Schools

E. Harriet Parent: Running for School Board Was "Logical Next Step"

Kingfield resident and Lyndale school parent David Weingartner is seeking the DFL endorsement.

Following leading roles in bringing Kingfield to embrace Lyndale Elementary and laying the groundwork for the new Ramsey Middle School, Kingfield parent David Weingartner said running for school board was the "logical next step" for him.

Those experiences, he said, positioned him well to help Minneapolis Public Schools serve all students, and keep families who've recently flooded Southwest Minneapolis schools.

"Every family wants similar things," he told Patch in an interview. "A safe experience for their child, they want to know their child is getting a quality education, and I think a lot of what we have to do is answer the fears and concerns that families encounter, and be responsive to them."

Find out what's happening in Southwest Minneapoliswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

When leading parents back to Lyndale school—whose test scores showed kids learned a lot but whose students were mostly poor, Black, Latino, and Somali—Weingartner said his mostly-white neighbors just needed to be made familiar with the skills of the school's principal and teachers in order to overcome their fears.

On the two biggest hot-button issues in this election—Washburn High School's academic programming and how teachers are evaluated—Weingartner said he came to both problems as "an independent thinker." He said he distrusted current schemes to evaluate individual teachers because so many different school staff impact a student. He said that Washburn needed to serve all students, but that high schools needed to develop common programming in order to "stop competing" for students.

Find out what's happening in Southwest Minneapoliswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

See our previous interviews with the other candidates running to represent Southwest Minneapolis on the Minneapolis school board:


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