The Bitchtucci Voter Guide: May 2k21 Special Election

Portland, OR

swear 2 god, magnolia season this spring was the only thing keeping my head, precariously tied to my head with a shitty piece of ribbon, tethered to planet earth. #blossomwatch 4ever

It turns out that if you cup your hand around a phone’s speaker and hold it between two school counselors in the pouring rain on the side of the road, you can still sort of hear okay. We were mid-walk but wanted the teacher’s union hybrid learning negotiations update. It was late March. I was standing with my friend underneath a tree on Woodstock. The downpour had completely soaked through my stupid jacket. The rain on my jeans was starting to warm to my body temperature, giving me the unsettling feeling of having peed my pants. “I’m dying to hear if they have an update about staff with medical exclusions,” my friend said.

“How can they just order everyone back, even pregnant folks? People taking care of spouses who have cancer?” I asked. These were the talking points echoed in my own union meetings, the faces of my teacher coworkers going splotchy with emotion.

“Well. They can take unpaid leave,” she responded dryly.

“Has anyone on the board ever…met a teacher?” I asked. It was barely funny. Mostly sad. Neither of us laughed.

Readers, the amount of shit I could tell y’all about how shady school districts and school boards have behaved during the pandemic. It would make your toes curl in your shoes. I belong to a union that wants to be strategic with if and how we publicize this information, so I’m not going to be the bitch with the exposé. Let me say this. I know people who belong to educator unions all across the state. Each and every one of them reported good-faith efforts to protect vulnerable families, students, and teachers from harm’s way while delivering kick-ass, engaging education during a damn global pandemic. Over and over, I hear their efforts get steamrolled by certain members of certain district administrative teams who refuse to come to the bargaining table, who issue threats with lawyers that aren’t even legal, who go behind teachers’ backs to make multimillion-dollar purchases of the wrong fucking safety and tech equipment.

Even Governor Brown’s Back-to-School order reneged on the sweet-talking she’d done earlier in the pandemic. Keep in mind that this young lady sailed into office with the endorsements of the Oregon Education Association and tens of thousands of votes from educators. But since she’s not running for reelection, I guess who cares. Tee hee. The state team talked a big game about listening to teacher’s unions and individual school districts, about closely heeding the ~COVID-19 safety metrics~ and letting districts make individual determinations about a veritable fruit salad of acronyms and buzzwords. You know, we got CDL (comprehensive distance learning — that’s what we’re calling all online instruction. Zoom school vibes), Hybrid (core instruction happens online still, i.e. CDL, but kids can come to school for strange increments of time, like twice a week for 2.5 hours. This does not meaningfully ease the burden of parents and families who aren’t able to work because they can’t secure childcare LOL!), LIPI (limited in-person instruction — wherein a small percentage of exceptionally hard-to-reach students would be invited back into the building for targeted instruction), WTF (that means “what the fuck”).

And school boards. Oh, school boards. Thought by many to be a stepping stone for ambitious people wanting to transition into politics, this group of unpaid elected officials has been asked to make decisions that are (strong Cockney accent) lit’rally life or death during the pandemic.

School boards approve budgets. They sign off on the contracts proposed by district administrators, including the memorandums of understanding that determine the conditions under which teachers return to in-person work, for instance. And remember, it was the school board who was taken to account in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka — not the district office, not any one principal, not a group of teachers. Board approval and implementation of policy is the umbrella over this whole buffet.

Here in Portland Metro, we have a metric shit-ton of school districts and therefore a shit-ton of school boards. Some seats are quite competitive, some are difficult to fill. Because we have so many small school districts, we often have wildly different school board rulings on similar topics, meaning kids who live three blocks from each other, who chase down the same ice cream truck at dusk on July days, but who attend different districts may have deeply different school experiences.

One thing I pay close attention to is the movement of families and their students across the Portland Metro area due to gentrification, rising rent, and eviction. Since record-keeping is so varied and communication so inconsistent, I have seen the stories of students literally fall through the cracks as they move into a new school district. Sometimes I will be months into building a relationship with a student and they’ll casually reveal a history of suicidal ideation that they’d disclosed to their previous school. I arrange my face to remain neutral — eyebrows, stay flat, dammit — and complete the counseling session.

When they leave, I’ll bolt to their CUM file and flip through, searching for a sealed envelope labeled “for counselor only” that would typically contain a suicide screen note. I’ll see old report cards, immunization records, maybe sticker versions of their yearly school photos arranged in a row on the inside cover of the folder. But no note.

These small clerical technicalities are sometimes enough to make my eyes well up with tears in the dusty records room. I believe in good intentions, in the care received by students at their previous schools, even in the possibility that a previous counselor may have intentionally omitted this information for some reason. I believe that. And I still weep in the closet sometimes when I think about how grateful I am that a kid was brave enough to share this weighty piece of their life’s pain with me, about how this disclosure is itself a way of holding onto life, about how obliteratingly awful and careless it would have been if this student attempted suicide on my watch and I had to find out later that they had a disclosed history of suicidal ideation. I think about how fucked up it is that we charge kids with the responsibility of having to advocate for themselves so many times in order to get help. As a person who has had to reveal my trauma repeatedly to get services throughout my life, I can understand the burden and the numbness that sometimes come from being required to share the same excruciating narrative over and over to an array of different adults who have power over me.

I say this to you so you can understand how deeply layered a school building is, how such a building can contain a child’s whole complex social universe, and how important policies and procedures can be. Public school is a flawed system (Foucault, et al), but one that I work within because I see the value in trying to reach as many kids as possible, no insurance required, no social security number or citizenship required. We all know that it ain’t right for a school to have to wear all the hats: childcare, a hub for social services, food stability, and so on. But since we’re here. Since the hats are stacked so precariously sky high. Since we have no replacement readily available in a meaningful systemic way. Here we are. Another round of school board elections.

I’m grateful to every school board member who has ever read my frenetic emails, listened to me speak at school board meetings, and translated my anger into, I dunno, more counseling positions, attempting to preserve restorative justice staff, patience and strategic acumen when soliciting community and most especially student voice.

When I thought about school board endorsements, here were my guiding questions:

• Who reflects the community best?
• Whose experience will allow them to hop QUICKLY into this work with so much at stake at this moment?
• Whom do I trust the most to be a buffer between educators on the ground and school district administrators in their offices? Who can bridge that gap most gracefully, bringing out the best practices and intentions of all organizing bodies?
• Who actually gives a shit about family, community, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, STUDENT MOTHERFUCKING INPUT?
• Who has displayed humility and a willingness to learn? School board members often have no background in education, which can be fine as long as they are willing to change their minds about preconceived notions when confronted with new information. Throughout my career serving public education students, my biggest frustration with school board members is usually when they act in ways that seem to GROSSLY misunderstand how schools actually work, and when they are unwilling to learn from feedback.

I have a school counselor friend who joked, “Whenever parents or teachers come at me funny, I want to just be wearing a tee-shirt that says, ‘I Work For Your Kid.’”

I think about this a lot. That’s the whole thing, right?

Thanks for being here. Thanks for lending your time to understanding this special election, which is overwhelmingly about who’s going to have their hands in our schools. Let’s find the ones who are most likely to work for our kids.

I love ya. Where’s your nicest pen?

• Election day is Tuesday, May 18th, 2021. Stroll your beautiful ass down to a ballot drop box until 8pm on Election Day. It’s sunny! Info about this special election is available in many languages here.
• #BlackLivesMatter forever and ever. Keep donating, organizing, and centering Black trans women and Black women and girls seeking therapy.
• If your ballot is missing, or if you’ve changed your mind and need a new ballot, you can pick up a replacement at the MultCo elections office until the end of Election Day. Fill out this easy pease online form for a will call ballot and pick it up all the way til the end of Election Day. 503–988–3720 or 800–735–2900, Fax: 503–988–3719, or elections@multco.us. You can even order your new ballot in advance and do a no-contact pickup.
• Then track your ballot. Thrill of thrills!
• We have accessible voting options available in our county, including volunteers who can come to your home, hospital, care facility, or elsewhere to help you cast your vote. I love you.
• If you’re a person who has a body that usually moves ya through the day without much complaint, if you have a mode of transportation and a little bit of time, I highly recommend you make a call to pick up the ballots of your family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Being able to do this up until Election Day is just KIND of you. LOOK AT YOU, YOU KIND KIND BABE. I like to post on social media, including in my local Buy Nothing group, and cast a real wide net. I feel like the tooth fairy, like if the tooth fairy were extremely angry and agitated about the status quo. If you want to DM me on Insta with your neighborhood radius, I can also connect you to folks who need their ballots picked up.
• Oh yeah, definitely DM me if you need someone to pick up your ballot. We’ll get your ballot picked up. They can’t stop us!!!!!!!!!!!!
• GUIDE NOTEZ: I didn’t comment on candidates running unopposed, and I kept my focus on Portland. I am going to include links to recommendations I trust in Washington County and East Multnomah County. If you disagree with my perspective……..COOL!!!!!!!!! Vote how you want. Live your life. Democracy etc etc ad nauseam Joe Biden’s america live laff luv
  I consulted Ballotpedia, Vote411, the League of Women Voters’ candidate interviews, and lurked very deep into strange Facebook group threads about various candidates. Shoutout to the St. Johns FB page for nary a dull moment.
  I checked in with the Portland Association of Teachers’ endorsements, this writeup in the Portland Observer, APANO’s endorsements (there are a lot of Asian American candidates out here this May!), the NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon endorsements, OregonLive’s writeup of recommendations, Imagine Black’s endorsements, Washington County Ignite for WashCo endorsements, and East County Rising for East PDX/Gresham/Troutdale endorsements.
• POSITIONALITY NOTEZ: I’m nobody. Just a big nerd. I’ve written a voter’s guide of some kind since I was 16. Spending hours creeping the candidates and ballot measures is just a compulsion I cannot shake. I want you to know at least what I know, and for you to draw your own conclusions. I’m cisgender, able-bodied, bi, femme, mixed Korean/white, working a middle class school counseling job. There are LIMITS to my perspective and you should vote with all your tools and sources of information. I am open to feedback and want to repair harm that I may cause to marginalized communities. Reach out and I’ll try to do right by you.
• BALLOT JAMZ: I cannot stop listening to “Hot & Heavy” by Lucy Dacus. When she says, “I wish I were over it,” I gasp. There is so much shit I wish I was over. Lucy will remind you that there’s something still to be felt in that not-over-it-yet space.
  “All My Stars Aligned” by St. Vincent feels like being in a Miyazaki movie’s end credits. Like…sweet and beautiful but a little sad for a reason you can’t quite explain?
  “The Darkside” by the Limiñanas is so sexy. It makes me inhabit the body of a person who can wear tight jeans and walk across a dusty surface at night in slow motion, transporting me from my actual body which would involve me walking across that surface at night being worried that the dust will get in my eyes and cause me to sneeze.

Candidates

• Multnomah Education Service District, Director, Position 2, At-Large: Helen Ying
  When someone says “educational service district” to me, my head involuntarily tilts to the side like one of those dogs who’s trying madly to translate the sound you’re making from English to Dog. Also, as I’m writing this, I’m realizing how infrequently the phrase “educational service district” is uttered out loud. I’ve worked in public ed for a damn decade and ESDs remain slippery in my imagination. They occupy a strata of influence higher than a school district, lower than a state: a regional bureaucratic body that connects state and federal resources to school districts.
  They are most legible to me in the form of my school nurse, who floats angelically into school to dispense insulin, screen for COVID symptoms, change tubes, dispense medication, and do licensed nurse things in a way that goes beyond what our angelic health assistants are able to do (they also screen for symptoms of illness, take temperatures, tend to minor wounds, and CRUCIALLY, offer ice, which ends up being so psychologically healing to children that they invent reasons for needing it). MESD has a fleet of nurses who often serve more than one school, which is emblematic of why ESDs exist, u feel? They coordinate supports across many districts that would otherwise be too costly or too specific for a single school district or building to afford, and have their hands in transportation, cross-district staff trainings, hiring paraeducator and other Special Education staff, preschool programs, instructional support for specialized county-wide curricula, transportation arrangements for houseless youth, and many more things, some of which are worded so vaguely in explanatory documents that I am left scratching my obtuse little head. One Wikipedia entry says that ESDs provide “network support.” What does that mean in this context? Like…internet networks? Every day I adorably slip further away from knowing anything…at…all.
  Anyway. Much in the way a school board approves major budget, staffing, and priorities of a school district, the MESD directors provide a guiding hand to the work of this county education resource hub. I truly don’t know what school will look like next year, but there’s quite a slog ahead. We want folks in the education service district seats who are elbow-deep in the work already; the amount of coordination and resource distribution will be immense. We also want folks in this seat who understand that socioemotional wellbeing of students WILL BE the thing that remediates “COVID-19 learning loss,” or, as I like to call it, “Kids lived through a fucking apocalypse, had no power over their own lives, were completely alone and suffered greatly, confronted death in a profound existential manner, and maybe it’s okay that they didn’t learn a ton about cosines.”
  I’m voting to re-elect Helen Ying. She has a long background in public education, including serving students as a math teacher, counselor, and administrator. She wants to continue racially-specific initiatives at the MESD level, and you can see her hand in approving recent developments like supporting a more robust Indigenous and Native American history curriculum for K-12 students. In her most recent term, she was the chair of the Equity Committee and got real money into the hands of real students through developing a scholarship program, pushed the board to explicitly name Black Lives Matter as a district-approved movement, and supports the work of trauma-informed training work for all MESD partners.
  To convince me to vote for someone other than the incumbents, we would need some pretty extraordinarily inspirational candidates. Instead of that, running against Ying is some dude who supports charter schools and school vouchers. There isn’t enough information about him out there for me to have a strong opinion one way or another about him, so I wish him godspeed in his future endeavors, I guess? I will share that the last line of his MultCo voter guide statement is, “School need to be now” (sic). What?
• Multnomah Education Service District, Director, Position 3, Zone 2: Mary Botkin
  For many of the reasons I listed above, I think we re-elect the competent Mary Botkin at this moment. I’m honestly obsessed with the vibe of her LinkedIn profile photo??? Incredible lighting. I feel JC Penney photo center feelings. Is Mary Botkin about to go viral on TikTok?
  No challenger in this race was compelling enough for me to turn away from Botkin’s solid career on the MESD board, particularly in the minutia of public educator retirement funds, mental health training expansion, and expanding the Hard History curriculum, which aims to paint a more accurate picture of Oregon’s history. Her work with labor unions like AFCSME makes me trust the way she approaches community and educational development more than her challenger, who is literally an intellectual property rights attorney LOL. I think particularly of the ways in which she advocates for education employees as workers. Put down your pencils and pick up your sickles, I’ve been saying for ages.
  I don’t know about some of her old school kumbaya language like, “I believe that education is the great equalizer” in 2021………………………..but I would sit at the table with her and ask her to explain what she means by that.
  I am interested in a world in which we can advocate more strongly to MESD board members to influence, suggest, and offer resources to school districts that have increasingly broken trust with their employees and students over the past year (also, forever). I would be verrrrrry interested in how we could take some of these suggestions to an elected official like Botkin who has not always been super visible to the average Oregonian. If we really do want to build capacity as a community for more direct accountability from our elected officials, I think we re-elect Botkin and get organized. Make some requests. Start playing chess.
• Multnomah Education Service District, Director, Position 4, Zone 4: Jessica Arzate
  Arzate, East County kween, comes from a long background of work in early education and student activism. She is widely supported by the progressive activists and politicians of color out in East County, snagging the endorsement of East County Rising.
  Arzate wrote an op-ed for the Oregon Business Journal that’s behind a paywall, so I did my favorite broke college kid trick of quickly selecting and copy/pasting the article before the pop-up kicked me out. I’m glad I did it. I’d do it again! Cancel me!!!
  Arzate says plainly, “I worry that Portland liberalism will remain performative and only surface level.” Let’s all take a moment to feel this. I am sure if you’re reading this guide that you’ve had that thought before. Every hardworking organizer I know, especially those who are women, nonbinary folks, and femmes of color, brings up the performativity of Portland liberals with sighs on their lips. She finishes the article by nodding to concrete wins like Preschool for All, and she uses this publication strategically, I think; Arzate is shrewd enough to know that the benefit of writing a hopeful op-ed for the business journal is to gradually make these well-meaning liberals comfortable with trusting leadership whom they perceive as non-threatening enough to elect. In her role currently serving as MESD director, Arzate is doing a lot of winning folks along with initiatives they are comfortable with, but also making sure that MESD is supporting the development of meaningful Ethnic Studies curriculum following the passing of Oregon House Bill 2845 in 2017 — a beautiful, student-led effort to mandate Ethnic Studies that then left the development and implementation details for districts to figure out.
  We vote for Arzate. Keep her in this position. I look forward to seeing even more.
• Multnomah Education Service District, Director, Position 1, Zone 5: Amanda Squiemphen-Yazzie
  Y’all, to see an indigenous baddie run for this position. I am SCREAMING. We have to elect her! Tell all your people in Gresham and East County!!!! Love that Squiemphen-Yazzie is honing in on the recruitment and retention of faculty and staff of color. Representation in our schools has proven engagement benefits for our students and families. There are so many facets of Amanda’s identity and lived experience that she beautifully says for herself: feeling silenced, ignored, and dismissed at school as a child; commuting from the Warm Springs reservation over an hour to a mostly-white school; desiring for kids of all backgrounds including those who share her identity to be free to experience “fully excellence.”
  Beyond the inherent value that an indigenous perspective in county school leadership will bring, Squiemphen-Yazzie has been deliberately gaining the mentorship, experience, and political training to succeed in a role of policy and influence. She is a student of social work, a longtime volunteer on governmental committees and organizations like the Portland Clean Energy Benefits Fund Committee, the Oregon Indian Education Association, and political action fund Next Up Oregon. LETS GOOOO
• Portland Public School District, Director, Zone 4: Write-in Jaime Golden Cale
  Being a member of the St. Johns Facebook group is better than any reality show, any political melodrama, any experimental one-act play. Samuel Beckett found dead in a ditch!! As I watched debate around this position unspool in early March, I had the feeling of listening to a West Wing monologue. Community members puffed out their chests and asked, “Will you step in and save our schools from the clutches of this QAnon-believing Republican?”
  These folks were understandably alarmed that the earliest registered candidate was Margo Logan, who says racist shit like, “Masks that were made in China? That’s all I need to see to know that they’re bogus,” and “Masks are child abuse,” and “Teacher’s unions are bad for kids.” When the Willamette Week announced that they were in alignment with the candidates endorsed by the Portland teacher’s union, aka one of the most normal things to have ever happened in journalism, young Margo sat down to her Dell laptop like a bright-eyed Carrie Bradshaw to type out, “I couldn’t help but wonder…was the Willamette Week in COLLUSION with the teacher’s union?” My dude.
  So the call went out largely on social media for someone — anyone, really — to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot and challenge her. It’s easy to understand why there weren’t tons of well-prepared candidates waiting in the wings this year. The task before the PPS school board is enormous and fatiguing: we are trying to balance zillions of conflicting limitations in order to…what, exactly? Bring kids back to school safely? Overhaul our buildings and curricula and hiring practices to better support our kids? Achieve ~equity~ at last? Collaborate meaningfully with teachers? All of those? More?
  
  The Portland Monthly did this writeup called “The Strangest Election in America Right Now Is This Portland School Board Race” and it is truly worth a read. In my circles, I have learned that even WEIRDER things were happening behind the scenes, but I particularly appreciated this article for including this perspective from Tammy Correa. When the call for challengers to Margo Logan circled on social media, Tammy Correa, a Black mama with a heart for activism, showed interest and then immediately felt the simplistic, knee-jerk racial anxiety of Portlanders who seemed only to care that she identified as Black. Here’s an excerpt:

“Almost immediately after announcing her candidacy], Correa found herself spending three hours in a photo shoot organized by We Win (a strategy group that encourages progressive candidates in smaller races), talking to current board members DePass and Moore. The whole thing “became way too much, way too fast. I started to feel I was being pushed to the forefront because I was Black,” she says. “By Wednesday I was on my second panic attack. The best way to put it, I was feeling really tokenized. Why was I the best person? I’m looking at all these people dropping out of this race because of me. Why?”

White and non-Black liberals who have no intellectual or emotional stamina to meaningfully engage with racial justice discourse and examine their/our own complicity with anti-Blackness and racism ABSOLUTELY LOVE to play reductive identity politics games in order to pat themselves on the back. There are CONSEQUENCES to this — this city suffers from a real aversion to salient accountability and healing because everyone is afraid of being called racist if they show any attention to nuance. We have actual abusers in this city who are Black, Brown, Asian, and other people of color and who have gotten away with power grabs for years because these fragile liberals seem UNABLE to discern or evaluate marginalized people’s merits beyond their identity as a particular race. This dynamic also GROSSLY DISRESPECTS the amazing Black, Brown, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and other people of color whose hard work, dedication, innovation, and unique perspectives are painted over by a wide, grainy brush reducing them to their racial or ethnic identities alone.
At BEST, you might get a well-meaning white liberal who can begin to fathom the intersectionality of being both Brown and gay ~at the same time~. And even then, no further nuance. We have so much work to do in this city toward building a higher threshold for inquiry and conflict and complexity as they pertain to race. I am raising my eyebrows very high up on my forehead as I type this. My eyebrows are actually touching my bangs, a most unholy reunion of hair. IT’S LAZY. IT’S DEHUMANIZING. Knock it off.
ANYWAY. Among the shuffling, Jaime Cale got called into the fray by a community member who knows her well. Cale said to the Oregonian that she’d dreamed of being on the school board for a long time but figured she’d wait until her kids were older. It was only in this chaos of candidates cropping up, deciding whether or not the field was too crowded, dropping out, tapping others, and self-consciously checking over shoulders that she said, “Fuck it, let’s see how it goes.”

And Cale, a Black/indigenous mama and longtime PPS employee, took a look at the field and saw an opening. I see her key strength as closeness to the community she serves. As a school secretary in PPS with a social worker and mama’s lens, she is extremely close to teacher dynamics with students and families, advocating in the past for increased racial competency training in her immediate community. She has seen the way the pandemic has affected district and school dysfunction, and has been on the frontlines communicating with and triangulating resources for students and families as they try to survive this ugly time. More than any of her competitors, Cale will be able to hit the ground running, and more than any of her competitors, I see Cale as SQUARELY in the corner of students and families, with the internal fortitude to be able to center their needs even when they are sometimes at odds with staff comfort. I see her as the candidate with the best personal and professional experience in listening. I believe in her ability to know already which perspectives are missing, her ability to seek out and welcome those perspective, and her capacity to translate those voices into tangible priorities and votes.
Cale has earned endorsements from some of the more lefty groups of communities of color, queer folks, and youth, like Imagine Black, PDX Queer Front, Portland Youth Climate Strike, the Sunshine Movement PDX, and more.
Now, a write-in candidate in a midterm election is…tough, right? But because the turnout of midterms is generally smaller, we can significantly move the needle by spreading the word in our communities. Even if Cale does not emerge victorious, it means something to throw our weight behind her and bolster her name recognition and clout for what I hope is a long future in education policy and local governance. I always think about what my friends Emily and Pesha have said about a different write-in campaign last year. On long summer walks with them, I turned over my anxieties about splitting votes, feasibility, and pragmatism. In their own ways, they responded, “If enough people vote for them, then they’ll win. The only way we’ll know if they could have gotten enough votes is if we vote.” We can do that here. We can vote with our values and imagine that wonderful things happen if enough people do the same. Not to be soooOOoo Taurus season, but in that space of imagining, we affirm abundance, right? We affirm a future bigger than what we currently can see, right?

For the record, I also think that Herman Greene, a pastor and longtime Black Portlander whose 4 children went through Portland Public Schools, would greatly improve the PPS school board. I appreciated the writeup on Oregon Live that fairly outlined his values and community experience, as well as limitations in perspective (like seeming more staff focused than student focused and not having the most up-to-date understanding of student needs, particularly socioemotional). Additionally, the Portland Monthly article did reveal a tense dynamic between Greene’s team and Tammy Correa, the candidate I mentioned earlier:

“Greene says Correa’s decision to drop out “was a mutual thing,” but that’s not the impression that stayed with Correa. “I feel like he pushed me out,” she says. “I feel like he bullied me a bit, but I was OK to take it because I just wanted out.”

I don’t know the details of this interaction, but I know that vibe, and I stay suspicious of men of color who exert entitled, “push/pull” energy against Black women. This urgent communication style in this kind of stressful conversation does give me pause; false urgency in political discourse is usually more about ego than about centering student needs. I recognize that this may not have been Greene’s intent, but I honor the impact that it had on Correa and respect her right to describe her own feelings in her own words.
And, look. Greene has been involved in community support and volunteering for decades. I believe he truly gives a shit about our schools. I simply feel more closely aligned in my own values to what Jaime Cale has shared, and I value her closeness to the education system (SCHOOL SECRETARIES KNOW EVERYTHING AND THEY MAKE SCHOOLS RUN), especially during the time of the pandemic, to be able to hit the ground running with frameworks already in mind for the intricate web of how a school works and how best to communicate with students and families. I realize that supporting a write-in candidate is tough. I’ll say like I’ve said many times before, that in a low-risk race like this one, ya may as well. Greene has the endorsement of the Portland teacher’s union and is actually on the ballot, so stands a strong chance of victory, with very low risk of splitting the vote between Cale and Greene in such a way that great harm would come because of a horrible third option.
Special shoutout to student activist Brooklyn Sherman. Love to see it. Stay in the game. Cale’s experience and identities were stronger to me in this particular race, but god please I would love to see more young people as meaningful stakeholders in positions like this.

• Portland Public School District, Director, Zone 5: Gary Hollands
  Hollands is the frontrunner in this race, and I think that’s swell. He’s an ~entrepreneur~ and longtime community volunteer who seems to have a deep understanding of how we can move the needle toward better serving our Black and Brown kids’ outcomes, especially in post-high school career and technical education support. Our state and city graduation rates are low when compared to the national average, and eliminating systemic discrimination barriers, offering more wraparound services to families, and inspiring students that a high school degree will actually aid in future prospects are all part of the mix for improvement. I appreciate that he is in touch with the risk of COVID-19 and isn’t willing to let go of ensuring a rich educational experience for families who are at elevated risk and will not be returning to school in person yet, even in the fall. He has experience on the MESD board. This, paired with his professional experience as owner of the Interstate Trucking Academy, means he will be stepping into this role with a big-picture budget and strategic planning experience. I’m compelled by his personal story of familial instability and a sense of protectiveness for his kids and family members, and creating opportunities for young people to specifically create a sense of belonging:

“[Because] I never got that sense of family growing up, when I became of age, I wanted to make sure all my little cousins had what I didn’t have. That just culminated as I started my family, joining the PTA, doing field trips, all the way up through now. I’m executive director of Albina Sports Program, which deals with youth and their abilities to participate in organized sports without the financial burdens that come along with organized sports.”

• Portland Public School District, Director, Zone 6: Julia Brim-Edwards
  I mean. Brim-Edwards is a Nike executive. She’s not exactly by and for the people. In this race, I don’t see a viable alternative whom I believe can step into the huge role of approving budgets and managing audits and all of the nitty-gritty of liaising with district admin and unions. PAT declined to endorse anyone for this race, citing a lack of confidence in Brim-Edwards due to her corporate ties, yet concluding that neither of the parent activist challengers quite had the needed tools yet.
  Brim-Edwards has closely aligned herself with the campaigns of both Gary Hollands and Herman Greene, likely a self-aware way to say, “Yes, I know I look like a nice white lady and that many of you have no idea who I am…but I will cooperate with the new perspectives of new school board members of color!” which tbh is solid — way more solid, anyway, than other white board members who don’t seem to grasp basic information about schools reopening and who center their own limited perspective in saying cognitively dissonant shit like, “Well, I’d want my kids out of the house and back in schools! But I still don’t want to have board meetings in person yet, it’s not safe.” Brim-Edwards at least had the decency to admit during the spring reopening process that the district has no real way to track which staff have been vaccinated, and therefore can’t guarantee real levels of safety that are contingent on high rates of vaccine protection: “We may be promising something to students and families that we can’t actually deliver on.”
  Um, yes! LMAO!
  I appreciated that she’s specifically named increased funding for socioemotional supports as we continue the strange, clunky process of attempting to meet student needs as we reopen schools. I can grasp the significance of longevity in this position in this time of great uncertainty, particularly as huge amounts of COVID-19 assistance money from the state and federal governments are dumped onto districts with that special combination of significant qualifying strings attached, yet no real guidance or recommendation for how money is to be spent. This kind of thing always goes well!

Bonus recommendations for our pals outside of PDX

• East County recommendations (MESD, Mount Hood Community College, Reynolds, David Douglas, Parkrose, Centennial): see East County Rising’s endorsements and vote right down the ballot with them. East County Rising is………so dope.
• Washington County recommendations (Tualatin Hills Parks and Rec, Portland Community College, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Tigard Tualatin): see trustworthy Washington County Ignite’s endorsements (make sure to click through the infographic and see their whole Insta for more recs)

Ballot Measure

• Measure 26–221: Five-year levy: Oregon Historical Society Library, Museum, educational programs: YES
  The Oregon Historical Society is absolutely savage in how it decries the racist-ass history of this country, and we want them to keep spreading the word for years to come. This four-year levy does not increase tax rates; it just maintains what’s already there. We want to preserve OHS’ ability to offer free admission to schools and county residents, to push into schools with educational programs and supplemental curriculum resources, and to do the literal work of preserving artifacts and illuminating narratives that help us understand how we got here today. Local history, in particular, needs to be preserved in the space where it happened or it risks being buried and ignored, with highlights from national or global history superseding the deeply engaging and informative series of events that happened right here. I hate that our students can rattle off the year of American independence but many aren’t sure which indigenous tribes historically stewarded the land on their block.
  Middle-class libs will literally not bat a single eyelash about their federal tax dollars funding the ruthless displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians but shuffle their feet about maintaining a small property tax levy that protects a MUSEUM. This is reprehensible.
  The Willamette Week summarized the financial burden as follows: “The levy costs homeowners 5 cents for every $1,000 of assessed property value. If your house is worth $200,000 — roughly the median home value in the county — you’ll pay $10 a year.” We know that homes in PDX are, on average, way more expensive than this, but if you own a home, you can afford the $25.
  VOTE YES PLZ!

It’s sunny out. I hope your plants are well-watered and that you are too.

I love you. I am rooting for you. Yes, YOU. Thank you for loving our students and schools enough to do a deep dive into their stewardship with me. Your votes in this election will directly affect these beloved, precious, powerful communities.

xoxo,
bitchtucci

EDIT: LOL it took a mere 5 minutes for my friends to yell at me to list $ links. OKAY stop yelling

There are so many important causes and ways to care for our extended community. If after you’ve been able to extend care to causes that sorely need support, I am humbled and grateful for any financial luv to do things like pay my mama’s utilities and keep her kimchi stock overflowing, buy dope counseling supplies to support my students, and heaven forbid buy a famous-on-YouTube pepper mill lmfao. I’m @marissayangbertucci on cash app/venmo/paypal. LOVE YA