Feeny
Eric Feeny
Pronouns: He/Him
Director District 2
Video Statement
Statement of Interest
Candidates were asked to submit a letter of interest describing why they wish to serve and should be selected for appointment.
I noticed at board meetings, there is not a great opportunity for just talking with constituents. We tell people to come and give testimony but it feels like yelling into the abyss. I would love to see 30 minutes for mingling. I would come with a clip board and collect the name and email of a leader from each interest group. I would help them to keep the dialog open and strategize what a win looks like and help to communicate between them and the district (super). I would mediate – helping the district to really understand what’s important to the people, and helping the people understand what’s viable and to have better context with which to pursue their interest. I would track each of these initiatives in my project management software, so I have a history of what I have succeeded and failed to represent and advocate for my community. I certainly will actively engage in District 2, but am interested in also supporting the broader community.
In terms of working with constituents, I would guide them not to bombard us with many email campaigns but to organize and submit fewer consolidated and organized communications co-signed by the supporting parties. I would ask that the emails not include everybody because the replies become unmanageable, but instead they collect and consolidate questions and comments and forward the emails to their group. I would put this guidance on my communication page, and I would connect people who don’t have a group to an appropriate community coordinator. And then I will keep up the dialog with these groups.
Personally, my primary goal is to go after the 30% funding deficit from the state. I believe an official, even temporary position on the school board and access to the superintendent will give me the legitimacy to build a statewide coalition and give state representatives the undeniable and clear mandate they need. My career background in outreach, business development, and entrepreneurship gives me the tools I need to see this through. I think I could thread the needle of the legal limitations of the office while still raising awareness.
I am able and willing to spend significant time in Olympia and in particular I believe the task requires focusing on representatives outside of Seattle and our cities with similar challenges. I have always had a knack for bridging gaps and believe I can relate to and find an understanding with broader WA.
In addition to the standard role of oversight and representation, I aim to spearhead 3 initiatives.
Building a coalition with other WA public schools to have consistent messaging to citizens and media about state funding needs.
Copy what works. Take a look at more competitive large metro districts and see what we can crib from them.
Evaluate creative opportunities for us to do more with less, communicating with the union early on to avoid getting blocked.
Politically I am not a member of either party and vote based on the merits of the candidate. Philosophically I am fairly moderate. I am open minded and tolerant, but I tend to focus on the big picture which can feel less empathetic at times. I am pro business but I also believe in wealth redistribution, though my preference is through direct transfer rather than ever growing government. I believe all systems have pluses and minuses. I do not believe government is inherently bad nor business and capitalism inherently optimal.
In summary, I’m all in for doing everything I can to organize and drive momentum around funding. That’s paramount and known. Beyond that I will explore, rank, and pursue as I am able, other opportunities.
Resume / Summary of Related Experience
Tell us about your experience, including any Board or other leadership experience.
I studied Mechanical Engineering and History at Stanford. Mechanical engineering (the most interdisciplinary engineering field) teaches us how systems of things work with a focus on designing products to work in the real world applications. History provided a look at how different groups of humans work over time in different places. Combining how things work and how people work, I felt provided a good foundation for navigating problems in our world.
After graduating I got a job at Oracle because during my summer jobs in tech support during the first dotcom bubble, I saw the best sales people came from there. Sales seemed most important to me because even companies with good products go out of business if nobody gives them money. I became the West coast MVP selling against Microsoft, Oracle’s toughest competitor at the time in WA and OR (Microsoft’s home turf). I had a reputation for being the person you ask questions to, because I love knowledge and process optimization, so I was at the hub of the information exchange. I mentored 5 rookies of the quarter. Ultimately the head of the North America sales organization gave me a free reign job to focus on operational performance gains. I met with about 2,000 sales people and managers and directors across 6 global hubs including India and Argentina. I consolidated behavioral best practices and created an enablement team to empower all of the sales reps.
I moved to Seattle in 2012 to cofound a company with a soon to be ex Microsoft director and some friends from school. I took the operations role overseeing business development and customer support. I also intervened to prevent the engineering team from ousting the CEO. It was amazing to me that long time friends could so quickly be at odds, but it was high stakes and high stress. I saw how the two groups just kept talking past each other, not quite saying things correctly so they kept triggering the other side and going down rabbit holes. I elevated the conversation and kept the company from breaking apart.
My second business, I joined 2 others to co-found in 2015 a business that created devices that plugged into systems in commercial buildings like elevators, air conditioning, lighting, etc and would create a standard data model and provide over-time and cross-systems insights to reduce equipment failure and improve efficiency. We came into a 20 year old mature market and in 3 years with minimal funding grew to be third place in market share. But this was a troubled market, hurt by a prior wave of over promising and under delivering ventures. So I oversaw a merger with our next best competitor and we became the market leader.
I sold that business going into covid and have been consulting for startups how to hire and manage their sales teams. From this work I get exposure to many new and unique problem spaces and help solve how to thread the needle to make it work. During this more flexible time and during covid I spent many sleepless nights trying to make sense of these turbulent times, and that soul searching brings me at least in part to public service.
I also am a long term board member of Cascadia elementary. My mother showed me the value of being active in your childrens’ school – involvement that benefits not just your kids but all the students from your community. We have a very productive partnership with our highly competent principal working together to support the staff in dealing with the neurodivergent kids. It’s really a community partnership to adapt the school to meet their own non standard needs. I am very intentional in making sure my kids know that just because school book learning comes easy to them this doesn’t make them better than other kids, even though school feels like the biggest part of their lives. Most people I worked for were not the top of their class. This humility and appreciation of other people’s different strengths is core to my worldview and leadership.
Application questions
What is your connection to the Director District 2 or 4 community, schools, families, and students? How do you foresee growing or expanding on those connections and relationships in your role as a School Board Director?
I have two kids in SPS in third and fifth grade. My kids have attended Green Lake and Cascadia Elementary, and next year start at Jane Adams. I believe in giving back to and supporting the community both financially and with my time. In previous questions I touched on both how I was involved with the PTAs and how I plan to engage the community going forward. I love meeting with people and talking through issues. I am highly resilient against tension or stress by choosing to focus on getting to a productive outcome and taking genuine interest in people and trying to support their success.
What is your understanding of the role and responsibilities of a School Board Director and the Seattle School Board? How do you foresee working with your fellow Directors, the Superintendent, staff, and the public?
As I frequently tell people, really at the end of the day the school board’s role comes down to hiring and firing the superintendent. The implicit threat of replacement provides the leverage, but of course that is not the goal unless it is necessary. So from that frame they provide the strategic mandates that are derived from the will of the people as they understand it, being the elected representatives of citizens. They are also the more accessible and relatable hand people reach out to, in trying to get help navigating SPS with their family when they see systemic issues or need to escalate. I’m a process optimizer. I like to analyze all the moving pieces and learn how things work, and what can be tweaked or rebuilt to make things work better. I’ve been trained for and have extensive practice in negotiating agreements between different parties. My favorite technique is called getting off the line of conflict. Often disagreements or inability to find a resolution appears to come down to a binary conflict. I want more of X, you can’t have more of X. But most times when you step back and investigate what is important to people and what the options are, there are solutions that sidestep the original disagreement about X entirely. Sometimes these elements are referred to as elegant negotiables, but I just think of it as creative problem solving.
Describe the areas of strength you bring to collaboration and building positive working relationships with fellow Board directors.
I believe one of my best traits has to do with pattern recognition and seeing which components in a system can be most levered to impact change. I have a broad area of interest and can quickly assimilate information outside of my domain of expertise. At the end of the day I believe in fairness, improving outcomes, and maximizing overlap of others’ benefit. I go out of my way to do the right thing even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient. I maintain a commitment to democracy and helping others even in circumstances when the outcome would go against my personal preferences or values.
Please give an example of how you have addressed conflict and overcame it to build alignment as a member of a group decision-making body.
Let’s go with a controversial and ongoing issue from my community. Within Cascadia we had to decide as a community if we were going to do significant PTA fundraising and grant that money to the school for basic operations, or not. There was a significant contingent of the community that opposed PTA fundraising. Years before, I started there myself. Despite doubling the fund raising ask from the community given the evaporation of the rainy day funds and continued funding shortage, I rallied increased unity on this topic. I did not accomplish this by winning people over, but by validating their opposing views, then uniting us on common ground. The primary points against PTA fundraising were that it was burdensome and it was unfair to communities that don’t have extra funds they could raise. I articulated the following narrative. First I think significant PTA fundraising is inefficient and would love to see the need for it eliminated. SPS already allocates money unequally to pursue equity. We agree with this. Schools with students that need more intervention have literally double the per student funding. Cascadia however, being a non standard school needs non standard operations to support their neurodivergent student population, but the district does not provide this. From a big picture perspective the district is underfunded and prevented from closing that gap by the state. This comes from dated legislation that was put in place to remedy the underfunding of rural schools, but now it is creating under funding in urban schools. SPS needs any money it can get injected into the system. Eliminating PTA funding and limited local agency does not solve anybody’s problem, it only increases demands on our staff which increases turnover and ultimately weakens our children’s education. At the end of the day these are elementary school kids and despite the fact that they may need less academic assistance, they are still small children and need basic supervision. When increasing bodies on campus, we determined the best way to accomplish it was with existing part time staff that know the kids and the needs of the school and we strategically picked the ones that were most relevant to the school. Nurse helping kids with emotional control issues, counselor more of the same, and librarian, giving our nerdy little kids more book fodder to occupy them and keep them out of trouble. I reminded folks that putting money into the school benefits all the students vs taking care of your child after school only benefits your family. The way in which we raise funds is progressive. We tell people what the average donation would need to be, but then remind people to give what they can. Some will give more to help those with less money to spare and some will give none. The budget was approved with only 1 opposition and the community fundraiser participation was 92%!
School Board Policy No, 0030, Ensuring Educational and Racial Equity, includes the following commitment:
The Seattle School Board is committed to the success of every student in each of our schools and to achieving our mission of ensuring that all students graduate ready for college, career and life. We believe that the responsibility for student success is broadly shared by District Staff, administrators, instructors, communities and families. We are focused on closing the opportunity gap and creating learning communities that provide support and academic enrichment programs for all students. Additionally, we believe that it is the right of every student to have an equitable educational experience within the Seattle Public School District.
What does this statement mean to you?
Tribalism is clearly a human tendency, and humans are very visual and very inclined toward pattern recognition. If you don’t address and manage these tendencies they sometimes stabilize on suboptimal outcomes, in this case systemic racism. The point is not that people are actively hateful or that we can’t try to focus on more important parameters, but that we have an undeniable history of male and eurocentric privilege. It was the law put in place by the dominant economic and military powers. While we have unraveled some of these things, that process is incomplete and the imbalances still echo throughout the system. For me, it comes down to meritocracy and efficiency. We want to facilitate a system where talent and labor get to the best place. This is inhibited if mobility is overconstrained from your starting point. The more you encounter and even perceive limited options because of your gender, orientation, physical appearance, cultural practices, religion, or financial situation the less likely you are to end up in your best outcome. If global individual outcomes are reduced total productivity is reduced which hampers progress – the opposite of a rising tide lifts all boats. The challenge is to facilitate improved mobility and meritocracy while minimizing alienating your allies and reinforcing the very tendencies responsible for the bottlenecks. I think a large challenge with anti-racism is that people don’t want to accept even passive racism as a personal trait. Also it is hard to let go of something even if it is derived from an unfair gain, especially when you perceive your personal behavior to be upstanding and when you’ve invested in the current system and followed its rules. Oftentimes anti-racism is called reverse racism. But I think that is a fair description of some of the techniques. I view it like a chess board. If you inherit a board with pieces already in play, then what happened before you got there is very relevant to the outcome. Even if you follow the rules and have good strategy, can you win against an evenly matched opponent if your pieces are missing the queen? Might you even lose to an inferior opponent? To make the game fair you have to reverse the imbalance. In football you take back the yards unfairly gained due to a penalty, etc. I also support looking for clever solutions that solve the problem without reverse racism.
The Seattle School Board has set three goals for student outcomes with accompanying metrics that serve as broader indicators of the school system’s performance. Provide your insights into how setting goals and monitoring progress influences student success.
Obviously data is important to decision making. Measure what you expect, as that provides a clear path to accountability. My personal experience with it in SPS is that this needs to happen earlier and more distributed in addition to the goals and guardrails at the highest level. Families need to be informed consistently and clearly when their child is behind and what the remedy looks like, and if the family is unable to receive and own this, the school should duplicate that ownership to intervention staff. My other criticism of the G&G work I’ve seen is that it doesn’t really make it easy to analyze progress. The binary goal of X% passing at Y time is easy to know when it’s done, but it doesn’t make it readily visible if you’ve made gains at least the way it was reviewed in public. For example you may still have 40% of kids short of the goal, but did they move from 4th grade equivalent fluency to 5th grade (while still being shy of the 7th grade target)? I suspect some of the leading and lagging indicators will shed some light on this.
Please share your knowledge and/or thoughts on an ongoing educational issue that is a high priority for you. How do you see the Board’s role in this issue?
Teaching to the curve is a long time challenge especially as class sizes are growing. Without solutions this dynamic yields low efficiency learning the further a student is from the selected teaching point on the curve and is also worse in aggregate in classrooms with higher variance. One clear tool is increased use of dynamic content delivered by technology with roaming teacher assistance. Another tool is rebanding (k-2 instead of k-5 etc you) and resizing schools allows you to have statistically more appropriate class counts to deliver appropriate teaching based on level for all subjects with a walk to everything model similar to high school. But this introduces several challenges that have to be addressed, transportation, creating sub community and primary accountability so children don’t get lost. This type of age banding and school size is really only an option for high density areas like Seattle so we can’t expect other areas to pilot it for us. Technology feels better suited for older students who have computer savvy and baseline information processing and executive functioning skills. I view the school consolidations as an opportunity to pilot these evolutions and lend some positivity to a situation that feels negative. I think there are a number of issues, funding, anti-racism, where the communication is not being received well and better messaging needs to evolve. The board as the representation from the community is an earpiece to help the school hear this and thus iterate. I think there’s also an opportunity for the board to push the district to have more representative teaching staff over time, though it may be hard to move the needle as much as desired in a budget constrained environment and high cost of living metro. So the board has to set up expectations and be patient so as not to sacrifice stability and performance while improving one facet of education. That said maybe teaching staff already is representative and individuals just don’t have high probability of having a teacher they identify with due to lower pool size given the teacher ratios. In this case does deviating from random assignment make sense? Or can you try to recruit diversifying staff into overlay positions? Does it have the same impact if you identify with a librarian or PE teacher or does it have to be a classroom staff? If this were something SPS were considering and working on I would certainly do more research.