Jen LaVallee, D7 Seattle School Board Candidate

Rainy Day Recess Episode 55

October 6, 2025

Christie Robertson: Welcome to Rainy Day Recess, where we study and discuss Seattle Public Schools, and welcome back to our 2025 Seattle School Board Candidate series. 

Today we bring you the two candidates from District 7, which covers South Seattle. We covered D2, D4, and D5 before the primary, and we will re-air the two finalists for each of those districts. It's important to note that in the general election, every Seattle voter will have all four of these districts on their ballot. 

This is our interview with Jen LaVallee. Be sure to listen to our interview with Carol Rava, which is also in your feed. We'll give you a quick preview of that interview at the end of this episode.​

Hello listeners, I'm Christie Robertson.

Cherylynne Crowther: And I'm Cherylynne Crowther.

Christie Robertson: And today we are here with Jen LaVallee. And Jen, thanks for running for School Board and welcome to Rainy Day Recess. 

Jen Levallee: Thank you so much for having me. 

Lightning Round

Christie Robertson: We are going to start with a lightning round. This section is meant to help listeners get to know you quickly. It'll be a mix of quick-answer and yes/no questions, so keep your answers very brief.

First, what are your name and pronouns? 

Jen Levallee: My name is Jen LaVallee and my pronouns are she/her. 

Christie Robertson: And how do you describe, “what you do?” 

Jen Levallee: I am a product designer who creates solutions for user problems, focusing on product lifecycle, doing research strategy and design, while balancing people's goals for their products and systems and what the business needs.

Christie Robertson: What director district are you running for, and what neighborhoods does it encompass? 

Jen Levallee: I'm running for District 7, which is approximately South Seattle. It goes from Rainier Beach to Mount Baker in the north, including a little bit of the International District and First Hill. It also includes 22 schools as the largest of the director districts.

Cherylynne Crowther: Next, some background questions, so answer yes or no where possible. Add a short explanation if something needs context. 

Have you attended a school board meeting? Yes. Have you testified at a board meeting? 

Jen Levallee: Yes. 

Cherylynne Crowther: Have you testified in the state legislature? 

Jen Levallee: Yes. 

Cherylynne Crowther: And where did you go to school as a child? 

Jen Levallee: I went to school in the Ross Valley School District in Northern California.

Cherylynne Crowther: And do you have, or have you had kids in Seattle Public Schools? 

Jen Levallee: Yes. I have my two kids in elementary school in Seattle Public Schools. 

Cherylynne Crowther: Have you worked in education? 

Jen Levallee: I have not.

Cherylynne Crowther: Have you been in a union? 

Jen Levallee: I unfortunately have not. 

Cherylynne Crowther: And have you ever been on a board? 

Jen Levallee: I have. 

Cherylynne Crowther: And have you ever worked with a large budget?

Jen Levallee: I have not. 

Christie Robertson: Now for some quick takes – rapid fire questions. Keep your answers short and to the point. 

Who is an educational leader you admire? 

Jen Levallee: I did a little bit of thinking about this, and I'm going to go with my 12th grade teacher, Aaron Pribble, who's still currently teaching. It was actually his first year teaching and I got to do a government studies class with him. I love studying politics and government and loved it at that point in time as well. However, I deeply, deeply struggled in his class. He was the person who then suggested that I should get tested for dyslexia, and I was able to get a dyslexia diagnosis there in my senior year. And so his impact was profound for me.

Christie Robertson: Who is a school board director you're looking forward to working with. 

Jen Levallee: I am really looking forward to working with Joe Mizrahi. He's been really available to meet and discuss subjects. And even at times when we haven't agreed on specifics of an issue, he's continued to look and understand deeper. And I've been really interested in the wonderful leadership that he's had on the board and the deep questions and thought that he's put into some of the stuff that he's been doing.

Christie Robertson: What's one education policy you strongly support? 

Jen Levallee: I strongly support the Ensuring Educational and Racial Equity policy that the board has. It's aimed at equity and education, ensuring services, learning environment engagement, et cetera. And it's done some really great things to try to equalize some of the education that we have across the city. I think it's really important and it's important for us to keep it as we balance, you know, how our funding models work across the city, to make sure that we're centering that there are students who have been left behind traditionally by the system.

Christie Robertson: Do you see the school board role more as a trustee, with a duty to the institution, or as an elected representative role accountable to voters?

Jen Levallee: I lean towards it being representative, accountable to the voters. Within Student Outcomes Focused Governance there has been a lack of representation, and our community craves better on this. Ultimately, however, it does need to be a balance of both, because we need the ability to make hard decisions that will not always be loved short term, but may benefit us and our students in the long term.

And these decisions to be made, with the community involved, is absolutely vital. So, although I lean a little bit one way, I think it does need to be a balance of both. 

Christie Robertson: And what's one thing that you would change about the school board immediately? 

Jen Levallee: I would look to make sure that we have committees added back. It's something, again, that has been removed by Student Outcomes Focused Governance. However, adding these committees back, we need to make sure that they are thoughtfully constructed, so that we are able to have impact with them. Too often when these existed, they would make recommendations that were ignored by the board and the district. So we need to make sure that we're doing it and we're able to make sure that these are actionable. 

Cherylynne Crowther: And lastly, what one lightning round question would you add for other candidates? 

Jen Levallee: I would like to know what one thing they would like to see for improvements within the district immediately. 

And my answer would be that I want better enrollment planning and lessening of the October shuffles. That is ultimately something that we can do far before that point in time by looking at both early enrollment numbers, as well as when we see that schools are over-enrolled, we can adjust within the first weeks of school, without having to wait six weeks into a school year.

Main Interview Questions

Christie Robertson: Great. So let's move on to the main interview questions. These focus on institutional change and the role of the school board. You'll have up to two minutes to answer each one, but don't feel like you have to use all the time. Ready? 

Jen Levallee: Yes. 

Cherylynne Crowther: What does a school board director actually do? 

Jen Levallee: So, as I think most of the interviewees have said, the state law is that they hire and evaluate the superintendent, set the vision for the district, adopt policies, oversee budget, and serve as community representative. 

This next year, we need to do such a better job at balancing the budget. I'm sure your listeners are aware that there are large deficits. However, solving this needs to come not at large cuts to schools, but we need people who are trained to look critically and balance both businesses and people's needs within a system. 

Within our purview, we are able to get an independent audit, as well as to ensure that timelines and budget deliverables are done in a timeframe that allows us to look deeply at the impacts. I've worked hard with so many others across the district to prove that mass closures would hurt students and not save much on the budget. Cutting into classes and more will hurt our future enrollment, and we need board members who will push on creating both more stability and growth, and not just address school-based cuts.

Christie Robertson: What should the board focus on most when it comes to finding the next superintendent? 

Jen Levallee: I've been to so many of these engagement sessions, and there's such a laundry list of things that people want. But in my opinion, we really need effective management. There has been too much dysfunction and lack of accountability within the central office. 

We need a leader who can effectively communicate and test ideas and look deeply at unintended impacts. Somebody who has the insight and learnings from other districts in better ways that we may be able to function, and who can recognize what needs to be fixed, and who can effectively build a new version of SPS, where things are kept on track, and it's a little bit less bumpy of a road that we so frequently have here. 

Cherylynne Crowther: What do you think is the right balance between centralized control versus school-based decision making? 

Jen Levallee: I don't know that there is one “right” balance, but I do think we need a different one. And obviously we need a balance between the two. So far, we've been missing the mark. 

Schools can't be treated the exact same as they have so many unique and wonderful programs. Such as Gatewood, which has wonderfully integrated classes for kids with disabilities in their classrooms. Or Whittier's unicycle program. Or Orca K-8’s gardens. And there's so many more everywhere across the district.

Programs like these make parents excited to join these communities. But we need to ensure that kids across, in every single school are meeting baselines for success and education quality. School admins, teachers, and students, and parents are ignored when they try to ask for help and have better understanding. 

When Rainier View struggled the other year, parents and staff tried to get support for months before going more public routes. The situation was preventable from the central office from a much earlier point in time. 

More recently, you can see it in the fiasco of changing high school lunch schedules, where impacts to schools and kids were never fully reviewed.

So this partnership needs to be better. We need to make sure that the relationship between central office and school sites are looked at, both directions, for their impact, and that they both have the autonomy to make decisions and make sure that it's in alignment with all of our goals. 

So it's not necessarily that one needs to take preference over another, but we need to balance them and make sure that we're understanding one another, for both of these.

Christie Robertson: What should the board do if the district isn't meeting its goals for students? 

Jen Levallee: If the goals haven't been met, we need to look at a few things. We need to look at if the goal was attainable. In the past few years, so many of our goals were just completely unattainable. And so not meeting them does not necessarily show a failure--it shows an unrealistic goal. So we do need to make sure that these goals are attainable and see what successes we did have. 

We also then need to look at what has been done to reach that goal and be critical about those steps. Were those the right steps? Were those the right steps, maybe just at the wrong time? Or implemented incorrectly? We need to be really critical about that. 

And then we need to be able to hold the superintendent accountable, so we can make sure the superintendent is holding those in the district accountable, when things actually are not met. 

We need to make sure that future failures are avoidable. We all will mess up. Sometimes we all miss metrics, sometimes we all miss a goal at times. We need to make sure that they are then set up based on that learning for future success. 

So when kids aren't meeting the goals, and if the goals are realistic, then we need to make sure that we are trying something different and setting someone up in a way that they can succeed, as well as pushing on our district officials to make sure that things are working correctly there.

Cherylynne Crowther: What should the board do when the district isn't meeting community expectations? 

Jen Levallee: The board right now so often is not hitting community expectations. And often, the bar isn't that high or nuanced. I talked to a parent in Columbia City a few weeks ago who has sent a few emails with questions and comments each year, over the past decade and hasn't received a single response to any of their questions. 

The community doesn't expect perfection, but it does expect people that show up and continue to engage, especially with those that don't always share our backgrounds or ideas. Right now, within Student Outcomes Focused Governance, too many things that are of value to our community are not part of our framework. And on the board, I would push to change that and be responsive, as I have continued to be in my community for many years over the issues that are affecting our kids' education.

Christie Robertson: And finally, what's something that you want voters to take away about your approach to being a school board director? 

Jen Levallee: I am someone that's already deeply engaged in my community and in the nuance of this work and someone whose kids are living every day with the impacts of these decisions. An effective board has a mix of people on it with differing perspectives who people can trust and listen to, who can take in the information and make decisions, who ask hard questions, and are able to push at the right times and in the right places.

Too often our district has become entrenched in old ways and patterns in its past relationships. And I think that having board members who have done effective work with the community on their side will be invaluable to move us forward.

Christie Robertson: Thank you for being here today, Jen LaVallee. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with us and with Seattle voters. And good luck with your campaign. 

Jen Levallee: Thank you so much. I appreciate all the wonderful reporting that you guys have done over the years. It's been so valuable for our community.

Christie Robertson: Be sure to listen to our interview with the other D7 candidate, Carol Rava.

Carol Rava: We need to be super clear that community engagement is something that the board will expect the superintendent, as the leader of the district, to ensure the district is doing a good job on. One of the main things the school board can do is hold the superintendent accountable for high quality community engagement. And when that isn't working, we need to, again, figure out why? Which voices feel like they are not being heard? And we can also look at ways to create more opportunities, formal and informal, for feedback.

Christie Robertson: Ballots will be mailed on October 15th and must be returned by November 4th. This is Christy Robertson, and thanks for listening to Rainy Day Recess.

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