Campaign Issues
So many issues face the Tahoma School District. Devin Leshin can tackle them and make our community a better place.
Below are just some of the main issues that Devin would like to address. He would love input on these issues in addition to any issues that are important to you and your family.
Issue #1 – Student Safety and Well-Being
Student Safety and Well-Being covers a broad range of topics that have been front and center in the district of late.
There is the ongoing concern around the physical safety of students within the scope of the buildings themselves. We all see some of the horrific events that happen elsewhere. Are we adequately safeguarding against a school incident both in terms of physical structure and procedures? This area needs to be continuously re-evaluated and done with transparency. Each school will have different concerns and needs to ensure this part of the safety is properly in place.
Next, there is the issue of bullying, which you see is my biggest passion issue. Every student deserves to feel safe and able to focus on learning. While there are current processes in place, they are reactive, not always put into place due to some misaligned triggers, and not effective in reducing the volume of bullying. We need a proactive framework to implement that reduces bullying by addressing core issues within the school community. It is my goal to create a committee of administrators (district and school), teachers, staff, and students to evaluate the many anti-bullying frameworks that exist and select and implement the one that the community feels would work the best here.
While these other efforts move forward, I would also seek to have the district expand support staff, including school counselors, social workers, psychologists, and nurses. I would then lean on the experts to do a discovery and evaluation around the level of social-emotional learning that has been integrated across all grade levels as well as the level of mental health support in every school. Based on their recommendations, it is my hope that the district administration would take steps to implement their findings.
Read more about my research and plan to address bullying here: https://devin4tsd.com/blog/?viewDetailed=20250723239
Issue #2 – Over-Crowding
While school over-crowding is certainly a safety issue, I have it as it’s own issue because it is more than just a safety issue. It affects the quality of education that students can receive. It affects the opportunities that students are able to get. It affect the stress on the teachers, who frankly have enough stress already. It affects the administrators who are trying to solve issues with actual physical constraints that keep them from doing so. It is a mess. It is certainly one of the most talked about issues in the district.
While the high school is the most obvious case of over-crowding and is often the focus, there are many other schools that are either over-crowded or dangerously close to being overcrowded. Go to Summit Trail Middle School one day and watch the monitors in the office while the students are moving between classes. Go to one of the many elementary schools that have similar physical “packing in” of students. Ask the teachers who have 30+ students in their classroom. This is a big issue and it is not going away any time soon.
Yes, a new high school would help in that specific case. Yes, a new middle school would help. Yes, new elementary schools would help. We should not rule any of that out. At the same time, when there is a trust issue within the community of the district’s abilities to properly use funds and the lack of transparency there, it would be hard to get a levy through to build a new school. To be clear, that is a horrible set of circumstances that this current administration has inherited from years and years of distrust forming.
What’s the answer then? Well, we may have to get creative. Again, we need to pull in representatives from all stakeholders in the district and let’s come up with some possible solutions. The issue at STMS maybe be alleviated looking at something like staggered releases from classes. There may need to be a reorganization of how buildings are being leveraged. Again, looking at STMS, it may be worth considering building some expansion on their location and have that be a second high school while we redeploy middle school students to potentially 1 or 2 other schools. Perhaps we could work with partner organizations, such as Green River College, to expand the services they offer to our high school students. These are just some examples of potential solutions that I have either thought of or came out through conversations with other parents and staff. This will take all of us to solve and will likely be a layered solution. We may not be able to solve it with one change.
Issue #3 – Support for the Most Vulnerable Students
When most people hear the term special education, they tend to immediately think of students with IEPs or 504s or special needs that have not yet been able to obtain either of those mechanisms. Special education also covers ANY student with ANY special need. That includes our kids that are in the High Cap program (or need to be). You also have the cross over of kids in High Cap that are also on an IEP/504, referred to often as “twice exceptional”. It all comes down to the fact that these students need special considerations to success and flourish in school. These are also often the kids that fall through the cracks. Again, this is typically due to a lack of available resources for the teachers or a lack of professional development opportunities that focuses on these specific sets of students.
I will use my children as examples here. Both have IEPs or 504s. I am giving their examples because I would bet that these situations will resonate with a lot of you. It is not a problem just for our family.
My oldest was in the limited High Cap program. It is missing a High Cap science component in middle school and High Cap support effectively ends after middle school. If you have a child who is High Cap, think about a class where the majority of their work was done with worksheets. How well did they do and how interested and engaged were they? How were their grades? I would wager the answers are not positive. I know that was the case with mine.
My son is going into 5th grade. He is definitely behind on grade level skills and behind on his IEP goals. A combination of being bullied and not having a learning plan that leans into his strengths has severely affected his attendance, which compounds the issue. With him being an autistic student and being behind on the more basic skills, he would not even be considered for the Discovery program in its current form, despite his learning needs being extremely similar to other students in that program. So, how can we support kids not in the Discovery program and, at the same time, need that type of differentiated learning to help them succeed?
I do not mention these examples as a “look at my kids”. I have heard story after story from parents struggling to get their kids on an IEP or 504. I have heard stories from parents struggling with getting the resources needed to support the IEP or 504 that is in place. Again and again, I hear and watch students who have similar struggles to my kids just fall away. This HAS to be our focus. This HAS to get attention and resources to solve this issue. I am confident in the district administrator whose area this would fall under. I look forward to working with him along with teachers, parents, and students to figure this out.
