Seattle School Board member brings firsthand student experience to the role

Editor’s note: This is the second of two Q&As with Seattle Public Schools’ new board members. Earlier, we profiled Joe Mizrahi.

As a student in Seattle Public Schools, Sarah Clark didn’t always feel that she could turn to a counselor or teacher for help if something went wrong.

“I don’t ever remember meeting with a counselor … other than when I was preparing to go to college and I needed to start making some decisions about that,” said Clark, who attended Madrona Elementary, Washington Middle School and Garfield High School in the 1990s and early 2000s and was in the district’s Highly Capable cohort program for advanced learners.

Clark is the new School Board representative for District 2, which covers Ballard, Magnolia, Phinney Ridge and Green Lake. She hopes to use her unique vantage point as the only current School Board director whose full K-12 experience was in the SPS system to find solutions to ongoing challenges and spotlight things that are working. She wants to increase engagement with parents, families, and students especially.

Clark, who was appointed to the School Board last month, also brings a policy background to the role — she’s the policy director at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.

Clark’s seat will be on the ballot in November 2025, and she has already said she wants to run.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How will your experience as a former SPS student inform your work on the School Board?

In many ways, I felt, [as a student], that my voice had been taken away from me or that I didn’t have a voice that mattered.

I hope to foster a sense of agency among the students, that they have some say in how they receive education within our system. That is what I’m hoping I will bring to the board — the perspective of someone who was just a number, or a slot or a name on an attendance sheet, to help us think differently about the initiatives that we decide to engage on as a board, how we implement them, and how we go through the decision-making process.

You felt like you were just a number, a name on the attendance sheet?

Yeah, I do. I had great classmates. I was one of just a handful of students of color in the Highly Capable program, and I felt very invisible in my classroom.

Just thinking back, unless I was being punished for something that I did wrong, I usually was not engaged — physically engaged — as a student.

The only bright spot[s] I would say were sports. I loved sports and extracurricular activities. I played basketball. I ran cross-country. I played the violin. The extracurricular activities were a place where I could express myself and be a part of a team and feel connected to other students. It was a place where if I made mistakes or did something wrong, I wasn’t punished for it.

It was really the only space where I got to engage with other students of color who weren’t in my academic program.

As someone who was in the Highly Capable (HCC) program, how do you feel about the district’s plan to phase it out?

I have mixed feelings about it. I think ending it is one strategy. But it’s not clear to me that we’ve tried other strategies or piloted or tested other strategies for students that come to school prepared. When I say prepared, I mean ready — they can read, they can write, they are highly capable from day 1. I think there’s value in having spaces where those students can thrive. But I don’t think it is valuable, necessarily, to exclude them from the other students who could very well learn from [them].

I was talking with someone about this [recently]. We were discussing the ways that students learn, or people learn. The real question is: Are we teaching students in the way that they learn? I think the answer to that is no. I think we’re only serving a certain population of students. 

What are your priorities as you take on this new role?

My top priority is to represent the students in my district. 

One of my priorities is to help the district continue to implement the student-focused governance model, identify what are the key measures that need progress, and help to shepherd those forward, in partnership with my other directors and Dr. [Brent] Jones.

Another priority is to bring in more money to help us with our budget challenges and help us diversify and offer more to students. So, working in partnership with teachers and students and families to work with our state leaders to develop a better budget package.

Another priority [is] mental health [and] working with the students to help them define what kinds of support they need with the $20 million in one-time funding the district received in this last [city] budget.    

What concerns you about school closures and consolidations?

I have concerns about students losing access, the challenges that could come if certain schools are closed in areas that are already underserved. I have concerns about access to education. I have concerns about programming for students who are differently abled to be able to continue to receive an education from the district in a way that works for that student and that family. 

I have concerns about more people leaving the district and us losing even more enrollment as a result. 

What skills did you hone in your professional life that will be valuable to the board?

I hope that I can bring a sense of curiosity, a renewed sense of excitement, a different lens as a graduate of the district, as someone who straddled both worlds: Of being a woman of color, or a child of color, but also having the privilege of being in a highly capable program.

In my work experience, the most successes that I’ve had [have been] when everyone gets something of what they want. If each stakeholder even just gets a piece of what they want, the outcome is better for the community, and it’s much more likely to make it through the legislative process.

Most of the skills I’ve learned are people skills, because policymaking is relationships. Sitting on a governing body is relationships. The better I’ve become at navigating different personalities and styles of governance and ways of operating and understanding people, the better I’ve become at being able to adapt to the situations, [taking] challenges and [turning] them into opportunities through communication, and bringing people together, uniting people around a cause that they’ve defined for themselves.

How do you plan to engage key stakeholders, such as students, parents and families, in the process?

In my experience, being really intentional and targeted around outreach is important.

The first step for me is just meeting people and inviting them in to talk. 

I think that being genuine is incredibly important — so showing up, being a part of the community, not expecting people to come to me, but also going to them is really important. 

Some tools, like surveys, can be really helpful to get quantitative numbers, but it’s really important to also have that human narrative to it, to hear the stories, and to have those dialogues.

I like to develop roundtables in different places for people to convene. 

I really see my role as convener, as secretary in some ways, like transcribing things and taking in information, and [as a] representative of their voices. 

I think it’s equally important to have community support for whatever it is that we’re trying to do. I could imagine holding a public forum of some sort.

Is there anything else you want to share?

The decisions that we’re going to be making as a board will not just impact students. It will impact our educators, school staff and administrators.

It’s been an ongoing challenge for many, many years, probably decades, of finding teachers of color to stay in our district and to work in our district. Studies have shown that students who have mentors and teachers that they can identify with [have] better outcomes. As we’re making decisions about how to manage the money, I also want us to think about the resource of our educators and our staff and [be] just as mindful about doing as little harm [to them] as we are to our students.

When I was a child, I didn’t have a Black teacher or an African American teacher. I had a couple administrators, maybe higher level, like the superintendent or a principal. 

I’m really passionate about making sure that not only we have diverse teachers in our schools and that we’re paying them well and treating them as the precious resources that they are, but that we’re also identifying strategies [to] do more in that area to meet the needs of the students that we have and make sure that the district is a great place to learn as well as to work.