Paula Battistelli
Adams 12 Five Star Schools Board of Education District 2
Tenure
Term ends
Years in position
Predecessor
Elections and appointments
Personal
Contact
Paula Battistelli is a member of the Adams 12 Five Star Schools school board in Colorado, representing District 2. She assumed office on December 6, 2023. Her current term ends in 2027.
Battistelli ran for election to the Adams 12 Five Star Schools school board to represent District 2 in Colorado. She won in the general election on November 7, 2023.
Battistelli completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Paula Battistelli was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. She earned a bachelor's degree from Southwestern Oklahoma State University in 1997, a graduate degree from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2003, and a Ph.D. from Washington State University in 2009. Her career experience includes working as a instructional designer and writing professor.[1]
Elections
2023
See also: Adams 12 Five Star Schools, Colorado, elections (2023)
General election
Endorsements
Battistelli received the following endorsements.
Pledges
Battistelli signed the following pledges.
2023
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Paula Battistelli completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Battistelli's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma that was unusually diverse. I developed a great appreciation for diversity and its benefits.
My family moved to an even smaller town when I was 13 where I was one of 28 graduating seniors. Several of my classmates dropped out for various reasons, and I always wondered what could be done to retain students more effectively.
I went on to graduate with a BA in English at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in 2001, an MA at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, and a PhD at Washington State University.
I taught for several years at a historically black university in Austin, Texas, and then transitioned into online learning where I became an Associate Dean. I am now a Learning Experience Designer at CU Boulder where I create innovative and accessible online courses for practicing educators in the School of Education.
I participated on the District Accountability Committee from 2017 to 2018 as well as the Five Star Leadership Academy in 2022-2023.
I am also the mother of an 11 year old boy who is in the Adams 12 School District. His experience at Glacier Peak Elementary has been wonderful, and his committed teachers and educators helped him grow immensely despite ADHD and ASD.
- I will work to ensure ALL children receive an engaging, innovative, and thorough education in a safe environment to meet the challenges of the future.
- I will prioritize improved school funding and equitable allocation of that funding.
- I am committed to attracting and retaining high quality educators in Adams 12, particularly since our surrounding school districts offer competitive salaries.
In the realm of public education, I'm passionate about equitable educational opportunities, equitable funding, prioritizing mental health, prioritizing public education investment over private, and ensuring public school safety while also ensuring student well being. I fully support Public School Choice in Colorado, and I support the four public charter schools that have public oversight through the Adams 12 Board of Education.
I have several people I look up to. First, I look up to my mother, who taught me how to work hard and who fought to overcome stereotypes when she entered a largely male workforce as a maintenance person at an apartment complex. I look up to my father who was challenged by a sudden disability in his twenties but who went on to embrace his role as primary caregiver and homemaker. Thanks to my parents' love and dedication, they have three kids who graduated with BAs, two of whom went on to pursue advanced degrees. I look up to Kurt Vonnegut who encouraged us to realize when we are happy and appreciate that happiness. He also taught us how to find humor in even the darkest moments. I look up to James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison for speaking truth to power in the most beautifully poetic way possible despite the ugliness they encountered. I look up to the young graduate students who are balancing parenthood while also pursuing advanced coursework. I look up to people who listen first and speak last. I look up to people who work to be a force of consensus. I look up to people who are kind because it's the right way to be.
Martin Carcasson’s The Wise Collaborator: A New Ideal for Civic Decision-Making
This is a non partisan role. The primary characteristic of this Board of Education Director should be the ability to engage in deliberative governance.
I’m analytical, thoughtful, open-minded, empathetic, a good listener, and absolutely dedicated to the growth and development of all children.
The core responsibilities are to oversee the performance of the superintendent; to set forth policies and resolutions that benefit the community, district and students; to fully engage in deliberative governance in the previously stated responsibilities; to behave ethically; to seek out viewpoints of the community, students, faculty, and staff’ and to act as an advocate on behalf of the district at the federal, state, and local levels.
I simply want to leave Adams 12 and the world at large better than I found it.
There are so many things that happened in the eighties. One thing I remember distinctly is the hysteria that occurred around HIV when it was first discovered. I remember the numerous rumors and myths spreading about how people caught the virus and I remember the scapegoating and ostracizing that occurred as a result.
When I was 15 years old, I worked as a nurse's aid at a nursing home in my town. I earned $4.25 per hour. I worked in that position until I was hired at a local convenience store. Nursing home work requires a lot of emotional labor. I grew to love the residents of the nursing home, but for a fifteen year old, watching them pass away was very difficult.
I greatly enjoyed Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. It made me want to laugh and cry all at once: “They say the first thing to go when you're old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn't true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
Right now, I would love to be a doctor in James B White’s Sector General book series. He wrote a series of books about a hospital in the middle of space that was equipped to treat patients throughout the galaxy and even universe. It’s fun to think of oneself wondering about the halls of such a hospital meeting and working with a fantastic array of alien species and navigating new relationships with very different groups.
Arcade Fire’s Unconditional I. It makes me think of my son and kids everywhere.
Here’s an excerpt: “Lookout kid, trust your heart
You don't have to play the part they wrote for you
Just be true.
There are things that you could do
That no one else on earth could ever do
But I can't teach you, I can't teach it to you.”
I was born into a very low socioeconomic family. My father was paralyzed in a car accident when he was 23, and my family survived on social security and my mother’s minimum wage jobs. I was blessed to have parents who loved me dearly. Socioeconomically, life was a struggle. I was the kid who received free or reduced lunches.
The primary job of a school board member is to be the voice of the community. The community includes taxpayers for the school district, parents who send children to school in the district, those children in the district, the staff and faculty who work in the district, and other stakeholders. My job is to help negotiate the sometimes competing demands of those voices in the school district in order to help reach a decision that is in the best interest of the community and, in particular, the students.
My constituents are the parents, students, grandparents, and tax payers in my district.
I will first support those diverse needs by listening. We need to first hear what our students, faculty, staff, and community feel their needs are. And I will help all those perspectives to hear each other fairly. I will then work to support compromise that balances competing obligations while respecting fundamental rights.
But first, I will listen, and I will do so by actively seeking insight and feedback. I will schedule regular listening sessions in the district to hear from the various stakeholders, and I will utilize digital media to share those perspectives.
I will plan to offer a meet and greet at a school in my district that rotates each month. I will partner closely with the school PTO, the DTEA, the Classified Staff Union Rep, as well as offer a student forum to connect with my constituents. I'll update them on important BoE topics, and I'll seek their input. I'll start with those schools that are struggling academically and from a funding perspective.
Good teaching begins first with good relationships. A teacher and a student have opportunities to connect with each other in personal and academic ways. This helps a teacher better differentiate for the students in the course. A second trait of good teaching is that it encourages autonomous problem solving and critical thinking. While memorizing the atomic weight of carbon has its importance, a more significant skill on the part of the student is the ability to utilize knowledge of the elements and the periodic table in relation to problems the community, the nation, and the world are experiencing. For this reason, I’m a strong supporter of problem based, project based, case based, and design based learning. Such approaches encourage students to puzzle through a situation and come up with a solution or idea that best serves the need identified.
Beyond using one of the approaches above, another trait of good teaching is when a teacher can help students understand the “why” question. Why is it beneficial for all of us to understand science? Why should we all be able to write well? Why is it important to be able to critically analyze and dissect online sources? Good teachers are able to help students start answering these questions. Good teaching also involves empathy and an asset based approach. Instead of seeing a child’s background as a deficiency, a good teacher works to understand what assets may be at play in a student’s background. They see the innate possibility in a child instead of all the factors against them.
So how do we measure good teaching? We can do so through one key survey already initiated–the school climate survey. Another way to do so is by utilizing shared rubrics created by teachers in schools to evaluate the growth and capabilities of the students they are teaching. Such surveys can also assess whether students and parents feel they are learning. As a Board of Education director, I will encourage the use of tools We don’t know what the future will hold. We need a curriculum that encourages more problem solving across subject areas. Interdisciplinary opportunities are also great for helping people escape binary thinking about topics. Math and writing often do go hand in hand. I would like to see more CTE and college pathways offered to everyone in the district. I can envision a college credit bearing certified nurse’s aid credential that prepares students to next earn an associate in nursing, and then, if they wish, pursue a bachelor’s degree.
I would also like to see a return to more arts in the curriculum with a push for more foreign language coursework options, art options, music options, and so on. Creative thinking, like critical thinking, will be important for an unpredictable future. We need to raise creative, critical thinkers who are prepared to meet a variety of different types of challenges.
We also need to improve our curricular offerings for students who are on IEPs and emergent bilingual learners. Adams 12 already does very well with our emergent bilingual learners, but we need more resources, more staff, and more faculty who can help meet the needs of these two populations.
I think the biggest barrier to equitable school funding throughout Colorado is the Budget Stabilization Factor. The state has addressed budget deficits on the backs of public schools and public charters for too long with this factor. I will support efforts to remove the Budget Stabilization Factor entirely from public school funding formulas.
I believe all children have the right to learn in an environment where they feel safe. They also deserve to learn in an environment where they don’t feel like a prisoner. We need to find ways to achieve both of those rights for our learners. School Resource Officers can play a positive role in helping kids feel safe by ensuring that our SROs take part in strong professional development around kids’ mental health and wellness and other very important topics that help position our SROs as mentors to children instead of enforcers.
The past few years have been particularly difficult not only for students, but also for faculty and staff. We offer social and emotional learning for children in k-5. If we do not offer this to kids in middle and secondary, we should make a concerted effort to do so, particularly around strategies for managing stress and overall wellbeing. We also need to provide similar programs for our teachers, not because they don’t possess social and emotional skills but because teaching involves a significant amount of emotional labor. Teachers deserve outlets and strategies for dealing with the stresses that occur while working with our children, particularly around topics like teacher burnout.
My son’s first joke he learned was the interrupting cow:
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow
Interrupt----
----MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I would like to propose a policy where board members are required to disclose monthly any and all schools and school employees they visit or speak with over the applicable month. This will provide transparency as far as whether board members are actively visiting schools to seek insight and, if so, which schools they are visiting.
I would also like to see language in the Board of Education policies about graduates that targets special populations i.e., low income students, students from minority groups, students on IEPs, emergent bilinguals, etc with an accompanying monitoring report.
Colorado Education Association
District 12 Education Association
Kathy Plomer, State Board of Education At Large
Kyle Mullica, State Senator, District 24
Shannon Bird, State Representative, District 29
The ideal learning environment would begin with a teacher who is paid a salary that allows them to live comfortably in the community where they teach. The classroom would also include a class size that is appropriate for allowing the teacher to make individual connections with their students so that they can best meet the needs of each student. This class size will vary based on the ages of students and student needs. In cases where there are students present who have IEPs and/or ALPs, the teacher would also have a paraprofessional present to help support the teacher in providing differentiated instruction. The ideal learning environment would include a school psychologist or counselor with a reasonable caseload who could attend to the mental well being of students, and classwork at all ages would continue to focus on social and emotional learning. The ideal learning environment would challenge students by using an inquiry based approach, and it would provide a robust curriculum that encourages critical thinking and problem solving at all grade levels.
I believe that Adams 12 did the best that it could do given the struggles that we faced as a nation. Districts and Schools were offered no handbooks or guidelines for dealing with a pandemic. They were basically told to figure something out in a week or two. Adams 12 made sure every child had access to a laptop for online learning. They followed the mandates set forth by our then health department. As soon as some degree of f2f was allowed, they started offering learning pods for kids whose parents were required to return to work. They did the best they could in a tough situation.
One way Adams 12 could have improved is that they were late to the game in creating an online school. Boulder Valley School District already had Boulder Universal in place for a few years. Other districts had online options, as well. If we had such options in place before the pandemic began, perhaps the transition to online would not have been quite so chaotic because Adams 12 would already have online learning experts on the payroll, and some kids would already have experience in an online modality.
I will partner closely with the PTOs for the schools in my district to connect with parents and share updates. I will also partner with parent groups for Gifted and Talented Students, Special Education Students, groups for our Indigenous students, LatinX students, LGBTQIA students, etc.
The ideal situation is a hiring committee made up of faculty and staff where they determine what they are looking for, what their school needs, etc. These needs should include recruiting from diverse employee populations to complement diverse school populations.
After narrowing down the list of applicants, the community should be invited to meet the candidates. They would complete a survey afterwards that would help affirm the final choice.
Hiring committees should solicit feedback each year on what the community, staff, and faculty feel the ideal candidates should bring to the table.
These are all things that Adams 12 does. I would just continue to support and broaden access to this model.
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Other survey responses
Ballotpedia identified the following surveys, interviews, and questionnaires Battistelli completed for other organizations. If you are aware of a link that should be added, email us.
See also
External links
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on September 10, 2023
