There are four open school board seats, and this race is not done with instant runoff, you just vote for four people and the top four vote-getters win.

On the ballot:

Zuki Ellis (incumbent)
Chauntyll Allen (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Yusef Carillo (DFL-endorsed and not an incumbent but he served on the school board previously to fill out Marchese’s term)
Erica Valliant (DFL-endorsed)
Carlo Franco (DFL-endorsed)
Gita Zeitler
Abdi Omer

Sahan Journal did interviews with every candidate. There was a LWV forum that Zuki Ellis, Chauntyll Allen, Yusef Carillo, and Carlo Franco all attended but the others did not; you can also see the screening interview done by SPFE with Yusef, Erica, and Carlo (although I didn’t get very far because FB video is so frustrating to watch for anything long-form — there’s no easy way to skip forward/backward).

Cut for length.

Abdi Omer

He doesn’t have a website, he didn’t come to the LWV forum, and in his interview with Sahan Journal he doesn’t say much to distinguish himself. I am not going to vote for him.

Gita Zeitler

Gita Zeitler is married to Jeff Zeitler, who is running for City Council in Ward 1. Once I’m done with this post I’m going to go back and edit my Ward 1 post, because I had not noticed, when working on Ward 1, that he was married to a school board candidate, and it really should be noted on both writeups because it is equally weird. You do not become a local politics power couple by simultaneously running for office; you do it by picking things that run in different years so you can focus on one campaign at a time.

Her most interesting idea is to offer more robust summer classes (for catch-up but also to allow students to move ahead faster). Her own kids are currently at Central but attended a charter school from K through 8; if she said which charter school and why she chose it and how that informs her philosophy of school governance I’d be slightly less put off by that. She has volunteered for her kids’ charter school but her bio (in the Sahan Journal interview) doesn’t mention volunteering at community schools or in educational settings, although she works as a public health nurse so that’s arguably something but she doesn’t really make that argument anywhere. I see no reason to believe she’s qualified to run the St. Paul schools, honestly. I’m not going to vote for her.

So that leaves us with four seats and five candidates. There are four DFL-endorsed candidates plus Zuki Ellis, who is not DFL-endorsed but is an incumbent who has served two terms. I actually like all five of these candidates for different reasons.

Zuki Ellis

I actually helped endorse Zuki back in 2015; she was a heavily involved public school mom who got increasingly fired up while organizing parents at her school, and while she’s made decisions I don’t like, as far as I can tell she’s been a hard working and reasonably decent school board member. I try to cut school board incumbents a fair amount of slack regarding decisions I don’t like, because that is truly inherent to serving on a school board, and it’s a thankless, demanding, badly paid job, and also if you endlessly throw out the incumbents you have a board with no institutional memory. A lack of institutional memory is a real problem on school boards, honestly.

(In Minneapolis, when my kids were little, the school board was busily trying to convert all the schools to K-8s and get rid of middle schools because “K-8s keep kids, kids, for longer” and “parents like having all their kids in the same school.” A year or two back I heard that they were splitting up nearly all the K-8s into elementary and middle schools because “you can offer better options to kids in larger, centralized middle schools” etc. There are arguments in both directions so maybe prioritize not throwing money down the drain by endlessly switching back and forth? I can’t wait to hear all the arguments for how great K-8 schools are come 2030.)

Zuki is not endorsed by the DFL, and I suspect this is largely because she was not endorsed by SPFE (the St. Paul teacher’s union). I looked on their website and it said she did not opt to screen for their endorsement. Which seemed like there was probably a story behind it, so I asked both Zuki and my contact at SPFE. SPFE said that they had no idea why she didn’t choose to screen, they were surprised that she didn’t. Zuki’s response made me think there had been a negative interaction but I’m not sure what kind. Nonetheless, I think it’s clear that her lack of an endorsement is more the result of not pursuing that endorsement, vs. Zuki doing something that made the union really mad.

One of the issues that seems to be kind of central for the union and the board but pretty opaque to a lot of people not on the board is a proposed new model for board meetings more broadly. Here’s an article about it (use your SPPL information to log in — you can also find it on the Pioneer Press site.) The model is called Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG) and it sounds like a mix of super obvious (have measurable goals) and super artificial (“After each member of the governing team have scored the school board individually, then the coach will lead the governing team collectively through a process of scoring the school board for the first time.”) (I’ll note, the first time I did project planning by writing a bunch of tasks down on post-it notes, that also felt pretty artificial, but using formal project planning methodology can be a very good idea for a group doing a large project, so “feels artificial to me, a person who’s never done it the new way or, for that matter, the old way” is not necessarily an argument against it.) Current school board members Jim Vue and Jessica Kopp got trained in this and are hugely enthusiastic. Zuki Ellis also seems to be in favor. (“We celebrate students when they show up (to board meetings), but we’re not talking about how well they’re doing or not doing in this district,. I don’t feel good about the things I’m seeing in this district. I need us to do better.”)

SPFE is wary of the framework and the article notes that Uriah Ward, Halla Henderson, and Chauntyll Allen are not fans. “In his first year as a board member, Ward persuaded the board to pass a resolution that will stop the district from investing in the fossil fuel industry. He’s also taken an interest in reducing class sizes, improving school safety, growing enrollment and shaping the district’s budget. ‘The SOFG framework says I shouldn’t have done this work,’ Ward wrote in a letter to colleagues.”

Honestly I am not sure what I think of this but I think this may be part of why Zuki didn’t end up requesting endorsement from the teacher’s union, because the first question asked on the interview I linked to above is about SOFG. My feelings are mixed: on one hand, actual focus on measurable student achievement seems like a good idea, and I feel like passing a resolution on fossil fuel divestment is not really something I want a school board focusing on. On the other hand, as someone who had a kid in the schools in the early days of GWB’s No Child Left Behind obsessive focus on testing, I feel like I have been there, done that, and donated the t-shirt to a rummage sale a long time ago. On the other other hand, it sounds like part of the purpose of this is to make meetings more focused and less draining for the school board members. On the other other other hand, I am automatically suspicious of anything involving hiring a coach, unless it’s, like, a youth soccer team.

But I also think that the person who has served for two full terms on the school board is probably in a good position to think, “our governance could work better.” Also: this is a job where I really value experience. So I’m probably going to vote for her.

Chauntyll Allen (incumbent, DFL-endorsed)

Chauntyll Allen brings both incumbency and DFL endorsement to the table. I appreciate her work and her commitment to equity. I have seen a lot of people who campaigned on an equity focus have switched over to “maybe we could just have a little bit of school-to-prison pipeline, as a treat” by the time they’re campaigning for re-election so I appreciate the fact that she remains firm on stuff like restorative justice and not using police in the schools. She was elected in 2019, which means her experience on the school board was basically, “welcome to the St. Paul school board, here’s a pandemic.” I am solidly planning to vote for her again.

Carlo Franco (DFL-endorsed)

I met Carlo at a meet-and-greet (along with Saura Jost) back during caucus/convention season and he’s one of those people that everyone seems to just instantly like because he’s so kind and so genuine. He’s deeply committed to kids, and works with youth through the City of St. Paul, and one of his pitches for himself is he can be a connection point between the city and the schools. School boards really are small groups that draw heavily on the stuff the members bring to the table, and yeah, a strong link to city youth programs provided by someone who works in city youth programs seems like a great idea that would have obvious benefits. I am planning to vote for Carlo.

Erica Valliant (DFL-endorsed)

Erica didn’t make it to the LWV forum, so I have a less-strong impression of her than I do of the other candidates I’m considering. She did go to the SPFE screening, and I watched enough of that to basically confirm, she’s clearly smart and well-informed and I like her. (I didn’t watch the whole thing because the very first question resulted in an extended deep dive into stuff about the board meeting framework discussed above, and Facebook video makes it incredibly annoying to skip ahead, and I am running out of time.) She has personal experience with homelessness and works for People Serving People, so she brings a different set of skills and connections to the table that would also be valuable. Her hobbyhorse issue is teaching kids financial literacy skills. On one hand: this sounds like a good idea. On the other hand: sometimes this sort of commitment results in an additional high school graduation requirement that turns into a hoop kids need to jump through and for most kids, it’s a hoop they don’t learn anything from, and for a few, it’s a formality that keeps them from graduating. (I also think the fundamental problem with teaching key adulting skills to kids in school is that for most 9th graders, “how to understand your credit score” feels just as abstract and pointless as algebra, and they remember it about as well as algebra.) Anyway — I like her, and the only reason I’m not absolutely planning to vote for her is that there are five candidates I like.

Yusef Carillo (DFL-endorsed and not an incumbent but he served on the school board previously to fill out Marchese’s term)

Yusef Carillo served on the school board from March 2021 until November 2021 when there was a special election to fill Steve Marchese’s seat (Yusef did not run in that; Jeannie Foster, who was an incumbent, wound up running in the special election and was elected to fill out Marchese’s term.)

Yusef is an immigrant from Spain, and lived in California (working for the Oakland School District) until 2017. His wife is a teacher; he works in finance now, which again — possibly useful to have someone on the board with that skill set. Watching the LWV forum, he seemed smart and down-to-earth. I really liked his responses to the Sahan Journal interview — he is very good at identifying things that are working that the district can build on. I like him a lot, and the only reason I’m feeling waffly is that there are five candidates I like.

I think that I am going to vote for Zuki, Chauntyll, Carlo, and Yusef. I am feeling less certain of my choices than I often do. (And I have to actually make up my mind about this one, since it will be on my ballot.) The good news is, compared to A LOT of school districts, we’re in the enviable position of picking our four favorites of five genuinely strong candidates plus two people I’m not as fond of but who still seem like decent human beings — as opposed to the many districts where you have to sort out the imperfect-but-reasonable candidates from the actual monsters.

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