Lee Barrios for BESE
Lee Barrios has earned the endorsement of The Network for Public Education Action in her race for the District 1 seat on the Louisiana State Board of Elementary & Secondary Education (BESE).
Lee, a retired Nationally Board Certified Teacher with a masters degree in Secondary Education, ran for the District 1 seat in 2011 and 2015, significantly increasing her share of the vote in 2015. Her opponent has held this seat for 12 years with the support of big money business backers. The majority of successful BESE candidates have been heavily funded since the 2011 election with the majority vote making it impossible to stop the privatization of the state’s public schools.
Lee wants to return the Louisiana Department of Education to an agency that supports public education and employs qualified, experienced educators rather than the current superintendent’s handpicked edu-preneurs who have no education expertise with which to develop education policy.
Since her retirement in 2010, Lee has attended and testified at almost every BESE meeting. As a founding member of the Coalition for Louisiana Public Education, a former Governing Board of Save Our Schools National, and a founding and active member of the national research organization Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, there is no questioning Lee’s commitment to the preservation of public education.
She told NPE Action that she is running to “preserve the locally elected governance structure of the school system, advocate for full and equitable funding, demand accountability for educators at all levels based on a fair and effective method of evaluation and end the one-size-fits-all, high-stakes standardized test as a punitive and flawed measure of learning.”
Lee’s primary election is on October 12 and the general on November 16, 2019. Please be sure to share this endorsement with all eligible voters in Lee’s district, and get out to the polls to elect this committed educator to BESE.