School Boards Matter: 2026 Candidate Guide

Jennifer Dahlquist Ramirez

What do you see as the greatest challenges facing public school districts over the next several years? 

Districts ,are absorbing obligations they were never funded to carry, and the absorption is invisible. When a campus cannot cover what it needs, the gap closes quietly: a teacher buys the paper, a parent writes the check, a class meets in a library. Nothing visibly breaks, so nothing gets recorded, and the board reads a budget that never shows what it cost the people standing closest to the child.

Buildings are the version of this that cannot be absorbed much longer. In September 2024, Poway Unified staff projected that by 2028 more than 35 of our campuses would rate poor or critical, against $185 million in need and $1.2 million available. Two of our schools have had mold this month.

Underneath both sits the harder problem, which is memory. Leadership turns over, and each change costs a district what the last person knew. Practices that work stay trapped in one classroom because nothing required anyone to write them down. A district that cannot hold what it learns, will relearn it every few years, and children pay the tuition each time.

Governance is the variable. Effort is not the shortage in public education.

How should school boards respond to increasing political polarization, censorship efforts, attacks on policies/programs aimed at supporting marginalized students, and declining trust in public education?

You cannot separate politics from education, as a system is only as good as its governance. What a board can do is make protection structural, so it does not depend on which majority is seated.

Programs that rest on the goodwill of five people end when those five change. What survives is a written requirement and a public report. If a district must show, on a schedule, how each group of its students is doing in discipline, attendance, identification, and achievement, then a board that wants to walk away from those students has to do it in public, with the numbers on the screen and its name on the vote. That is harder than repealing a program nobody was measuring.

On trust, districts lose it through delay far more often than through disagreement. A letter about mold that reaches families on a Saturday, ten days after students walked back in, costs more trust than the repair costs money. Publish early, publish what you do not yet know, and correct the record in public when you get it wrong.

I have never seen a system correct a failure it was permitted to hide.

How would you work to ensure that all students, including students from historically marginalized communities, feel safe, supported, respected, and able to fully participate in school? What role should school boards play in creating inclusive school cultures?

Belonging is the condition under which learning happens, and conditions are what a board controls. Environment determines expression, and regulation precedes reasoning, which means a student in distress is not available for instruction no matter how good the lesson is.

A board sets conditions through what it requires itself to see. Discipline outcomes, chronic absenteeism, restraint and seclusion, complaint outcomes, and identification rates, disaggregated and reported on a fixed cadence, tell a board where its schools are safe and for whom. Our own 2025 California School Dashboard rates Poway Unified Blue, the state's highest level, for all students in English, math, graduation, and college and career readiness. In the same year, it rates students experiencing homelessness Red in math and in chronic absenteeism, and long-term English learners Red in English, Red in math, and Red in chronic absenteeism.

Access is the other half. Any family should be able to reach a trustee about their child without a form, an appointment, or a reason. Meetings should be accessible to a parent who works nights and speaks Spanish at home.

The signal is present in this district every day. What is missing is enough structure to receive it.

Educator burnout, staffing shortages, and retention challenges continue to affect schools across California. What do you believe districts should do to better support and retain teachers, counselors, classified staff, and other school employees?

Teachers and classified staff are the shock absorber this district has been using in place of a budget, and people leave when they are the only thing holding a system up.

Three things a board can do: 1. Put caseload and staffing standards in writing, so that a specialist's load is a number the district owes rather than whatever the year hands her. 2. Require reporting on vacancies, caseloads, and long-term substitute placement, because a core class went ten school days at my daughter's school without an assigned teacher and families learned it only because a parent asked. 3. Stop passing budget holes down: a teacher standing in front of forty parents with a donation slide is delivering a decision made somewhere above her, by people she cannot name.

There is also a tax on the best teachers. When a district declines to specify what replaces missed instruction, the teachers who care most build it themselves, unpaid and unasked, and what they build leaves with them. Write the answer down districtwide, build it from what those teachers already made, and pay them for the making.

Ask staff who leave why. Then publish it.

Student achievement data often reflects persistent disparities based on race, income, disability, language access, housing instability, and other factors. What strategies or priorities would you support to improve student outcomes while also addressing underlying inequities?

Demographics are not destiny, and the evidence is not in dispute. Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, moved from 49th toward the top of national reading; adjusted for demographics, it now ranks first in fourth-grade reading. Compton Unified, roughly 95 percent high-need, beat California's state math average in 2024. Neither district got richer. Both were run by adults who watched the system closely and adjusted quickly.

That is oversight, and oversight is the board's actual job.

For a district like ours, the first move is early identification. A student identified in third grade costs the district less and costs the child far less than the same student identified in ninth, and every year of delay is paid twice, once in services and again in the dispute that follows. Child Find is a legal obligation, and it is also the cheapest equity intervention available.

The second is disproportionality, tracked honestly and in public: who gets identified, in which categories, who gets suspended, and how those rates differ by race, language, and disability. Our district's own state data already shows where the harm concentrates. A board that reads its own dashboard has no excuse for being surprised.

Schools are increasingly navigating questions related to technology, artificial intelligence, social media, student privacy, and digital safety. What principles should guide district decisions around technology use while ensuring students are both prepared for the future and protected from harm?

Artificial intelligence is a governance question before it is a classroom question, and a board's authority is over procurement and disclosure. Families should be able to read a published inventory of every platform operating in our schools: what student data each collects, who holds it, how long it is kept, and what the district agreed to when it signed, without filing a records request.

One line matters more than the rest. No tool should generate or screen a decision about a child's identification, eligibility, discipline, or placement without a person accountable by name for that decision. An algorithm can flag; it cannot assess, and it cannot be questioned at an IEP table.

There is a quieter risk in what we already use. At Back-to-School Night this year, I learned which platform stores the grade and which stores the assignment, and to check a missing-work report on Sunday nights. Nobody taught me what my daughter would learn this year. A dashboard assumes an adult at home with the time and language to run it, and there is not an adult behind every student. A tool that sorts children by what their households can operate has made an equity decision without a vote.

How should school districts ensure that all students, regardless of background, identity, ability, or zip code, have equitable access to high-quality academic programs, mental health supports, extracurricular opportunities, and pathways to college and careers?

Access varies inside a single district, campus by campus and classroom by classroom, and most of that variation has never been put in front of a board. I watched three teachers on one campus give three different answers to what happens when a child misses a day of instruction. Same evening, same tools, same district.

So the first requirement is a map: what is offered at each school, which counselors and specialists are actually in the building, which positions are vacant, and which pathways a student at that campus can reach. A board cannot equalize access it has never seen listed.

The second is cost. A public school with a price of admission has already sorted its families. At my daughter's school this fall, one student's cost before October ran $465 in supplies, program fees, and foundation asks, before the Jogathon and the classroom donation lists. Fundraising is how a district converts its own shortfall into a family's problem, and the families with the least room are the ones who quietly step back.

The third is the standard itself: one districtwide answer to what replaces missed instruction, the same at every school, built from what our best teachers already made.

School board members must balance their duty to act in the best interest of students and the families they represent with the practical realities of overseeing a district's operations and finances. How do you plan to communicate with your constituents to understand their needs and priorities? What steps will you take to follow through and verify that what the district reports is actually being implemented as promised?

No family waits its turn to be heard. Any parent, any educator, any day, with no form, no appointment, and no reason required. Access is the board's work rather than a favor it grants, and I will keep that door open on the record.

Listening is the easy half. Verification is where governance actually happens, and it runs on instruments rather than assurances.

Three I would build. A standing facilities report on a fixed schedule, with each campus's condition in it, so trustees learn the state of a building before a principal has to discover it. A written notification threshold, adopted in open session, specifying what triggers a letter to families and how fast it goes out. Publication of trustee questions on consent items alongside the staff answers, so the public sees the reasoning behind hundreds of spending decisions a year.

Reports create a record, and a record is what makes a promise checkable a year later. Where a district will not report, the California Public Records Act still works, and I have used it.

I keep nothing from the people I serve.

For more about Jen, visit: www.jenforpoway.com