Letter: ‘I hope you fill your ballots out and consider casting a vote for me’

Jacob Smith makes his case for a position on the Evergreen School Board

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

Originally I wanted to serve on both the Charter Review Commission and Evergreen School Board. However, I feel my impact is on the school board as I feel EPS is making questionable moves. We have had three strikes in seven years, no librarians and our communication has gone wayside. We also lost Dr. Singleton and I learned a ton from her about what our district needs.

I have attended EPS schools and remember when our addresses were started. My journey at EPS at Silver Star Elementary in 1997, then went to Covington where I was in the first 8th grade class to attend and graduate from new Covington while being one of the first students to take AVID and finally Heritage where I was a three-sport varsity athlete (cross country, swimming and track) and was a member of both DECA and FBLA. DECA and FBLA have become points in the campaign and I will explain why I am using those organizations in my campaign. I would love to get support for these fantastic organizations, end bargaining bonuses, bring International Baccalaureate to the schools and revive the AVID program. Most importantly get me on the board.

Communication

Our district is confusing when it comes to communication. Most recently they put forth a budget committee yet it was buried on their site and I only found out the day before the deadline. I also found it confusing that they said up to 30 people on this committee and you’ll have 90 meetings yet they don’t pick what days they are meeting nor the composition of the board.

Furthermore, I find it interesting our board refused to condemn comments that were said at the table. It is not respectful to say things such as this isn’t Burger King you can’t have it your way or you don’t have the juice to strike.

Our district also has only three liaisons. I reiterated at the Oct. 28 meeting that the size of our district makes zero sense to only have three liaisons between our 38 schools. Skyward is also not available in other languages which was brought to my attention by Dr. Singleton. In fact, VPS has 14 liaisons to our three. In spite of Heritage offering an Accounting and Business English class that offers college credit, we have a hard time filling those classes in some years. Having more liaisons especially during the forecasting process would help determine what our district truly needs. Forecasting is time sensitive as we build our master schedule and hire in May.

Why DECA and FBLA?

These organizations are what Evergreen students have excelled in. State officers since 2017, awesome projects, placement at FBLA Nationals five of the last five conferences – 2021, 22, 23, 24 and 25. In fact Heritage had its first national placer since 2019 at this year’s conference placing 9th.

I find it illogical that our district hasn’t given Heritage a retail operation given that it has an Advisor of the Year and of the last seven schools with an Advisor of the Year for Washington DECA, only Heritage does not have a retail operation. This should cause our community to pause. Student store is a fantastic class and Heritage has had the Wolf Den Cafe be gold certified since 2010. I would be open to bringing retail stores to all of our high schools to help our district’s DECA program and to hope they take the opportunity to certify them. In fact, FBLA has a new event called on campus commerce which does presentations about on campus operations. This event is right up Heritage’s alley.

Our middle schools also do not have an FBLA chapter. This is in spite of the fact that Jemtegaard had an FBLA chapter during my time at Heritage and Kamiakin Middle School having 642 students at their school. Kamiakin is the largest middle level FBLA chapter in the state of Washington. Most of the middle level chapters are from rural areas such as central and eastern Washington. Our schools are more populous than Kamiakin and logic says we’re more populous than the rural schools in central and eastern Washington. (Frontier 800, Cascade 862, Pacific 833, Covington 876, Shahala 809 and Wy ‘east 777). It makes no sense for our middle schools to not have FBLA especially with the beacon of talent in southwest Washington FBLA and especially because there are six allocations to state on the table. Our schools excel at FBLA and DECA and I enjoyed my time with these organizations while at Heritage. My goal is to propose an amendment to the CBA to add compensation for FBLA advisors to jumpstart our middle schools.

$31,000. The number that the board hates to hear. This was the compensation that our bargaining team received during the 2023 strike. I call them bargaining bonuses because saying you want to end supplemental contracts opens unclear definitions and is not a good idea. Our lead negotiator who makes over 250k a year received a nice $14,000 bonus. PSE was willing to go over Labor Day weekend if the district agreed to not accept bargaining bonuses. Shockingly they refused that part of the deal. $31,000 could have funded AVID, IB for the year at one of our schools, or easily given merchandise for our retail operations. I found it appalling we can’t have certain programs but bargaining bonuses oh my.

I hope you fill your ballots out and consider casting a vote for me.

Facebook: Facebook.com/jacobsmith4evergreenps

Jacob Smith
Vancouver