In this episode, Jacqueline Martinez, teacher of 13 years and advocate for education, shares her experience running for school board and how you can best support candidates in your area who are fighting for the things that teachers really need.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Running for School Board
Daphne Gomez:
Welcome to the Teacher Career Coach podcast. I’m your host Daphne Gomez, and in this episode I talk to Jacqueline Martinez. She’s a 13-year veteran teacher and a huge advocate for education. She’s been building a social media following for the last three years with the goal of normalizing teacher advocacy and we talk all about her experience running for school board. Not everyone who listens to this podcast may want to run for school board, but I recommend everybody listen to this podcast interview so that you know how you can best support the candidates in your local area who are fighting for the things that teachers really need.
Hi Jacqueline. Thank you so much for being here today.
Jacqueline Martinez:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
Daphne Gomez:
I was looking for someone to come on and talk about running for school board, and I had an overwhelming amount of people reach out and say, you are the person to talk to about this. I’d love to hear just a little bit of background about you for anyone who is not familiar with you and you running for school board.
Jacqueline Martinez:
Yeah, absolutely, so my name’s Jacqueline Martinez, a 13-year veteran teacher here in Texas. My advocacy journey started about a decade ago when I participated in an ed policy fellowship. That was kind of the first time that I feel like I was exposed to the world of education policy. I was equipped with skills to speak at my first school board meeting, and after that, I continued in the classroom, but I felt like I finally had the verbiage to articulate the frustrations that I was feeling within my profession. The pandemic happens in 2020 and there’s all this debate about whether we should reopen the schools or not go back to in-person or remain virtual. And I very much at the time did not think that it was safe to go. This was all pro-vaccine as well, so I didn’t feel like it was safe yet, but a lot of teachers were being forced back into their classroom.
Students did have the option of remaining virtual or going back to brick and mortar, but teachers did not have that option. A lot of the time they were teaching both virtually and in-person at the same time, which I feel is a huge disservice to all students. Out of the frustration and just trying to get people, specifically teachers and parents to go and give public testimony at the school board meetings, which were happening via Zoom, yet they were trying to force everyone back into the buildings, I was trying to recruit people to go and speak at these school board meetings. Even though there was this overwhelming number of people speaking up and being vocal about it, some of the school districts still decided to just push on through. Something that just has always stood out to me is that the people who are in these elected positions, they very rarely have any kind of education background or classroom experience, and yet these are the people who are creating and shaping policy that directly impacts our students and us.
Back in October of 2022, the trustee who sat in my district, he resigned. I remember kind of thinking like, “Oh wow, there’s going to be an open seat. The seed was planted, I guess.” Then I was also following the story of the teachers in Austin, Texas and Austin ISD who were running for school board and they swept that school board race. Now there’s a bunch of former teachers on Austin ISD’s school board, and I just remember being really inspired and just thinking, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to go for it.” The goal win or lose was to normalize this. I started a social media presence on TikTok when I was trying to recruit people to come and speak at school board meetings. I never thought that it would actually go anywhere, but it started kind of picking up traction and just blowing up. I’ve built this following since then. The goal the entire time has been to normalize teacher advocacy because a lot of times, teachers have this very deeply rooted fear, a very real fear of retaliation because it happens. I’m trying to empower teachers and parents to be more vocal and be more civically engaged with their school boards.
Jacqueline shares how she learned where to start when she decided she wanted to run for school board
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah, and I want to go back to something that you said, because you mentioned that it’s often someone who doesn’t have an educational background. Most of the time it’s parents who are on school boards. Then I’ve also, what I’ve looked at, it seems like some districts have different rules to them, whether or not an active teacher from that district can even run for school board. Did you have to look up specific rules for your district or how did that get made available to you for you to even understand if you were able to do it?
Jacqueline Martinez:
At the time, I pretty much just made the assumption that if I work for the school district, I cannot run for school board. I just automatically made that assumption. I never actually looked it up, but the loophole for me was that I live in the district that I ran for, but I worked for a neighboring district. Once I started announcing and posting videos about it, a lot of people were asking that same question like, “Oh my God, can you do that? Are you allowed to do that?” The answer is no. If you work for that school district, you cannot run for it, but if you live in it and you’re part of the community, then yes, absolutely. I found out later that there are some states that teachers are not allowed, whether you live in it or not, teachers are just not allowed to run for school board, which I think is insane.
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah, I’ve seen, I mean, I would need to go and double check and fact check everything, but I think I’ve seen people who have been able to fight to be current educators and it’s very rare that current educators can run for their own district, but I think I’ve seen it starting to happen where a couple people have talked about it, but I, once again, would need to double check and fact checked on it. You saw that there was an opening, you need to basically see an opening on the school board in order to run for it, or can you run to remove other people from their seats as well?
Jacqueline Martinez:
Oh, you can totally run against someone who is already sitting there. The thing with me is that the seat happens to be open, but I mean, people challenge it all the time there. Someone can be sitting in that seat and then be challenged and then somebody wins that seat. I mean, it really just depends.
Daphne Gomez:
Does the challenge come at a specific time of year that people should be looking into? Is there an election cycle once a year for school board or It can happen almost at any time.
Jacqueline Martinez:
The seat that I ran for has a four-year term. The trustee who resigned, his assignment was going to be this May, May of 2023, and he ran in 2019, I believe. The person who ended up winning the seat has four years, unless they two decide to resign or something happens. The elections take place at different times throughout the year because there are seven seats total in the school board that I ran for. Only three of them were up for election this past May, May of 2023, but I know that there’s some other seats that are going to be in the race in two years. It really just all depends. It’s something you would have to look up on the district’s website.
Jacqueline shares how to know if running for school board is right for you
Daphne Gomez:
Okay. Perfect. Thank you so much. This has been so helpful so far. I’m sure that there’s someone who’s just listening who’s like, “Okay, I know what’s going on in my school board. I have started going to meetings in the last three years.” What I’ve heard from so many teachers, teachers who have felt over the trajectory of their career inside of the classroom, they were well-respected, right, when 2020 hit out of nowhere, they said the vibe changed. Going to school boards out of nowhere, they were the enemy, out of nowhere, things felt violent things. The parents that they thought that they had a good rapport with completely changed and shape shifted on them. It was some of the most traumatic experiences from well-respected teachers careers were the moment that they realized what started happening in school boards. This is not going to be for everyone. Some people are not going to want to subject themselves to it, but those teachers who are like, “Mo, I’m fiery. I can take this and I want to take this.” What advice would you give for them to start just to get started, even evaluating whether or not it’s the right move for them?
Jacqueline Martinez:
Evaluating whether it’s the right move for them or not, I think that if you’re fired up enough. I mean, yes, there are so many teachers that just, they’re fed up and they want make a change. If you don’t have a fear, well, you know what? I shouldn’t say if you don’t have a fear of retaliation, but if you’re willing to accept that politics can get really ugly, that the learning curve for me was very steep these last six months. There was a lot that I think maybe I wouldn’t say that I was naive, but it was more of a ignorance is bliss. I really thought that like, “Oh, this is a clean race. We’re all just running for our seat.” It got politicized real quick even though it’s supposed to be a nonpartisan race, and so those were things that I didn’t anticipate. You hear all the time that politics is ugly and that it’s dirty.
I didn’t experience it until the runoff. It’s so funny because at the beginning when I announced friends and family and complete strangers are like, “Hey, congratulations on making that decision. That’s really brave of you.” I remember thinking, “Brave, it doesn’t seem like something to be brave about. This is actually quite fun. Then when it started getting ugly and there was smear campaigning and the mudslinging, that’s when I was like, oh, that’s why people were congratulating me and calling me brave. Yes, it can get very ugly, but I think it’s worth fighting for. You’re fighting the good fight. You’re right, it’s not for everybody, but I think over the last decade, I’ve been in this advocacy journey, built that social media following, continued giving public testimony at school board meetings. I mean, I guess it does take a specific personality to be able to roll with the punches that are going to come with it.
Daphne Gomez:
Were there organizations that helped you with just the project management piece or even part of the strategy of running?
Jacqueline Martinez:
No, not necessarily. I started from scratch. I knew absolutely nothing about running for school board. The number one thing that I knew was that there is a lack of teacher representation at the decision making table, and I was just ready to go for it. I had to build my own website, set up the donation page, design the print material, but I didn’t do this completely alone. I reached out to people who might know something like even just to file first to that, you’re running for school board. I didn’t even know how to go about doing that. I asked a friend who was actually a parent of one of my students who had run for school board in a different district. So I messaged him one day and I was like, “Hey, I want to run for school board, but I don’t know the first thing about getting started. Can you guide me?”
We set up a phone call that night and told me what I needed to do, which was to go to central office for the district. All the information was on the website as well. If you look up your school district and if you Google it and put a school board, there’s information in there on the election, but he told me, “You’re going to have to actually go and file. The filing period is for a month.” It’s funny because when I filed, I filed at the very beginning, as soon as the period opened. For that entire month, nobody else had filed. And so I remember thinking to myself, “There’s no way it’s going to be that easy. There’s no way I’m just going to walk in here and be like, ‘Okay, I want to be on the school board.'” Sure enough, the day of the deadline to file, four more people had entered the race. Yeah, it was pretty crazy.
Daphne Gomez:
This is something that used to not be as competitive. They used to have openings that they were like, “Oh yeah, whoever’s running for it,” because a volunteer position it are they paid positions? I know some of them come with healthcare.
Jacqueline Martinez:
Yeah, they’re not paid positions. It’s completely volunteer. I’ve heard of school districts somewhere who knows where, but where they do give you a small stipend, but I don’t know any specifically.
Jacqueline explains her experience with campaigning and gaining a following
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah, I believe one of my friends is on a school board where he at least I think has health insurance maybe potentially through that position. I could be wrong on that, but let’s think about people who are starting to run. I know you had a really big TikTok presence that was kind of part of your strategy. Do you feel like they would have to have a social media account to run for school board?
Jacqueline Martinez:
No, not at all. I do have a social media presence, but I didn’t really use TikTok. My voters were not on TikTok, and so while I did utilize it for fundraising, because I was totally starting from scratch, I know you don’t need to have a social media presence in order to have an advantage at all. Then as far as organizations, if you can get the endorsement from unions, this was the advice I was given at the beginning. They were like, “Hey, if you can get an endorsement from the unions that’s really going to legitimize your campaign.” I thought, “Oh, easy. I already do all of this advocacy. I go to school board meetings. This is my thing. Oh, I got this. I’m a shoe-in,” and that’s not how it went.
Actually, in the first round, the unions ended up endorsing someone else who was not an educator. That was something that I had to learn that just because you’re a teacher doesn’t necessarily guarantee you the support from the unions. As soon as I made it into the runoff election, that’s when the unions came and they said, “Hey, let us help you,” and I definitely accepted the help because I knew I was going to need it, so it was a very close race.
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah, so with you reaching out to the union as our process that you need to do or you just basically say, “Hey, this is who I am.” Is it an interview process?
Jacqueline Martinez:
Yeah, so at the time I didn’t know that there was a process, so what I did is I emailed them first and said, “Hey, I’m running for school board.” Then one of the union presidents, she reached back out and she was like, “Hey, as soon as filing period is over, we actually reach out to the candidates and you can interview for the endorsement.” I thought, “Oh, okay,” and so when was it? It was a week or two after the filing period ended that I went in for the interview. Yeah, it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, but it was still a good experience and a good learning experience.
Daphne Gomez:
How long does the entire campaign process last?
Jacqueline Martinez:
Well, filing period started in January, and then the election was May 6th, so really five months, but because it ended up going into a runoff. It added an extra month to the whole process. For me, this all went on from mid-January to June 10th.
Daphne Gomez:
About how many hours per week do you think you really spend on researching or creating materials or going out and trying to meet voters?
Jacqueline Martinez:
I would say that the entire process was just all-consuming. As far as cold calling and block walking, especially because block walking is the most important thing that you can do when you run for school board. That was the advice that I was given, and I really held onto that and I did as much block walking as I could, which I would get out of school around 3:30. I would come home and rest, and then anywhere between 5:30 to 8:00, I would be block walking and this was a daily thing. On the weekends I would spend the whole day block walking. Mostly that was because I had very limited resources. I did not have the budget to hire canvassers to go out and do the block walking for me, but I would’ve still done it anyways because I think that voters really appreciate the face-to-face contact with the actual candidate. Yes, you can have a budget to hire canvassers, but you definitely shouldn’t replace your own block walking with those canvassers. It’s important to be meeting voters face-to-face.
Daphne Gomez:
What types of things did you talk about when you met a brand new voter? Did you knock on their door? How did that conversation go and how did you prepare for it?
Jacqueline Martinez:
You know what’s funny, is that being a teacher running for school board is a really, I mean, just people … It was well-received by people. You hook them right away as soon as you … When I would knock on the door, they would open if they opened because they don’t always open, but when they would know, I would introduce myself and immediately say, “I’m a teacher running for school board,” and then I would talk about my platform and I had my three major points on my platform, but I was very well-received by the community when I was doing my block walking and my cold calling. There were a lot of people who had questions who had their own issues. I met a lot of retired teachers. I met a lot of former teachers during my block walking who wanted to talk about the issues. I always told them, I was like, “I’m happy to geek out over education issues with you all day long,” so I really enjoyed those conversations and I was pleasantly surprised that block walking was actually the most enjoyable part of the entire campaign process because just meeting new people and getting to talk about education issues was just gold for me.
Daphne Gomez:
You had three main platform pieces. Do you mind sharing what those were?
Jacqueline Martinez:
Yeah, absolutely. The first one I said is that we need to address the teacher shortage. I said, we’ve got this mass exodus of teachers that are leaving the field and pretty soon we’re going to have empty classrooms, and so we really need to be taking care of our teachers. We need to make sure that they feel respected and heard and that their concerns are being addressed. That was number one. Number two was that I wanted to de-emphasize standardized testing. This is something that I’ve just built my social media presence on, is that I have been showing parents specifically here in Texas that they have the right to refuse the state standardized test. We called the STAR, they have the right to refuse that test for their child. A lot of parents don’t know that. It’s interesting because whenever parents do go and try and do this, not 100% of the time, but the majority of the time they’re met with contentious, angry administrators.
I’ve learned that a lot of administrators are either misinformed, they really think that parents can’t do that, or they know exactly what the parents’ rights are, and they still decide to kind of use these scare tactics to make them take the test. That was the second thing. Then the third platform point was that I wanted safe schools. Yes, I was talking about physical safety. I don’t think you’ll ever meet someone who’s against safety for kids, but for my platform, I was specifically referring to safety in an emotional sense. I said that students who are from specific communities should never be going to school feeling harassed or discriminated against. When I said that we need safe schools, that was the safety I was referring to.
Daphne Gomez:
I can kind of imagine how those words may have potentially antagonized other people who would want to create a smear campaign.
Jacqueline tells Daphne how she dealt with personal attacks on the campaign trail
Do you mind sharing any of the information about how it got dirty?
Jacqueline Martinez:
Yeah, absolutely. There were two main things, but the first one, it’s really specific to El Paso, Texas, where I’m from. At the time, back in May, there were several charters on the ballot. It wasn’t just the election for school board. There were all these other charters that the people were going to be voting on, the one that was getting the most attention, and that got this insane amount of voters out to vote, because no one votes in these local elections. That’s the other thing. These elections are on nobody’s radar, but the reason people came out to vote in May was because of a specific charter regarding the climate change. It was called Prop K and they were trying to get El Paso to have policies that would help with climate change. There was this huge campaign against that. There were all these billboards going up and signs and everything.
They spent millions of dollars to say, “Hey, this is bad for El Paso. This is going to take away jobs. This is going to raise your taxes,” which I found that’s all you have to say. It’s going to raise your taxes and everyone’s going to freak out. It was misinformation, and so that charter ended up just failing. It was like 80% of El Paso said, no, we don’t want this charter. My opponent saw that I had supported, openly supported this climate charter on my social media, and so they did use that against me. They said I was fiscally irresponsible and that I wanted to spend $8 million of taxpayers money. That was the first attack, which I didn’t think was a big deal because I remember thinking, “Well, I made this decision based on thinking about my students, thinking about the future and how, hey, the world is on fire right now. We don’t know if the world’s going to be habitable in the next several years. I’m thinking of my kids when I voted in favor of this charter.”
The second attack was by far the worst, and the one that really just, it’s so upsetting because it was intentionally misleading. I think that they used information to their advantage by exploiting it and knowing that people were not going to know the specifics. The attack was that I supported comprehensive sex education for kindergartners. It was like a, “Oh, Jacqueline wants to teach your five-year-old about sex,” and obviously, the word sex and kindergartners, they don’t belong in the same sentence, but what people don’t understand is that comprehensive sex ed in kindergarten does not mean that you’re teaching five-year-olds about sex. Comprehensive sex ed in kindergarten is teaching them boundaries, teaching them consent to give a hug, consent to receive a hug, being able to speak out and say, “Hey, that makes me uncomfortable.” Things like that, but of course, people don’t know that.
What’s so interesting is that my opponent who is not a teacher, I felt, I was like, “Well, you’re just proving why we need teachers on school boards because one, either you don’t know what this means or you know exactly what this means and you’re intentionally misleading people by using this.” The way that they found that information is that they did a complete sweep of my social media. Back in March of 2022, so this is over a year ago, I stitched a video where there was a teacher in a different state outside of Texas explaining what comprehensive sex ed in kinder meant and why she supported it. I was like, “Yeah, thumbs up. I totally support this.” They took a screenshot and they blew it up on a mailer and sent it out to the community, and it just was awful.
Daphne Gomez:
It’s something that’s getting far too common is a large audience grasping at straws and not paying attention to the actual context to villainize teachers. It’s part of why so many teachers are just exhausted and leaving the classroom. Because if you can’t teach a single lesson without this audience of people who are very extreme and looking for a single word or a single subject matter of whether or not you’re just doing social emotional learning or things that teachers can really explain their intentions and why it’s important that kids know this at certain ages or how it keeps the rest of the community supported and safe, but it’s so infuriating to hear these stories over and over and over again. When they were pretty much calling you like a groomer because you wanted to teach kindergartners-
Jacqueline Martinez:
Groomer, all of that.
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah, because you wanted to teach kindergartners to have boundaries and be able to articulate, “Hey, I’m feeling a little bit uncomfortable.” Where were those smear campaigns going out on? Was it on social media? Was it at your school site?
Jacqueline Martinez:
No, they were through mass text message services and mailers. I actually saw the mailers because my parents who live in the district also, were receiving all of my opponents’ everything, the mailers and the text messages. Yeah, whenever you’re campaigning, you utilize mass text messaging. That’s like one of the things that can help you get the vote out, but yeah.
Jacqueline shares what she learned when her campaign ended in loss
Daphne Gomez:
Unfortunately, you did not get the result that you wanted. You ended up being a few votes short. What would you do differently, or what would you suggest other teachers who are looking and former teachers who are looking to run do differently that you’ve been able to learn from your own experience?
Jacqueline Martinez:
I’m still trying to process the loss. It’s been a month and I’m trying to learn what was the lesson here, because I’m proud of the campaign that I ran. I felt like the message really resonated with both parents and teachers voters, and I felt like I ran a very clean campaign with integrity. This is a teacher who’s putting themselves out there because they want to help. They want to improve the situation for both students and school employees. I think that if I were to change something, and I still don’t know if this is something that I would’ve done, but looking back when the smear campaign started and the mudslinging started, I was advised to not address it. This just completely went against everything that I stand for because I am a very vocal person. I built a social media following based on being very outspoken.
I felt like if there was ever a time to come out and defend myself that it would’ve been now, but I was advised to not address it because then it would legitimize what they were saying. I remember thinking, “Okay, you’re new to campaigns and elections and running for office, so you can’t just take to social media and say something like, you need to listen to the people who actually have experience in all of this.” I didn’t, and looking back, I’m like, “Should I have taken to social media and tried to clear my name?” Then I thought, “You know what? My social media probably wasn’t reaching the voters who tend to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum, who needed to hear this. Right now, I’m still kind of chewing on that, “Man, well, what could I have done differently?”
In the end, I don’t think I would change anything about my campaign because I didn’t need to resort to the mudslinging. I felt like I am the most qualified. I still believe that. I think that what happened here is that we just don’t have the voter turnout that we need in these local elections. Local elections are never on anyone’s radar, and it’s even worse for a runoff in June. No one is thinking about going to the polls in June. They’re on vacation, they’re out of town. They’re resting from a crazy year. I think that if anything, I would want to maybe hire more canvassers. I only had the budget to hire one, and so it was just me and that one canvasser, there were actually two, but one of them ended up kind of not sticking to what they were supposed to do. Maybe that might have been a turning point, I don’t know. I definitely would’ve tried to raise more money to hire canvassers to help me with the block walking.
Daphne Gomez:
I don’t know anything about running a campaign. It would’ve been hard for me not to go out and defend myself on social media or send some sort of follow up letter to everyone else just saying, “Hey, here are the facts, and this is how this is confusing and this is how this is misleading and gross.”
I mean, there’s no reason to take this as a loss because what this does is continues to show other people the importance of teachers and former teachers continuing to run. Every story that ends up, even if it is not a win, is going to empower and inspire other people to continue to take action because you were so close to winning. What the other side wants to do is they want to twist the facts. They want to confuse, they want everyone to be completely exhausted and they want you to give up, so they’re ultimately in charge of running and micromanaging and making sure that things don’t change or scare them. It’s just so important what you did, and I’m just so happy that you came on and shared your story and shared your advice because I feel like there’s a lot of lessons and I believe that it really will truly inspire a lot of other people who are strong and brave just like you to take action, so thank you so much.
Jacqueline Martinez:
Thank you. There is one thing that I do want to say that I think could be like the most empowering thing for teachers who are considering or toying with the idea of running for school board. The election was very close. I was short by 69 votes. In my mind, that makes me even more confident than I was going in because I ran with zero budget, zero resources, no endorsements. My opponent had an entire political consultant agency, an unlimited amount of funds because of who was funding my opponent’s campaign. It was a very well-funded campaign, and mine was not. The fact that I came so close makes me think, “Okay, I was a force to be reckoned with. They were scared.” They couldn’t find anything on the teacher, so what they had to do was go and twist the information and intentionally mislead the community. For me, that is a huge win, because it shows me they’re afraid of teachers running for school board.
Daphne Gomez:
100%. 100%. Jacqueline, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with this audience. Such a good episode, and just congrats on whatever you do in the future and just keep fighting and keep pushing because it’s so important.
Jacqueline Martinez:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Mentioned in the episode:
- EP 46 – Sharon McMahon Answers Teachers’ Questions
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course (If you are a Teacher Career Coach Course member, you can also sign up for our one-on-one Career Clarity calls.)
