Alex Medler

Alex Medler is running for the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) Board of Directors in District C, which primarily includes a small portion of the western part of the City of Boulder, the towns of Nederland, Ward, and Eldorado Springs, and extends into unincorporated portions of western Boulder County, but see the map below for better detail. BVSD Directors are elected by all voters in the entire BVSD area, though they run as residents of a given geographic district. Terms are for four years, and Directors are limited to two terms.

Relevant Experience

  • National Network for District Authorizing, Executive Director (ED), 2022 to present
  • Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers, ED, 2019 to 2022.
  • National Charter School Resource Center, Director, 2016 to 2019.
  • National Association of Charter School Authorizers, various titles, including Vice President, 2009 to 2016.
  • Colorado Children’s Campaign, various titles, including VP of Policy and Advocacy, 2003-2008.
  • CU Boulder, Department of Political Science, Graduate student, teaching assistant, and instructor, 2001-2008.
  • US Department of Education, Charter School Program, Expert Appointment, National Activities, and Acting Director, 1997 to 2001.
  • Education Commission of the States, Policy Analyst, 1922 to 1997.
  • Physicians for Social Responsibility, Research Analyst, 1989 to 1992.

Q – What made you decide to run?

I want to prioritize student mental health, well-being and sense of belonging. Too many young people are experiencing serious mental health challenges and reporting struggles with depression, anxiety, and attempted suicide. There is no single “fix”, but we must prioritize these issues at the district and school level to safeguard our kids. This includes improving how we handle bullying. We must ensure students and families feel their schools are safe for every student. This includes LGBTQ student — who report higher rates of depression and attempted suicide than their non-LGBTQ classmates.

I will work to expand options for high school students so that all our graduates are engaged and challenged, and prepared for whatever path they choose after graduation. The students that are not pursuing selective colleges still deserve challenging content and support in preparing for their future. That includes more Career and Technical Education and increased access to post-secondary options, like AP and concurrent enrollment. It also includes making extracurricular programs and services more accessible.

I want to continue and institutionalize the district’s recent efforts to provide more support to the schools and students that need it the most. We have used one-time, federal money to support our equity work, in schools with higher proportions of low-income students, language learners, and students with disabilities; and as COVID dollars run out, we need to continue this support. It is making a big difference now in some of our schools that have not done well historically — so we don’t want to stop.

Q – Are there specific needs in your geographic district?

In a period of declining enrollment, I think we need to maintain and support our mountain schools. Despite small enrollments, our mountain schools are key parts of their communities, and options to transport kids to schools in town are likely to be rough on our little ones. It is also unlikely the district would save much money by closing mountain schools. Many families in the mountain towns choose to enroll outside the district. We should explore programming and other changes that could be attractive.

The community in South Boulder has seen more than its share of tragedy and frustration, including the mass shooting at King Soopers, the Fires, and issues related to sexual assault. All these factors increase the urgency of addressing mental health, well-being, and our students’ sense of belonging and safety.

We need to continue to work on issues of school climate and culture, and student inclusion. The districts approach to school safety advocates appears to be working well. We should evaluate how well it is working, and endeavor to build strong partnerships with the communities our schools are in, including with city and county governments and local police and emergency responders.

Q – How would you characterize BVSD’s current level of academic performance and your performance priorities?

I have worked with education performance data throughout my career and am pleased to see that the district is making a serious effort to support data-based inquiry in our schools and increasing support to schools in using data to make meaningful changes. Academic performance is a big priority for me, and I believe in using multiple measures to understand it as well as we can.

Generally, BVSD does well on measures like the state tests, in both achievement and growth as well as post-secondary and workforce readiness. Much of what we are doing is working well. The district also made a solid up-turn in achievement after the serious dip in performance all schools experienced during the pandemic. But there are exceptions for particular student subgroups.

Q – Do you believe BVSD has done a good job managing educational achievement gaps? If not, what can BVSD do to narrow the gaps?

BVSD has seen impressive gains in the schools that have received additional support in the last few years, where performance by Hispanic students has historically been unacceptably low. Across the district, one of the most significant achievement gaps is between our Hispanic and non-Hispanic students. There is considerable differences between individual schools on these measures.

We continue to need to close achievement and opportunity gaps for our Hispanic students, multi-language learners, and students with disabilities. We also have work to do to support our students of color and students from low-income families. Our gifted-and-talented parents are very frustrated at a lack of services.

Q – What is your take on the use of or reliance on standardized testing in today’s educational environment, and would you favor changes?

I believe we should not frame testing as high stakes. In policy and practice, almost all public schools and educators do not face high stakes because of testing data. At the state-level, schools with low scores are given access to grants and programs. Many sources of data on student performance and well-being can help inform various school improvement activities, if done with care and understanding of data’s uses and limits, and in conjunction with data from other sources.

As a community, I hope to help us de-escalate the angst over the role of testing data, and I will support educators, parents, administrators, and the community as a whole to engage in responsible data-based decision-making, the exploration of evidence-based practices, and data-driven inquiry. I hope to help us all avoid rash judgements and a “gotcha” mentality.

Testing data is available from the state and we should use it. While it is true that student characteristics are associated with performance, it is also true that schools and schooling make a difference and there is variation in performance that we can identify that is over-and-above the impact on performance associated with student characteristics.

We definitely want to use all available data, with care to pick who is using what data for what purpose. In my professional work I have helped districts and charter schools explore alternative measures that reflect school-specific circumstances and goals.

Q – General thoughts on BVSD finance, including whether you could favor running a future ballot measure that would improve revenue for BVSD?

It will be hard to raise additional funding with new mil levy over-rides, although we may be able to pass an additional bond before my term would be up. I support multiple strategies to increase funding in BVSD, for all schools in the state, and have worked on and will continue to support major changes in public finance for the state. I don’t believe there are many opportunities that BVSD can control directly that will result in substantially more money for our Pre-K-12 schools in the next few years. Whether it makes sense to go to the BVSD voters in the near future will depend, in part, on how the state continues to evolve. There are pending state ballot measures that could change this a bit, but I don’t see any big changes that will help in the future. My work at the Colorado Children’s Campaign included work on finance related topics, including developing cost models used to design the Denver Preschool Program, and other finance changes. I believe BVSD and the city’s elected leaders should participate in state-level policy debates to improve public finance.

Q – What are your thoughts on censorship in school districts, and what would your thought process include if there were calls to censor materials in BVSD? 

I oppose censorship and book bans. Of course, all materials should be developmentally appropriate for the audiences, and parents should retain the right to opt-out of programming or materials as they see fit. But the district should work so that all students see themselves, their families, and their cultures represented in their materials.

As a parent of a non-binary student, I believe the district has done good work on its policies regarding LGBQT students. I have met neighbors who moved to the district because of its inclusive and supportive policies. We still have work to do, and I will resist efforts to deny the identity and dignity of any person or group.

Q – Has BVSD done a good job managing pandemic-related learning loss, or does work remain to be done?

The testing data indicates that the district has done better than many communities in “catching up” academically, but there are still subgroups where that is not the case. For example, the middle-school scores of Hispanic students on the CMAS are still very disturbing.

I believe we all have a generational obligation to do everything we can to help the young people affected by the pandemic to recover and thrive as adults. We should continue to be honest, transparent, and committed to helping young people thrive. The needs of our students, which are much broader than academics, will remain for years. We should not be too quick to try to “get beyond” COVID. But it will soon become the general work to help all students succeed and thrive, even if we no longer frame this work as COVID-recovery.

Q – What are your thoughts about education related to diversity in BVSD?

As I said above, the district should work so that all students see themselves, their families, and their cultures represented in their school materials. Our treatment of history, literature, arts, sciences, should all be inclusive of all people. I believe our education should accurately reflect our history and the accomplishments and challenges of all people. I oppose efforts to sanitize U.S. history and will resist efforts by extremists to re-write history to exclude the struggles and contributions of anyone, or to recast the evolution of our nation to fit a narrow ideological agenda.

Q – Changing demographics within BVSD might mean there could be school closures or other changes. What factors would enter your thought process if closures are considered? 

I support the recent BVSD long-range taskforce. It provides ideas for how to report and track the ongoing challenges with declining enrollment and their impact on schools. This is a very complex issue, and a short 300-word essay can’t convey what we should do.

Circumstances and context matters. Our isolated mountain schools are small and some suffer from declining enrollment. But there is likely little to be saved financially if we close them; and the transportation burden and risk for mountain kids would be problematic if we were to bus them down to town. We also have small schools that are designed to be small, and can thrive with a limited enrollment.

Parents deserve transparency about the district’s concerns and the long-term viability of schools. We must maintain good communications.

We can do things like adding new programs to existing schools to support their efforts to attract more students, and we can support schools so that things like multi-age classrooms are used effectively.

We can also consider how to adjust attendance boundaries of schools. If we do this, I will insist we remain focused on issues of student equity, as we can manage public school choice and intra-district choice in ways that support inclusion and that decrease the risk of stratification by Socio-Economic Status.

Q – How do you keep in touch with the thoughts of students and parents now, and/or how do you plan to keep in touch if elected?

Great question. I believe sitting down and talking with as many people as possible is best. Many of the topics addressed above are truly complex, and short soundbites and 300-word answers are inadequate. I believe being available to people, and listening when we are together, are key. I also believe that we must double-down on listening to people that come from backgrounds that are different from ours or those that think differently than we do. I like to work with people to develop a shared sense of what we want to do and to collectively problem solve.

Digital Information

Website: alexmedler.org
Phone: 720-635-8329
Email: alex.medler@alexmedler.org