Washington State Democrats Approved Revised Education Plank

You may recall I, along with other Dems, were not so happy to see what appeared to be a stripped-down public education plank in the Washington State Democrats platform.

I heard from one of the members of the Platform Committee members, Andrew Villeneuve, on this topic recently.

I wanted to let you know that this past weekend, the Washington State Democratic 2014 Convention was held in Spokane. The final Education language adopted by the Convention is here:
http://www.wa-democrats.org/issues/education

As you can see, it's quite substantive. The Platform Committee agreed that the original draft (which was produced by a subcommittee) was insufficient and worked hard to ensure we had a set of Education planks that we could be proud of. I wasn't present when the subcommittee responsible for Education came up with the original draft, so I can't speak to how we ended up with that language, but several of us were resolved that we needed to go back to the drawing board and write a better set of planks for Education, even before the public comment period ended and we received a bunch of comments saying the same thing.

So that's we did. The dedicated activists who volunteer for the Platform Committee draft the platform in stages, thereby allowing for continuous improvement, whether that comes in the form of tweaks or a striking amendment. It's a deliberative process. 


My only regret is that there is no language around student data privacy but that's probably a new issue to most.  It's one I plan to aggressively work on and I know, from this work on the education plank, that the Washington State Democrats will be willing to listen.

I so appreciate the follow-up AND that the party that I belong to listens to input, believes that a "draft" means "still in progress."  As an activist, I applaud and thank those who stepped up to the hard work of crafting any part of the platform including that of education.  

I like a "deliberative process."