Tuesday school board elections: Tulsa District 1 candidates state their positions

Current board President Stacey Woolley and Jared Buswell are vying for the seat. With redistricting completed, TPS campuses within District 1 in this election include Clinton West, Council Oak, Emerson, Eugene Field, Robertson and Wayman Tisdale elementary schools; Webster Middle and High School; KIPP Tulsa University Prep High School, and Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences.

After the election, Emerson’s campus will shift to District 2 in order to accommodate new precinct lines. Located in the former Wright Elementary School, Collegiate Hall will be added to District 1.

A citizen of the Choctaw Nation, Woolley is a certified speech language pathologist and dyslexia interventionist. A former PTA chapter president, she was elected to the board in 2019 and has three children currently attending TPS. She has also served as a substitute teacher for the district, including a stint at the start of the current school year at Clinton West.

“I believe that literacy is the great equalizer,” she said. “The job of a public school is to ensure that our kids are prepared to go out into the world.”

During Woolley’s tenure, the board solicited community feedback to develop a series of student-outcome focused goals, including improving literacy rates among elementary and middle school students, increasing the percentage of seniors completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid from 41% in 2020 to 70% by 2027, and increasing the percentage of multilingual students hitting their growth goals on state-mandated English language assessments.

Those goals were formally adopted by the board in late 2021 with regular updates starting in January 2022.

Despite being taken aback by the increased politicization of school board meetings since initially getting elected, Woolley said she wants another term on the board to help work toward achieving those goals across the school district, particularly now that reliable data are once again becoming available with respect to goals tied to standardized tests.

“It takes a good minute to get started doing something like board work,” she said. “It’s been a rough few years, quite frankly, for the whole world. I’m … hopeful that we’re coming into some normalcy, and I would love the opportunity to be on the board with the changes we’ve implemented.”

In addition to continuing the board’s efforts to focus more on improving students’ academic outcomes, Woolley said she would also prioritize students’ physical and emotional safety if elected to a second term, including seeking additional resources for counselors and other mental health professionals.

“Without feeling safe, fed and comfortable, both emotionally and physically, a child is not going to learn how to read,” she said at a forum hosted by the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association and the League of Women Voters on Tuesday night. “We have to invest in all of those things in order to be able to teach our children.”

Buswell is a small-business owner and has lived in west Tulsa for 15 years. He is on the national Board of Directors for Favor International, a Christian-based nonprofit organization that primarily works with communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

During a February campaign speech to the City Elders, a conservative Christian group whose stated goals include “drafting civil laws which reflect and uphold Biblical values and Judeo-ecclesia ethics,” Buswell described public schools as being occupied by “systemic demonic strongholds.”

When asked, he said those remarks were meant to convey to that specific audience the existence of systems and policies that set up individuals to fail.

“Using the language of the group I was speaking to, it was a phrase I came up with,” he said.

Buswell does not have children, and at Tuesday night’s candidate forum he said he has had little direct involvement with District 1 schools.

Instead, he said he is running due to his frustration with the district’s COVID-19 response and the blocs that tend to appear in the board’s voting habits.

“Our current board president has the support of three other yes people,” Buswell said. “I think that without this one person on the board — and I couldn’t let this seat run unopposed considering the way things are being run — I really believe it’s not just a 4-3 flip.”

The board’s seventh member, Diamond Marshall, was sworn into office on March 20 and, other than on a motion to table a goal-monitoring report in the interest of time, has abstained on votes since taking office.

Along with wanting an additional review of the district’s finances, Buswell said one of his immediate priorities if elected would be to seek policy changes in an effort to allow for more discussion between the community and board members during school board meetings.

Currently, board members are not allowed to engage in dialogue during the meetings with speakers who are signed up for public comment or citizens’ comment. The former is restricted to comments about items on the published action agenda, while the latter may be on any topic but subject to prior review by legal counsel.

“There’s no really inviting people to come together and reason together and make solutions for our schools,” he said.

Early walk-in voting will also be available Friday at county election boards. Election Day at the polls is Tuesday.

Other area school districts with seats on Tuesday’s ballot include Anderson, Berryhill, Bixby, Chelsea, Claremore Sequoyah, Inola, Mounds, Oologah-Talala and Sand Springs.