CAMANO: Three running for Stanwood-Camano School Board at-large position (SCN)

Isabella Loy reports for the Stanwood Camano News from a campaign event in Stanwood.

With the primary election fast approaching, Brookdale Senior Living in Stanwood hosted listening sessions for candidates, including all three running for the Stanwood-Camano School Board District 5 at-large position…. [T]he at-large position is the only to be affected in the primary. The other two seats only have one candidate for each and will advance to the general election in November.

They Said It

As founder and president of Stanwood-Camano Alliance For Equity (SAFE), [Satin-Deseree] Arnett said she already has a close working relationship with the School District.

“I have had the immense pleasure to get to work very closely with our school district, with our schools, our students, our board,” she said.

“[SAFE] advocate[s] hugely for student voice and for parent voice,” Arnett said. “So I have pushed our school district of last few years, sometimes a little hard, to get parents and students and everybody’s voices involved on things.”

[S]he said one of her priorities is collaborative involvement between the district and families.

“I really believe that if we have every voice included, they are really going to be able to help,” she said. “We can’t live in an echo chamber, and our students are such a diverse population. So we need to make sure that everybody is involved.”

Teaching financial literacy early on is another thing Arnett will push for if elected, she said.

“I have a 14-year-old right now, and he started mowing yards in the neighborhood, and I told him ‘OK, you’re starting out in business, you have to pay for your gas for your lawnmower — I’m going to teach you how to run this as a business,’” she said. “He is doing that now, and he’s been very successful. So that is another thing I believe is very important that we teach our youths in school.”

[Steve King‘s] biggest goal if elected is to drill in on vocational training for students.

“(We need to be) helping them, starting in elementary school, develop personal qualities that will be attractive to employers, like work ethic, and responsibility and so on — as well as thankfulness,” King said.

Recently, King took a tour of the new Stanwood High School and said he was impressed with the shop classes.

“It’s better here than anything in Southern California when I was teaching,” he said. “That’s absolutely amazing.”

King said he wants students to realize that not everyone has to go to college, and many students might be able to get the training they need for a high-paying job right here, during high school.

He also hopes he can guide students to career paths where they will end up with little to no student debt. He completed eight years of vocational training and college with no debt.

“My goal for our students … is that they will get whatever they need to prepare for life, whether it’s a Ph.D., bachelor’s degree, associate degree or just high school graduation — carefully focused to give them the career they want,” he said.

“I believe that education is the answer to most of our problems and the resolution of most of our differences,” [Phil Snider] said. “And I’m not talking about just the education of the individual students. I’m talking about education in our entire society and community.”

Snider said he believes strongly in the importance of building relationships between students, parents, the district and surrounding community.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard business leaders tell us ‘Don’t try to teach our students the everyday nitty-gritty stuff they’re going to do when they come to work. We teach them that. We want students to come to us who can read, who can write, who can think critically, who can calculate and compute,’” he said.

Snider has two grandchildren in the Stanwood-Camano School District, so he said he understands the need for family involvement.

“These are not the board’s children, they’re not the school’s children, they’re not the districts, children, they’re not the state’s children,” he said. “They’re my daughter’s children. They’re my grandchildren. And we have an obligation to see to it that we are supporting the goals and respecting the values of the parents of those children.”

On the Ballot in 2023