Seattle School Board Candidate Updates - District 7

 Just two candidates here so they will both skip the primary and be on the ballot in the general election. 

The legislative district in their region is the 37th and they endorsed LaVallee.

Jennifer Lavallee

Here's her website.

As I previously reported:

Lavallee works at Amazon as a UX designer. She serves on the board of the National Women's Political Caucus and volunteers at Seattle Children's Hospital.

She helped launch the Billion Dollar Bake Sale that organized hundreds of parents and students to go to Olympia to advocate for better public education funding.


Her website echoes what other candidates say - transparency, community collaboration, but also "celebrating what makes Seattle Schools extraordinary."

Building Trust Through Authentic Engagement

I commit to listening actively to our communities. While the school board doesn’t have the power to fulfill every request, understanding families’ concerns helps us prioritize what truly matters for student success.

So I applaud the explanation that the Board can't be helping every single request. However, what others would say to the second part of that statement is that not everyone can send an email or go to a Board meeting to speak. The Board has always gotten dinged for listening to the loudest voices.

She has statements on school closures, Option Schools, enrollment planning, Advanced and Dual Language Learning, board governance reform, and superintendent selection.

While Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG) was implemented with good intentions, its current application has created community frustration. The model sometimes overlooks critical factors like student safety, cultural responsiveness, class size impact, and mental health support. I’ll work to adapt adapt our governance approach to ensure we remain responsive to families while addressing reasonable community needs.

She also stressed data-driven decisions.

She appears to have deep ties to her community and understands its needs.

She recently wrote a paper on The Ratio Problem: Where Seattle's Schools Fall Short.

Carol Rava

From my previous reporting:

Rava has high-level skills in operations and strategy with "expertise in education." She works as a VP for Operations and External Affairs at the Postsecondary Commission, a non-profit that works to accredit colleges.

She also works at Spring Strategy and Communications as a consultant. 

Here's her website.

Carol Rava has been a parent of Seattle Public Schools students for more than 18 years.

She brings 25 years of professional policy-level leadership and operational expertise in education.

She has lived in Seattle’s southeast neighborhoods since 1998 and has three children and two stepchildren who attend or attended Seattle Public Schools.

From her priorities list, I see a bold throwdown to the current Strategic Plan:

All students are reflected in the district’s goals and provided both the opportunity and support to excel.

I think that is brave because while the district will blandly say they support all SPS students, the plan never really reflected that.

Like other she stresses her background in data analysis. Her About page is quite detailed about her background.

She has endorsements from several former Board members.

She had an op-ed about school safety in The Seattle Times in June 2024.