Those campaigning for two Long Beach City College Board of Trustees positions, two Long Beach Unified School District Governing Board spots and three city council seats were in attendance at the event. Moderator John Glaza, a graduate of Leadership Long Beach, led the event, which was also organized by the Long Beach Public Library, Long Beach Community Action Partnership, Public Access Digital Network and Palacio Magazine.
Glaza began by asking each of the four candidates to choose one of Leadership Long Beach’s 14 principles and explain why it is important to them. The 14 principles the nonprofit embraces are integrity, teamwork, respect, values, compassion, accountability, vision, personal responsibility, ethics, commitment, courage, congruence, service and trusteeship.
Felton Williams, the incumbent who currently represents Area 2, said a good leader must embrace all 14 of those characteristics but teamwork, in particular, has worked extremely well for Long Beach Unified School District.
“We’ve got a group of committed folks that serve on the board that work very well together,” Williams said of the current school board members. “Because of that, we have really moved the district forward as one of the top-performing urban school districts in the nation and one of the…top 20 urban school districts in the world. It’s because of the ability of all our folks to put their partisan things aside and focus on the classroom and the kids.”
Williams’s challenger, Jessica Vargas-Alvarez, responded to the same question by choosing accountability.
“In order for us to do meaningful changes, we need to make sure we hold everyone accountable as parents,” she said. “Myself, I’m going to ensure that we’re accountable for our students but… also representative in who does policies and puts programs in place and hold it all across the table. Our children are being held accoutable; so [are] our stakeholders all over the city. I think it’s very important that accountability is one of my priorities and what I would bring to the table as leadership.”
Moving on to those seeking to represent Area 4, Glaza directed the same question to incumbent Jon Meyer and challenger Rosi Pedersen.
Meyer chose integrity.
“I think a person of high integrity embodies values, beliefs, an ethos that speaks well to serving kids, teachers and support staff, and the community,” he said. “Show me a person with high integrity, and I think he or she will embody every one of these characteristics that Leadership Long Beach has identified.”
Pedersen said it’s “hard to be the last person” to respond because she agrees with all the traits the other candidates chose, but vision, in particular, was her choice of trait on which to focus.
“I think all of our board members need to have a vision for what they see will be best for our students in the district,” she said. “As board members, we represent the parents and the children. So, ‘What is the best for our children? What’s the vision?'”
Pedersen also echoed Williams’s sentiment about the importance of teamwork in serving on the school board.
Glaza then posed the second question for the candidates, which was, “The State is now allowing school districts to redirect their allocation from the art and music block grant to fund other priorities. How would you balance the need to invest in arts education with other financial challenges facing the district?”
Alvarez was given the opportunity to respond first.
“Being able to work together with our local schools to be able to balance the needs, because every school has different needs,” Alvarez said. “So, I think we would have to bring to the table the discussion of our local school administration and our school site councils to see what those needs are in order for us to balance and to be able to move forward and to be able to meet those needs.”
Williams began his response by emphasizing that arts education has always been a top priority for the school district, even during severe budget cuts.
“We have directed a lot of our decision-making down to our school sites, and they have the funding to go along with that,” Williams said. “So, the school sites, basically, would say that these are programs that they want to have at their particular school, and if those recommendations were ‘all contained’— we call them the ‘single plan for student achievement’— if those recommendations were part of increasing the academic success of the kids, then they would get approved by the board. But we put that capacity for making those kinds of decisions at the site level.”
Glaza presented a new question to Meyer and Pedersen, asking, “How can the district ensure equal opportunities for high- and low-achieving students?”
Pedersen commended the school district for already doing a good job of “equalizing” resources for all students. She mentioned “local-control funding,” in which the district distributes the same amount of monies to the different schools for them to spend as they see fit at their sites. However, the district retains a portion of that funding so that schools that still have particular needs may request more money for programs or resources to meet those deficiencies.
Meyer said it all begins in pre-kindergarten and that there needs to be benchmarks along the way, in grades 3, 5 and 6, to discern when intervention is needed. He agreed with Pedersen about the importance of local-control funding.
Glaza then asked the candidates, “What sets you apart from the other candidates running for this position?”
