PORT ANGELES — Three positions on the five-member Port Angeles School District Board are up for grabs in the Nov. 7 general election.
Incumbent Sandy Long is running unopposed for the Position 4 seat and Kirsten Williams is running unopposed for the Position 5 seat being vacated by Jacob Wright. Stan Williams is running against last-minute write-in candidate Chris Noble for the Position 3 seat being vacated by Katie Marks.
Long, Kirsten Williams and the winner of the Stan Williams-Chris Noble contest will join board members Sarah Methner (Position 1) and Mary Hebert (Position 2) whose terms expire in November 2025.
Position 3
Stan Williams is a retired heavy equipment operator who moved to Port Angeles in 1987 and whose two sons attended district schools. This is the first time he has run for public office.
“I want kids to get an education. Without an education, they cannot prosper and every kid in the country should have an opportunity to prosper,” he said. “We throw a lot of money at education and we’re not getting much out of it. It’s stealing from the kids.”
His priorities are curriculum, school safety and the budget.
Although he had not seen the history books used in the district, Stan Williams said he was nonetheless concerned about their content.
“We need to teach them [students] true history,” he said. “This country is not a perfect place by far. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but the only way we don’t make mistakes anymore is to have history that teaches you what we’ve done before and how not to do that again.”
Training veterans to patrol schools to deter would-be shooters and protect students was a proactive measure the district needed to consider, Williams said.
“I don’t foresee it, but I think that it’s something that we should be aware of,” Williams said. “Once it’s here, we can’t do anything about it, we need to do something before it can start.”
When it comes to school funding, Williams said he wanted to work to find sources other than levies and bonds to pay for capital improvements and operating expenses.
“I think we need to fund schools, but we need to get it off the backs of just property owners,” he said.
Position 3, write-in
Write-in candidate Noble retired with his wife to Port Angeles in 2018 after careers in education and business. He said he decided to run for the school board to give voters a choice in the Position 3 contest. This is his first time running for public office.
“I bring experience and skills that I think will be helpful in managing the school district,” Noble said. “I’m interested in digging into the budget, asking some good questions and figuring out if there’s anything we can do better with the money.”
Noble said his priorities are school funding, classroom behavior and the upcoming district bond campaign.
“Allocation of funds by the state is not working well for Port Angeles and want to try and help our legislators do a better job with that,” Noble said.
After working as a substitute teacher and math tutor at Stevens Middle School and the high school, he said he wanted to address some of the behavior he saw.
“From my experience in the schools, discipline issues are really detracting from teachers’ ability to deliver on content. They spend too much of their time with classroom management,” Noble said. “I don’t have a solution, but maybe there’s something we can do to improve the situation so that students can spend more of their time learning.”
When it comes to the bond the district plans to put in front of voters in 2024, Noble said the district needed to effectively communicate to voters exactly how the money was going to collected and spent to improve its chances of passing.
Position 4, unopposed
Incumbent Long is a retired educator who has lived in Port Angeles for 21 years and served on the school board for eight. Long said that serving on the board was hard work, but that she enjoyed it and working with the other members.
“I like to work as an advocate for children,” Long said. “We work very hard to build consensus and work for the children of this district.” Long said the poor condition of schools, particularly the high school, and funding were her primary concerns.
“One of our major issues is facilities,” Long said. “We’re building a new middle school — the community passed a capital levy o do that and we have to wait until we’ve collected all the funds. In the coming year we’re going to come to the community with a bond for the high school and Franklin Elementary.”
The state largely does not fund capital projects like constructing schools, Long said, which puts financial pressure on small rural communities like Port Angeles. The formulas the state uses to allocate funds to districts has also negatively impacted Port Angeles compared to its neighbors, she said.
Long said she would continue to travel to Olympia to push local legislators to make changes that would benefit the children in the district they represent. “We need their help,” she said.
Position 5, unopposed
Kirsten Williams and her husband retired to Port Angeles from central Washington about 18 months ago. She worked in the technology industry writing training and certification materials and served on the Index School District Board of Directors about 20 years ago.
Williams said began volunteering at a number of organizations when she arrived in Port Angeles and decided to run for office when she saw there were no other candidates.
“If a couple people had filed, I would not have filed,” she said. “I kept watching to see if anybody was going to file and nobody did, and I thought, OK, I guess I’ll do it.”
Williams said that from conversations with the people in the community, it appeared to hear that things were going fairly well in the district. “I don’t see any real high concern areas, but I am concerned about school funding overall and don’t feel that it’s adequate and equitable,” she said.
Williams said she was interested in improving the district’s technology infrastructure and practices. “I really see it as a tool to help students learn and streamlining processes for staff and teachers and administration,” she said. “Also being aware of things like AI [artificial intelligence] and how that’s going to impact everything and get ahead of any negative impact.”
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Paula Hunt can be reached at 360-425-2345, ext. 50583, or by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
