Endorsing Disability - Getting Special Education on the Election Agenda

Near disaster in 2022. Only 2 school board candidates showed up out of 4 running. Non-existent attendance. Stumbling into a city that has more candidate forums and events than coffee shops.

I felt like a fool.

However:

I got to know those candidates and made connections that continue today.

Both candidates were much more aware of special education as a priority in the school district.

Mission Accomplished(-ish)

There had to be a better way.

By this point, I had hosted 3 school board candidate forums over 5 years.

My mission had always been to get the candidates aware of special education as a priority. That part had worked from the beginning. But logistics and attendance were tricky. Even a successful forum isn’t seen by that many people. And – how do I get candidates to show up?

Plus I hated the standard forum format.

• My goal was never to play “gotcha” with candidates.?

Even parents with students in special education rarely have a good understanding of the system beyond their own child… and if you aren’t in special education… it is pretty invisible.

• 1 to 2-minute answers on the fly were often awful.?

Too many questions at forums wind up with a common answer that all candidates want to give, but somehow have to answer with something besides “what she said”.By this third forum, I had been researching interview strategies and come up with something I call:

Duplicate Interviews

Every candidate gets the same questions.

They get the questions in advance

The questions are designed to lead to very different answers.

One side benefit of having so few attendees in 2022, is that I really didn’t keep the candidates on a clock. This gave the audience (I think it may have been just 3 of us – we barely outnumbered the candidates) a chance to see how they thought… this was a win.

The Long Game

I’ve been actively attending school board meetings since we moved to Palo Alto – more than 3 years. I speak regularly, and hopefully respectfully, to elevate special education to the board and district. In addition, I’ve hosted weekly open coffees for special education parents since school started in August of 2023 (both topics for future issues).

All of this made it pretty easy for me to connect with candidates early this round. I was even asked to run for the board (thank you but no thank you). I did wind up getting to talk to pretty much every candidate as they were considering their run. I don’t think this is necessary, but the more you are a known, thoughtful quantity in your local community, the easier the process is going to be.

A Happy Accident

The Wednesday coffees have highly variable attendance and simply asking people to invite their friends works only sporadically. Also, sometimes, people would linger and… I don’t have a ton of time, so I wanted to keep things moving. In early May, I hosted our first guest, who happened to be a school board candidate.

Bingo!

Better meeting management and a great way for candidates to meet with a number of parents in a casual way and a great way to show candidates that this is a constituency that they need to pay attention to.

It is worth remembering that over 12% of students have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), more have 504 Plans (the other official US disability certification for students), and still others have disabilities that do not qualify – dyslexia, anxiety, ADHD, and more – so close to 20% of the student (and voting) population – in Palo Alto this is around 2000 students and 4000 parents in an election where a couple of hundred votes matters - your numbers may vary, but they are likely similar

Taking on too much?

I was asked regularly to endorse candidates. This was awkward as I had decided that I wouldn’t do that as no matter who wins, I want to be able to have a good relationship with them and work with them. Two friends (Forest and Cari) suggested that I start a Democratic Club that could endorse candidates. This was consistent with my long-term goal of building Disability Political Power….but we didn’t get enough people soon enough to participate in the local party endorsement process – this year (another future topic). This took some time but didn’t stop me from priming the active candidates and getting them scheduled for interviews. They came over to my house, answered the questions that I provided them, and the interviews are live.

Live

How is it going?

As of this morning (10/18/2024):

There have been 356 page views to the interview page at: https://disabilityalmanac.com/pa2024/

35 new contacts (I have not been great about working this systematically)

303 views of on the DisabilityAlmanac YouTube channel totaling 31.6 hours.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX0Gvi56NMW2ycHtNsHUVhQ…

Not Mr. Beast numbers by any stretch of the imagination, but a start.

Most importantly, we hosted 9 candidate coffees on special education, each of the candidates spent around 2 hours with me recording their interviews and I’ve spent at least an hour (usually 2) helping make them aware of special education in our community.It seems to be paying off. All 5 active candidates are talking about special education and it has become part of the overall public agenda of this campaign.

We will see what happens after the election.