The names and sexes of the candidates probably didn't help. If you aren't paying attention, you would assume the white guy is to the right of the Latina. He needs to work a little harder campaigning, which (this year especially) means more flyers.

If you read the voter's pamphlet in the Primary, you wouldn't know who to choose.

Other than not the total nut jobs.

And once again...because Espinoza won't stop lying about it...the sex ed plan was NEVER going to teach fourth graders sexual positions.

She has known it was a lie everytime she said it, and she said it anyway.

Maybe, just maybe, even parents of color care more about how educational school is than how woke it is. Maybe.

@6: Bingo

6: We don't have to choose between schools being educational and being "woke". A good educational experience virtually never requires the spectre of white teachers singling out black or brown or Indigenous kids for harsher treatment simply because they're black or brown or Indigenous. And it's been repeatedly proven that school districts with no sex education programs have just as much teenagers having sex as- and often far more teen pregnancies than- schools that teach sex ed. Ignorance is never bliss on that subject.

@9 I don't mean to say that sex-ed is bad and students being treated equally in disciplinary action needs great improvement.
What seems to be lost in all of this, I haven't seen any reporting on how either candidate aims to improve graduation rates which are 10 points below that of even Alabama, for example. You know, educational stuff.

@11 to head the Washington State Schools, I should say. But this is a Seattle board with mostly Seattle voters.

I'm with #1, if all you have to go on is names, genders, and the extremely vague paragraph in the voters info pamphlet, the Latina woman is going to appeal to liberals. (Always have the same problem deciding which judicial candidate to vote for.) Reykdal needed to get the truth out about her positions with a big (alas negative) information campaign. Hopefully, some of that has come out since the primary.

Well that one woman came close to saying it, but it's obviously due to her Hispanic last name and the stereotype that they must be progressive.

Unfortunately, Washington is still the United States, and the likelihood of the electorate slipping yet again into that steam bath of willful ignorance is always high. Witness Timmy Eyman's initiative record, for example. Espinoza would take a public education system that's trying its level best to claw its way out of the pit that society has dug for it and kick it square in the teeth.