Winning the vote to be president of your elementary school should not be high on anyone’s résumé, but for the students and parents involved, it’s a big deal. After Washington Elementary’s principal acknowledged in a letter on Thursday that she’d manipulated the results of the school’s student election, she returned from an administrative leave on Friday to a campus in turmoil.
Washington is a GATE magnet school in Santa Barbara’s Mesa community, sought after for the education offered to highly teachable kids, and has a population of motivated parents. Principal Arielle Curry was placed on leave on September 28, after allegations arose that she had ignored the vote totals from the election and chosen to put second-place winners in two positions. One office was 6th-grade president, which she gave to her child, and the second was not disclosed.
In Curry’s letter to Washington families, she said, “I led deliberations after the student votes were tallied that resulted in overriding the outcome of two positions.” She apologized “for allowing this practice to persist” and that “our school’s process for selecting student officers lacks transparency and fairness.” She said she would lead the effort to change the process, implying it had existed before this year. “I am committed to making this right moving forward,” she wrote, making it less than clear whether this year’s winners would take office or not.
Questions to the school district about the policy of allowing administrators or teachers to improvise an election result were answered by John Becchio, assistant superintendent for Human Resources. He stated, “The district expects that for student/ASB elections, the candidate with the most votes wins.” He also asked that the students’ privacy be guarded “and let the school community move forward with lessons learned.”
Parents and teachers at the school are outraged, to judge by the emails the Independent has received. But the repercussions to students, families, and district employees are large, and none were willing to go on the record with information about the election.
One Washington parent and one teacher agreed to meet with a reporter on Friday afternoon on condition of anonymity. Their description of life on campus these past weeks is one of division, mean words, and tears — among both students and staff. The individual who first reported the malfeasance has been attacked verbally, they said, and the district had to send the staff information on how whistleblowers are protected by law.
To get on the ballot, candidates had their teacher fill out an election form, which the principal approved. They then gave a “vote for me” speech to students and made posters before votes were cast by about 200 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Being in student government carries privileges like leaving class to attend meetings, but the president gets to make the graduation speech at the end of the year, and student government chooses events like “crazy hat day.”
Curry has been Washington’s principal for five years, arriving after about a year as Santa Barbara Junior High’s principal and a stint as assistant principal at Washington and Franklin Elementary before that. She walked into a tradition of awarding the election to chosen students, the interviewees said. This was not the first time they’d noticed that nepotism was the result.
The two expressed doubts that Curry would respect the actual outcome of the students’ vote. “The letter says ‘moving forward,’ not ‘this year,'” they noted. As an educator, one said, “Isn’t losing a good learning opportunity?”
