and how your plan is to make sure that it's equitably distributed to the schools that need it a little bit more that's an awesome question today our state is at least three and a half billion dollars short of fully funding basic education and what the court made very clear was you define the formula as we know what the invest mission look like but instead of the state picking up the bill you're sending a bunch of the obligation to local school districts to do it through local property tax levies so very wealthy suburban communities can handle their need with very low tax rates but rural communities for example with almost no major property value they have very high tax rates in order to generate the same amount of money or he or or come up even sure so my plan is to fix levees to make them more equitable so that the state uses its property tax capacity and probably a capital gains tax because we can no longer ask the low and middle income families to pay more through property tax and sales tax we have t change the tax code in this state so that it is more just so that is more progressive so that the wealthiest and most successful in our state pay their fair share that would generate about three have million dollars in the key is don't send all the money out where it was generated otherwise you it right back out to wealthy suburbia change the funding formulas based on population student performance demographics e o l recent immigrants send the money into communities where the data suggest we can have the biggest impact so the revenue gets collected differently and more progressively and the spending side is more progressive if we do that well with accountability for school districts we will finally change outcomes for students some of the clay states that when and if the state needs to fully fund basic indicates and basic education has been outlined and has by twenty to sixty one as kind of the operating costs transportation and teacher come from face and highly capable special education and grams i would add that where everybody plays a huge role is in things like smaller class sizes so we voted for that but it wasn't funded and what i would suggest as a state superintendent i need to advocate for especially in certain communities and we know where they are we need to start funding smaller class sizes and sold a kindergarten in certain communities for so many  science where in our state could there be a huge benefit and we've got to advocate for that as a priority in terms of funding and i think we need to fund both of those initiatives across the state but we know already that a community like southeast seattle is going to need to have point five billion dollars out of the legislature which i don't know that we want but i'm hopeful let's hire it ties and think about how do we get from that in those resources that we make sure we intentionally target it in the communities that most need it i think about three things when you have special education populations on top of students of color and type of deal all students those exponentially are impacted by kind of their demographic and we have to target those communities first with resources because those it will have the kids impact you just impact on those particular communities good afternoon my question is how are you going to stand up to the pressure of charter school i mean there's a lot of people who are  around i mean there's still out there and so how will you fight for public education and not get the dollars siphoned off for eighteen hundred students when you have a million and a half students in the public system i think both of us believe that charter schools are not the way and you know obviously if the supreme court there's another case that's being heard around and we'll see what the supreme court says i would say from the beginning my message has been tied to schools are not the answer saying no to charter schools and not yes to something else then my guess to something else says there are models that are doing really great work and closing opportunity gaps the school of the arts and to comment on the split math and science right now it's taken a while but they are serving the exact same demographic of students and to comment said the same number of black students as any other high school and they have close the gaps they're graduating kids at about ninety five percent their students have higher test scores that there are models that exist right now in the public school sector that i believe we need to elevate and i must be i hasn't done a good job of elevating best practice and said that's going to be our responsibility to fight against the charter school is to elevate these models out of school that's working really well for students of color we can't just say no to schools and then not acknowledge that we are failing way too many black especially black boys but brown children in general ill children and don't want special education told on and on but there are good models and the way i'm going to fight is by other voting those good models and celebrating those and encouraging people to that process this community or taxpayer or voter good chance to have a direct accountability over that system and i think our court will say look at that again and they'll say yeah that's not going to work so i've said pretty consistently for as long as i've been in public service in any way including as a school board member and as a former teacher this is an economic argument of people who want an economic theory of choice but the data across the country is actually very neutral on most cases charter schools are not outperforming public schools sometimes they do with a massive investment of resources on the front end and in some cases there dramatically worse because they don't have that accountability so we need to give parents choice within a community to move their students between schools we need to give parents choice between school districts if you want competition tell a neighboring school district that a student might be coming their way if they're performing well or they might be leaving if they're not performing well we have all kinds of opportunity to have  choice and they have competition but to privatized the system without voter taxpayer control is very very dangerous imagine if we all promise to take our money from the state we promise never to visit a state park but i want my share of taxes to fun parks and i promise i'll never call nine one one for a fire if i can just have the money in my taxes that go to fire services imagine if we just took all of our vital services and took our share of it and said i'll do with it what i want those systems would collapse and when you really needed then they would not be there we've got to make sure we do this right i don't think charters are legal in our state i don't think the court will hold them up if they are i think we both committed to following the law and doing what's right by the law but at this point this is and one of the things i don't care about is the budget on gang prevention because in tacoma you know it's a very big soul what are your plans for gang prevention  it's a very good question this is this is back to our school to prison pipeline unfortunately from the moment we start school in our discipline practices that are disproportionate in our expulsion practices we create a culture of schools as as mirroring presences mirroring places where behavior modification and behavior control is more important than growth and so when it comes to things like gangs going all the way back to the early eighty's we put this always in the criminal justice space and not in the education space so there's virtually nothing at the state level that says here is a targeted resources accountable for schools only for this purpose of trying to address gang related activity in and around schools and changing and modifying behavior so that we accommodate kids who don't want to choose that alternative we put it in the criminal justice space and i think we've got to think carefully about putting that in the education space otherwise in our mind we will always see students when they behave differently not as students who need interaction and intervention but if somebody we've got to put on the other side of the line of the criminal side and then we're into a ball of wax it is expensive and ineffective so it's a great question there's just quite literally almost nothing from the state targeted a gang intervention young men that were gang affiliated and so for me this is a particular pass and i think when it comes to getting her friend prevents and for me i think about my sister in law is dead now because of her connection to gangs and i think about how she got started and gang see got started and things because she didn't feel like stable on one think about the ten years of experience i had working with young men in gangs they had families that were disconnected and they needed they needed a connection for me even if we didn't have targeted gang intervention one of the things that would lead to see us do better is creating community with younger students i think about to come in when i started teaching and to come in seventeen years ago we had brand new ukrainian families  d communities and cambodia and vietnam means and what we saw was a rise in gang violence because as they older teenagers learn to speak english and their parents didn't what we saw as the older young people having a lot of power and so that kind of they created family among their peers and so i think we need to get at two sides of this we need to help our families really learn how to understand the american system and how to speak english that's why all of us i think are really critical we also have to we create splits where young people have something to fear but they feel like they belong and they feel affirmed and they understand their history and american young men who are in gangs most of them don't know their history and they don't feel like they belong it's no different than what he was talking about  use that you know there's a local control by the time the parents get to always be i've always been a is like sorry there's nothing we can do either so they just remain in limbo so what are you planning on doing to actually make sure that these local control doesn't mean iniquity for our parents and for our students and that there's actually a place for parents that they can go to and complain have agreements but that their grievance and so actually has to follow and he just doesn't go back to between always be i in the school think that's one of the things they're speaking to them parents navigate center to know how to navigate really well and if the people down and set families that don't know how to navigate i believe we have an obligation to create some document and guidelines for how do you navigate the system so that you get office mostly is only to private schools it's part of the new law i think between those two resources we can figure out what a best practice looks like that teaches school districts had a liaison better with parents and to put resources in place and then they have shows to come to the state when they've gone through the appropriate channels in the district isn't listening or there's conflict they have the ability to get the ear of the governor's office or the superintendent's office and bring greater attention to this i know i've said it before but i'll come back to it if you accountability system includes authentic parents including ajman you treat community very differently than you do today when the only accountability for dollars as just get the next two to show up so this is part of the solution is changing the accountability system state of washington last year one thousand two hundred african american children did not graduate on time with their peers four thousand latino in the teenage students did not graduate with their peers fourteen thousand low income students across race and ethnicity did not graduate with their peers are economic injustice start students on a track of disproportionate treatment and its meghna fight by race nasty ethnicity and your l g b t q standing if you are it is magnified by barriers in life our school system quite literally gets paid if a student shows up and hangs out so i don't think we're going to change the dynamic for folks until we create a professional development plan for every teacher so that they see kids of color they see poverty understand how to interact differently than they would by just treating every student the same when the system is designed for success for every kid in the accountability system says we're going to go beyond our graduation numbers we're going to desegregate it to see how you're doing  sub populations when school districts know that the state plan and the money associated with that plan is finally taking a deep dive they will behave differently these are not bad actors they care deeply about kids because the incentive system is not right there's almost no consequences every year when twenty thousand kids don't graduate on time with their peers who gets in trouble and we have to create a system where people are very uncomfortable by that reality either because they are personally accountable highly capable a p classes international baccalaureate there is a a way to get into that and in most districts it's based on a teacher saying that she belong in this program i guess you can think for the most part it's quite a what i have left about having served in tacoma for the last two and a half years we have so much more work to do but what we did is we created a policy called academic acceleration and actually it started in federal way school districts and what we said is anyone who meets a standard on any part of our capable teachers about how do you now teach that ground time that you didn't think had the potential to be that can i say this as a month that my husband is here right now back there but we have three children and our youngest one is gifted our youngest one missed school districts but we can create the conditions of accountability and resources an expectation that begins to change the dialogue i am the young man of two people with an eighth grade education i lost my parents at a fairly young age i see the world through poverty that  my lens and it's it's a it's a beautiful lens and it's also a very narrow lives because every student deserves to be sure not just the four or five hundred thousand right now struggling financially but that is where the data says we have the biggest problem and so i bring that attention to this work i've been a classroom teacher a school board member a legislator in fourteen years in our higher education system so why i've seen the system work and failed at times from birth all the way to career i would love the opportunity to serve you in this community in the entire state of washington and to bring my professional background my personal background my education to the role so thank you so much for having us i'm going to go move my car before it gets  twenty seven years ago i came to the united states and i came on an academic scholarship but i played basketball and soccer and politics and i became a teacher because i got tired of the expectation that black people were supposed to be athletes  academic and i ran today because i want our young people to understand they don't have to be one or the other they can be but they can be many thing and i meant that i have to as i believe that every single child behind this and there is a pen in their skin color to take care of themselves or a sick child without having to choose between their family and a paycheck and paid sick leave makes us all safer in fact seventy percent of all food related stomach flu outbreaks start when a sick food handler has to show up to work it's vitally important that we pass a common sense lot like paid sick leave to help prevent the spread of disease and keep our family safe and mission of protein thirty three will also boost to be income of more than seven hundred thirty thousand low wage workers lifting families out of poverty and growing our economy with low wage workers have more money to spend they spend it at local businesses and mission of fourteen thirty three will inject two point five billion dollars into our local economies this demand in turn creates more good paying jobs and that's why every state that raised its minimum wage in two thousand and fourteen saw faster job growth than states that left their wages stagnant voting yes on initiative fourteen thirty three we can make washington a better place to live work and raise a family you notice the ground of a through the asm from all of the students who are here i notice as well that all the students are being trained for great work that being trained for the media and the media is extremely important i try to do what i can in terms of african american history in terms of writing african american history but it's really up to the media that you have to spread that story and so that's why i think what you guys are doing is so vitally important in terms of the future of black people here and across the globe as well as all of the people in seattle and all the people in the u i want to thank you and your youth media for giving us the opportunity to talk about africa tip of chorus african chamber of commerce is an organization that we started nineteen years ago  only organization pacific northwest that proudly can put together over twenty businesses that successfully doing business in africa though so that's why international  worked very crossly with our brothers and sisters here in washington state to help them grow their business we walk in partnership with the port of seattle some of you may know but between port of seattle and port of call there are over five thousand i've ricans who move container ice in and out of the port so we work with them to help them run their business successfully  a company right now just bought a building that's called bruno truckers two young men came to me guide them to form a new company where they would work for themselves it took us eight months but probably to say that now they are completing their for the year and just three months ago they bought their own building in bruno truck us a success story on the internet international part is a company in they came to us we guide them to go to africa and i obviously being from kenya i guided them to go to kenya and the last time i was that kenya i was so proud to see more than  this venture probably will have a separate station to talk about that but today i'm really excited for varies and peter talked about being able to bring insights and link guidance in and be able to understand the eighteenth africa deep business for and basically what he does is that it brings business people from africa to network with the business people from pacific northwest he also bank as you know all those airplanes that are being bought by african countries being financed through export import then and then obviously they'll be somebody who were there who would talk about from u s d d a powell africa isn't there that would be someone from the state department which is is the one that organizes a gore african growth and opportunity act so so this is really a grid event for people who are interested in in building mutual business connection between us in africa after all and what africa needs and we see these eighteen years ago when  ten years or so all the chairman of africa and i just returned from attending the conference in washington d c in in the goal right now is really to be very strategic is to make sure that  horse to bring the water what do we basically doing is providing you the information and opportunities for you to take advantage of the huge business potential between us who are here and on our continent africa africa is where the action is very soon we will be over there one point two billion consumers s come from africa to us now then we will also have for example companies from here that's how doing successful business in africa for example i technology is one area that we need to take advantage of and the other thing i also need to say is that and we were really told by one one of the africa elder guidance is there's so many more to national companies that are investing in africa don't let them just go invest be part of those companies come together and put your resources together and  elders guidance is there's so many more to national companies that are investing in africa don't let them just go invest be part of those companies come together and put your resources together and  you know after all that's where you come from that's great just one more lasting peace for our side of the forum individuals that are interested in exploring opportunities in finding t then after that we have to speak us talk about what to invest enough or what product to sell enough for and once you have identified the product or services you want to market in and then we have a sit down to lunch and during the sit down lige we give our to two or three small african businesses that have done business successfully yeah because we want to make sure to find a place for them and here and like to give back to their country what is it what is in it for the you like you guys have been doing what i think the best thing to do obviously let me say that we have been blessed