the effective winner.

The four other candidates participated in Wednesday’s forum: Jeff Albertson and Rickie Day seeking the District 1 seat, and Halvar Olstead and Joe Lomedico seeking the District 4 seat.

The forum was the last in a series hosted by citizens’ advocacy group Voice of the Shores and hosted by moderator Gina Rawlings.

Albertson was the only candidate in attendance at the forum with experience on the school board. A few months after his appointment in September 2022, the board elected him president, where he took on some administrative duties in the absence of a superintendent.

“As you make a decision, I invite you to look back on my record over the last 12 months as a director on this board and the things I have pushed and helped to accomplish,” Albertson said, adding later that one of his future goals would be to create a comprehensive strategic plan for the district.

Albertson grew up in Seattle and went into the tech industry, is now a project manager at Google, Inc. He’s visited the North Beach since the 1970s, he said, and has a son in the district.

“This is a place that’s very special to me,” Albertson said. “We live in a beautiful place. We need a school district that is truly worthy of the kids that we have here, and what families are trying to achieve with their children’s future.”

His challenger, Rickie Day of Pacific Beach, spent a 32-year career in the Navy, 17 of those as a supervisor. He said he has “thousands of my signatures of certification on papers for every ship that I worked on.”

He said his core values are “integrity, respect and consensus.”

“The school belongs to the school board, the school board belongs to the people, and I represent your voice,” Day said. “Don’t look at me as a politician. I would like to take your voice into the school district. I would like to repair the damage that’s been done.”

“There’s been a wall built up between you, the taxpayer, and us, the people who are responsible for teaching our children how to become responsible in our society.”

The District 4 seat will see a fresh face in 2024 after incumbent Jessica Iliff fell short in the primary.

While new to the North Beach district, Olstead brings decades of teaching experience to the school board, including 30 years as an elementary school teacher in Whatcom County and another 10 as a substitute in Eastern Montana.

He currently works as a safety manager at Seabrook. Olstead, 74, said he would choose to serve only one four-year term if elected, but chose to run because of the poor public perception of the district he witnessed when he moved to Ocean Shores in 2018.

“I have no agenda, I’m not running against anybody, I’m running for the position,” Olstead said. “I’ve been to many school board meetings.”

Lomedico is the candidate with the most experience with the North Beach School District. He worked for several years starting about five years ago as an assistant football coach and paraeducator until he was fired by the former superintendent in 2022, which the school board later found to be an unlawful termination in a settlement with Lomedico.

He said he would work toward a “full rebuild” in the district.

“I’ve seen firsthand and experienced the issues the last five, six years have brought upon our district,” Lomedico said. “It’s no shortage of tragic. … We need people who are going to allow our district to right the ship and get us on the right track.”

Lomedico has four children enrolled in the district, owns a gym and jiu jitsu school in Ocean Shores, and is close to launching a nonprofit aimed at helping local kids afford sports expenses.

“I love North Beach, I’ve been here my whole life,” he said. “But these kids need help right now,” he said. “They need help badly. We’re not helping them like we need to.”

Curriculum

Rawlings asked candidates about the role of the school board in setting curriculum.

Olstead said some school boards have “overstepped their bounds” in setting curriculum, and that the board’s role should be limited to approving policies and expenditures surrounding curriculum.

“Most board members do not have the training and experience to tell people with bachelors and masters degrees and 20 years of experience how to teach,” he said.

Lomedico added that it’s not the school board’s job to dictate curriculum — that duty should be left to the state, superintendent and teachers — but the school board should step in if concerns arise from parents. He said it’s the school board’s job to do their own research and provide checks on spending.

Day said curriculum is the superintendent’s responsibility, and board members have the ability to step in during a discrepancy.

Albertson said selecting particular volumes of coursework in an “evidence-based” way is critical, and those decisions should be driven by education professionals. He said the district has already begun and should continue to work toward mending current holes in curriculum, mentioning that different schools had previously been learning from different standardized textbooks.

Test scores

One question probed candidates on what action they would take to rectify the North Beach School District’s below-average test scores.

Lomedico said the scores have lapsed because of a lack of emphasis from the previous administration.

“Our job is to make sure the superintendent is doing his job and raising the scores,” he said. “Our job is accountability.”

Day said he found in research that many schools across the state of Washington are performing at substandard levels.

“For us to be accountable to our students, we have to hold our teachers to a professional performance level, so that we as a board can give them the instruction they need to be a success for each of their students,” Day said.

Albertson said he doesn’t believe testing is the “be all end all of underperforming educational systems, but they are an indicator.” He said addressing low test scores — which vary based on specific locations in the district — is an “extremely hard problem to solve” and will take multiple years.

“Where the rubber meets the road is the teachers. Raising the skill level of our teachers through robust professional development opportunities for them, raising the bar for the teachers we hire through the qualifications they bring to the table,” he said, adding the district has been operating with teachers with limited credentials.

Olstead said low test scores could be due to factors outside of school, like health, home life or “if a kid doesn’t have a place to stay or doesn’t have enough food.” He said the media has sometimes misconstrued test score statistics.

“By and large, teachers are good at what they do,” Olstead said. “If they need more resources, that’s the board’s responsibility.”

Student discipline

Rawlings asked candidates a question about policies related to disciplining students, and used the example of a student using offensive language when addressing a superior or in a classroom setting.

Albertson said respect is an important value in schools, and peer leadership in calling out disrespectful behavior is key.

“I do think that students demonstrating that kind of respect consistently contributes to a better learning environment, it contributes to a sense of safety for students, staff and everyone in the building. That kind of standing needs to be consistently upheld,” he said.

“You have to keep after it, because if you lose sight of this issue, the whole environment of the building starts to erode over time,” he said.

Olstead also emphasized respect, and said teachers are “more reluctant to do things” because of some policies.

“You have to look at what the law says, what the policy says, and if you can change policy, change it,” he said. “You can’t pick and choose who it is that you are going to deal with.”

Lomedico said he has witnessed a “lack of accountability” for behavior of students and athletes in schools, and said some teachers have not instilled discipline in students by befriending them. He said that as a coach he’s implemented some punishments, like running extra sprints, if an athlete misbehaves.

“Kids want to be held accountable,” Lomedico said. “But as a district we need to hold them accountable, and we need to put things in place so there is accountability, because right now there’s not.”

Day said “discipline starts in the home,” and emphasized communication between faculty and parents.

“If you’ve been raised with discipline and respect for those who are giving that instruction out, you can walk out those doors very happy with yourself,” he said.

Special education

One question asked candidates about the district’s special education department and Individualized Education Programs in the district.

Albertson said the district has a variety of “legal, documentation and due process responsibilities that as an organization it was not consistently meeting in recent years,” but it has made “significant progress” in that area because of efforts of the special education director and new superintendent.

“We have great educators working with our special needs students in the district,” he said.

Olstead said he has personal experience with the topic of special education as several of his own children went through school with Individualized Education Programs, and has “great, great respect” for special education instructors, who have to meet high standards. He said he would work to provide instructors whatever they need, and balance the ratio between students and teachers if necessary.

Lomedico said North Beach has a high number of IEPs for the small size of the district, and having instructors work part time is “clearly not enough.” He said one-on-one sessions are critical to special education, but it’s difficult to recruit new paraeducators with the current state of the district, which has “driven so many of them out,” because of a lack of support from administrators.

“Frankly, people right now don’t want to work for the school district,” he said. “They leave in droves, and that’s so sad. We need financial help to employ those people.”

Day said he also has personal experience with IEPs through his granddaughter in the North Beach School District. He said he recently learned about alternative modes of learning — kinesthetic, audio and visual — and said the special education process should start with respect from instructor to student.

“Once they know that we’re there with our arms wide open to help them with their issues with learning, we can make that happen,” he said.

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.