Phinney-Greenwood resident running for Seattle School Board

by | May 11, 2011

Phinney-Greenwood neighborhood activist Kate Martin has filed to run for Seattle School Board Director in District 2, against incumbent Sherry Carr.
Martin’s two sons attended Seattle Public Schools. Her youngest son is graduating from Roosevelt High School next month.
Martin told me one of her concerns is public schools changing curriculum on a whim because they receive money from charitable foundations that don’t have enough background in proven educational principles.
And she’s especially upset about what she calls the district’s “fuzzy math” curriculum. She homeschooled her youngest son in sixth grade specifically because he was having so much trouble in math, and she feels the district isn’t doing enough to help all students excel in math.
She said she would like to see district resources directed more to the classroom than to testing and administration, and she would like all students and their parents to develop a personal learning plan with their teachers. More than just meeting with teachers occasionally for a Parent-Teacher Conference, teachers, students and parents would discuss and revise their learning plans on an ongoing basis to make sure each student is achieving at their highest level.
Martin and her husband, Jose Chavez, who is executive chef at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, have lived in the neighborhood for more than 20 years. Martin is a planning, design and construction consultant at her own business, Kate Martin Design.
She has volunteered extensively with the community, including serving as Chair of the Piper’s Creek Watershed Council, a member of the Seattle Pedestrian Master Plan Advisory Group, a member and officer of the Greenwood Community Council (including president in 2008-09), as a founding member of the Parents for Skateparks advocacy group, and she’s currently volunteering on a Department of Neighborhoods Matching Fund project called Greenwood Streetscapes, which is developing a guide to help neighbors organize to plan and pay for their own sidewalks and other streetscape components in North Greenwood. She also recently donated her design and construction management services to Washington’s first clubhouse for people with Traumatic Brain Injury, at PROVAIL on Aurora Avenue North.
(Disclosure: We hired Martin two years ago to landscape our yard.)

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