Siuslaw School Board Candidate for Director 6
Tom Posegate’s decision to run for the Siuslaw School Board is shaped by being a son and father.
He wants good schools for his three daughters: Scout, 7, Wren, 4, and Ember, 2. Scout is a first grader at Siuslaw Elementary School. “My middle child is going to be starting kindergarten. And I would love for her to come home from school and say, ‘I had a great day today. I had so much fun,’ ” Posegate said.
And his father was a public school teacher and professor. “He’s the type of person that I think would be wonderful on a school board.” But his father was recently diagnosed with cancer, “And so he can’t do it,” Posegate said.
Posegate and his wife, Heather, moved to Florence in 2016 from Riverside, California. Heather is a nurse practitioner at PeaceHealth, and Posegate is a stay-at-home father who worked for a year as a substitute teacher in the Siuslaw schools and now volunteers one day a week in Scout’s first-grade class.
If his devotion to his daughters is the fuel behind his candidacy, the March school board meeting was the spark.
He is concerned that the current board is trying to micromanage the schools. Witness the March 2025 school board meeting, he said. The board banned a book – overruling the decision of the librarian, principal and a community-run committee. Posegate said he would have voted to leave the book on the high school library shelf. At the same meeting, the board considered a policy to require teachers to have all their supplemental materials approved by the board. The board chose to delay voting on this measure.
To Posegate, both decisions reflect a board trying to step out of its lane by managing day-to-day decisions.
He would like the board to be a cheerleader for the schools in the community, spreading the word about the career training programs in the high school and the dedicated teachers he sees in the schools.
He is interested in looking for new funding streams that could support infrastructure improvements or new programs.
“I think that, for a society to function and thrive, we are all better off if we all take care of each other. I think that teaching everyone makes us all smarter. And, yeah, I, I think public education is a vital part of a functioning democracy,” Posegate said.
Multiple important issues will come before the board over the upcoming four-year term.
A bond measure to replace the high school and repair the other buildings was defeated in 2018. Aging buildings and other capital needs are almost certain to be a focus for the board over the next few years.
The board may also need to find a new superintendent. There is a possibility that the current superintendent, Andrew Grzeskowiak, may retire or step down. Other issues facing the district are plans for a new charter school, the impact of federal budget cuts, and state budget woes.
“We will likely be losing federal money, and there’s going to have to be some kind of cuts, and the school board will be very much involved in that. I’m not going to tell you that I know exactly what I would do because I, you know, I haven’t looked at all the information yet, but we’re going to have to have people who are going to be very intentional about where the money goes.”
Answering the “if elected” question, where he’d like to be in a year or two, Posegate responded, “I’d feel really good if I could look back and say, look at these things that we’ve done that have made going to school a better experience for the students in our town.”
“I want to see our schools be a place where the kids are excited to go. I see some of the staff really putting their heart and soul into these kids. And I think that’s so great. And, as a school board member, I would love to be a part of that team that just wants to see these students thrilled to be at school, having fun and feeling valued.”