How long, and where have you lived in Boulder County?

My family and I moved to Boulder in 2007.

What schools have you attended throughout life?

I grew up in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California. For elementary school, I attended the Emanuel Community Day School in Beverly Hills, CA. For middle school, I attended John Burroughs Junior High School in Los Angeles. We moved to Santa Monica in 1985 and I attended and graduated from Santa Monica High School. After graduation I was a student at Santa Monica College, a community college, for two years, and then transferred to UC Berkeley, where I earned my BA in English in 1992.

From ages 6 to 12, living in Los Angeles, I was able to work as an extra in the TV and film industry. While working on set, union rules dictated that school-aged actors spend at least 4 hours doing schoolwork, supervised by an instructor, usually in a trailer-classroom near the set. I spent several school-months spread over those six years in that kind of classroom setting.

What additional training or education have you received relevant to the Boulder County School Board?

I am a member of the current cohort of the BVSD Leadership Academy, and have participated in management training sessions throughout my professional career. In my current professional work, I manage a cross-departmental group made up of representatives from teams that, prior to my involvement, had been siloed and a history of not working well together. My experience of bringing together people and helping us all find common ground, to work together toward our shared goals, is relevant to the role of school board director.

List the Boulder County boards, civic or volunteer activities in which you have been involved and the dates of service.

I currently volunteer as a docent and serve as the resident retro-computing hacker at CU Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab, and have done since 2017.

I volunteered in the CU Boulder ATLAS program’s BTU Lab from 2014-2017.

I volunteer as a pottery instructor at the Studio Arts Pottery Lab’s annual Chili Bowl fundraiser.

I served on the board of my homeowner’s association from 2008-2011 as secretary and treasurer.

I volunteer at my neighborhood’s hydration stop for the annual Boulderthon marathon.

While my children were students at Eisenhower Elementary in Boulder, I was one of six parents who formed a team to build that school’s first school garden. I was also a volunteer for Bike To School days at Eisenhower, organized an annual Halloween pumpkin auction PTO fundraiser (using the pumpkins we grew in the garden), and participated in that school’s Dodgeball fundraisers.

When my kids were at Platt middle school, I mentored a team of six kids who built an elaborate “Rube Goldberg contraption” for a contest held by the Boulder Library’s BLDG 61 makerspace

I currently mentor high school students interested in a future career in the cybersecurity industry, and have guest lectured at CU Boulder computer science classes three times in the past two years.

Why do you want to hold the office for which you are running?

Throughout my professional career, I’ve worked in variety of roles in some very different industries. But if I was going to say there was one characteristic that ties those parts of my career together, it’s that the roles I gravitate towards naturally seek to help protect the vulnerable from harm. As a journalist, I covered the consumer protection, computer security, and internet privacy beats. In the information security industry, I can take a more direct role in protecting people from fraud, malware, phishing, ransomware, and spam. As a school board member, if elected, I would be able to put that instict toward protecting the vulnerable to work, with the rest of the board. The work of the school board, for me, is an act of service for the benefit of our community’s future. My experience asking probing questions - first to reveal, then to remediate, the root cause of problems - as well as my diverse professional background, and propensity to creativity, uniquely qualify me as a school board candidate.

Will you be able to meet the time commitments of the office? Yes.

Do you support following Public Health guidelines for child safety like vaccinations? If you don’t then what are your reasons and alternatives?

I support both the idea of and the practical implementation of public health measures. I support the use of childhood vaccinations to prevent disease; I encourage frequent hand washing and support the idea of having handwashing stations located near lunchrooms and cafeterias; I’d like to see more comprehensive planning for air filtration and air quality maintenance in the classroom and other school areas, like auditoriums and gyms.

How would you promote diversity among staff in BVSD, and what is the best way to bring more inclusion and responsible diversity into the schools?

Representation matters, and I support a diverse educational staff makeup in the schools. The high cost of living in our communities impacts our ability to recruit and retain top talent. Staff and instructors should be able to be a part of our community, if they choose to do so, and it would benefit our community and our environment if more teachers and staff could live near the schools where they work.

School board directors obviously cannot directly impact the high cost of living, but those of us who want to highlight the problem can lend our voices to bring attention to this issue, and support regional and state representatives who will commit to better education funding and will work to increase the supply of family-friendly affordable housing.

Briefly, how does your belief system align with BVSD’s Strategic Plan?

I find a lot to like in the strategic plan. The plan at its core supports equity and inclusion, high quality academics, and a support network designed to help children overcome obstacles on their education path. I also support all of these things, and recognize that the school district faces unique challenges that the current plan could not have anticipated when it was enacted. We also have a lot more data about how the plan has played out so far, and the board should follow a data-driven approach to evaluating the effectiveness of specific elements of the plan. The Strategic Plan needs a few patches and updates since it was implemented in 2019, and the board needs team members who will make adjustments in the best interests of our children and schools.

The mountain schools in BVSD are different from the other schools within the district. How will you become familiar with them, and how will you best support them so they can thrive in their own environments?

I haven’t had an opportunity to visit any schools since I was informed in September by the board secretary that candidates were restricted from having one-on-one meetings with staff at schools or district headquarters. However, if I win the election, I would like to spend some time with staff and families at the mountain schools, as well as others, and listen to what they say is working and what needs help. I’ve previously spoken about ideas to bring some of our CTE curriculum out to schools, rather that having it based in the TEC. Offering kids certification programs they could pursue without having to come to the TEC could offer a huge time savings benefit, especially to kids in the mountain schools. It also furthers the district’s climate goals by reducing car trips.

If you could ask all of the candidates one question, what would it be?

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when, all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t...not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why aren’t you helping, [candidate name]?

For additional information, email Andrew at brandtforbvsd@gmail.com