Massive student population growth and last year’s failed bond measures are playing a large role in the Lake Washington School District Board of Directors race that features two challengers from a district task force.

Challenger Eric Laliberte is running against longtime incumbent Jackie Pendergrass representing District 1, while Rob Tepper is challenging District 2 incumbent Christopher Carlson. Incumbent Siri Bliesner, representing District 5, is running unopposed.

Pendergrass, serving her fifth term on the board, said that her focus has been ensuring that there are a wide range of programs available for students, as well as choice schools with smaller classroom sizes.

“In my 20 years on the board, we’ve (started) a lot of…programs in individual schools, we have choices schools that are smaller and meet some students’ needs,” she said. “I’ve championed for those. While I think we’ve done a good job, there are probably others we aren’t reaching, and I’m looking to see how can we reach them.”

Last year’s failed bond measure would have raised $750 million. It garnered a majority voter approval, but failed to get the required 60 percent to pass. At the same time, the school district has been the fastest-growing district in King County during the past several years. Following the bond measure’s failure, the district has repurposed funds to make better use of existing facilities and redrawn district boundaries in order to accommodate the student population, the latter of which initially drew criticism from certain communities.

Pendergrass said the supermajority, needed to pass the bond, means the district has to have better outreach.

“I think we learned from our bond failures. The tough thing is reaching 60 percent of voters when you have a lot of people in the community who don’t have kids in schools,” she said. “Voters have to understand the need and the costs and what would be the best thing to do… it’s working to really educate our voters. It would have been easier if it didn’t cost (so much), and when we surveyed afterwards, that was one of the main reasons people put ‘no.’ They didn’t want to pay more. And at a time, that was kind of the tendency (of voters), not just with us.”

As for student growth, Pendergrass said that she believes the solution can be found in working with the community, as well as the district.

“I still enjoy being a board member,” she said. “It’s interesting. I work with good people. It’s a good school district.”

Laliberte said one of the reasons he has decided to enter the race is because he and his wife plan to start a family and wants the current problems dealt with before they get there.

“By the time my kids are in the district, I’d like to have (the district) on the turn of getting fixed,” he said.

A member of the Long Term Facilities Task Force, he said that his involvement on the committee has made it clear that new leadership at a district level is needed.

“I feel like there is the perception that the district is sort of complacent in how to do things differently,” he said. “It remains a very frustrating process to be a part of this task force. The district needs to look at doing things differently.”

One area he said that needs improvement is community engagement as part of facilities planning.

“It remains top down,” he said. “There’s usually a plan put in place. It’s disseminated and people are told to get on board, essentially. For a district this large, both size and class, the only effective way to do community planning is to do community generated planning.”

This lack of community outreach, Laliberte said, is also partly to blame for the bond measure failures, especially when there has been organized opposition to the most recent bond measures the district has put on the ballot.

“One of the things the district or our leadership needed to do was address some of the concerns the opposition raised,” he said. “The idea that the district is building ‘Taj Mahal’ schools, there was not a response to that. There was not a coherent message as to why the bond was at the level it was at.”

He also said making several small changes or adjustments to the plans, such as removing unnecessary computer labs and constructing two-story school buildings, can help lower the costs and emphasize to voters that the tax revenue will be well spent.

“I think just conveying to the community you’ve created as many little wins as you can… gives you credibility,” he said. “Simply building the cheapest school possible is not the objective, but it is a criteria.”

In District 2, Carlson said he has decided to run again because the issue of growth has to be dealt with.

“I think I need to stick around because we’ve been growing at an unprecedented rate,” he said. “With that level of growth, there are growing pains. The thing about growing as a school district is you can grow proactively and you can decide how you’re going to grow. We’re going to have to make some really important decision on how we grow in the next couple of years.”

Having served two terms on the board, Carlson said his work to get school curriculum changed has given him a strong understanding on how to influence local education.

“When I was upset about the math curriculum I asked ‘how do you change this?’ We’ve got to change the standards at the state level first. You have to understand where the pressure points and leverage points are,” he said.

On the bond measure, he said the district asked for too much in one bond last time and without context.

“We asked for a lot of money and I made the assumption that the district voters would understand,” he said. “We were asking for three quarters of a billion dollars. It’s a big number. When we heard gasps in the room it should have been a wake-up call.”

Like Pendergrass, he also attributed well-organized opposition in the community to the bond’s failure: “The con people managed to catch with us with the ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ question,”  he said. “We failed to counter them effectively.”

While the district has tried to make do without new facilities, Carlson said the next time a bond is presented to the voters it will need to pass if they’re going to be able to take in any more growth.

“Passing that bond is critical,” he said. “The most important thing for the district is to grow thoughtfully once we pass the bond. We got to deal with the overcrowding.”

One major hurdle to getting a bond passed, he said, is the inability of the district or district board members to actually campaign for the bond.

Tepper said his experience attending numerous district board meetings as a parent inspired him to ultimately run against Carlson.

“I started leaving meetings more and more frustrated,” he said.

The main source of frustration, he said, has been the overcrowding schools due to repeated bond failures, a problem he said other district have not had.

“That’s one of the major issues I really feel like I need to be a part of,” he said. “I think they need someone there to be passionate… when you have a bond measure on the ballot you have to treat it like a political campaign itself. You have to treat it very aggressively. You have to have a public relations movement to get the word out and explain to people the need for all the funds. I felt like that was not done in any capacity. I was fully anticipating before the election that the bond was going to fail based on what I was seeing around my neighborhood. The opposition was quite aggressive.”

When the bond measure finally passes, he said, many of other issues plaguing the district, like overcrowding and problems stemming from that, will be fixed.

“One of my strengths is being a communicator, and communication is what’s really needed to get this bond measure passed,” he said.

With three kids at Lakeview Elementary, Tepper said he would also be in a position to advocate strongly for academic standards.

“I am very interested in making sure academic standards are kept to a level that is proper,” he said. “Our district, comparatively speaking, is okay but there is always room for improvement. A lot of the issues are going to have a common denominator.”

Another district issue that inspired Tepper to run was the reboundary process, during which special needs students were transferred from Lakeview Elementary. Making changes to the special needs community at the school should have been a last resort, according to Tepper.

Carlson defended the decision, saying the district did not have a better option.

“None of us is moving a special needs classroom as first choice, but sometimes it is the least worst choice,” he said. “He (Tepper) wasn’t at Lakeview when we brought in the learning center. Those two classroom were not always there.”

Tepper also said Carlson is not as available to the community as a board director should be.

“Maybe he has such a rigorous job,” Tepper said. “I’m sure everyone who serves on the board has another job to fund their lives. Maybe he just doesn’t have the time. I have a lot of time and I have a lot of passion. I definitely can be much more available than he seems to either want to be or can be to the community.”

Carlson said Tepper has misconceptions about the role of a school district board member.

“I didn’t fully understand it when I first came on,” he said. “The money problem is in Olympia. Most of our dollars come from Olympia. He (Tepper) seems to think that at some level he’d be more capable of passing a school bond than I am. I don’t believe he would be able to do a whole lot better.”