Peter Gibbins
From Ballotpedia
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Peter Gibbins is a member-elect of the Jeffco Board of Education in Colorado, representing District 2. He assumes office on December 3, 2025.
Gibbins ran for election to the Jeffco Board of Education to represent District 2 in Colorado. He won in the general election on November 4, 2025.
Gibbins completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Peter Gibbins earned a high school diploma from Shawnee Mission East High School, a bachelor's degree from Metro State University of Denver, a degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018, and a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018. His career experience includes working as an attorney.[1]
Elections
2025
See also: Jeffco Public Schools, Colorado, elections (2025)
General election
General election for Jeffco Board of Education District 2
Peter Gibbins defeated Samuel Myrant in the general election for Jeffco Board of Education District 2 on November 4, 2025.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Peter Gibbins (Nonpartisan)  | 67.9 | 113,669 |
 | Samuel Myrant (Nonpartisan) | 32.1 | 53,654 | |
| Total votes: 167,323 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Gibbins in this election.
Campaign themes
2025
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Peter Gibbins completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Gibbins' responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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I am the proud parent of a Jeffco student, and the proud son of a schoolteacher. My mother eventually left the classroom and finished her professional career working for teachers associations, including the Jefferson County Education Association. Growing up, I saw firsthand how hard educators work to provide a quality education for their students. My experiences growing up instilled in me a deep appreciation for the role public schools play in our society.
My relevant, professional background as it relates to the school board includes several years working in the labor movement with public sector employees. This included valuable experiences addressing labor-management disputes in the public sector, and time and time again I saw that public sector labor-management relations can and should be collaborative, and that they can improve the quality of public services enjoyed by taxpayers. I worked during the great recession and saw firsthand how acute budget shortfalls impacted the state’s workforce. My experience also includes community and political outreach work, including coalition building.
I eventually left the labor movement and attended law school at Washington University in St. Louis, where in addition to my law degree, I obtained a degree in mediation and alternative dispute resolution. For undergrad, I studied political science and public administration. I am currently a practicing attorney.- We need increased transparency and accountability from the district. All too often, the district has failed to transparently engage with the community on important issues, and has avoided accountability for questionable decisions. We face a large number of challenges that need to be addressed, and we can only address those challenges if leadership improves transparency and accountability and rebuilds broken trust between the district and the community at large.
- We must continue attracting and retaining high-quality educators. Although major strides have been made in recent years for educator compensation in Jeffco, most educators are still unable to purchase a home in the district, and teachers and staff routinely work second jobs just to make ends meet. It will be hard to maintain compensation levels as we address looming budget shortfalls, but it needs to remain a priority of the board to do so. This will require the board to work hard to seek additional funding, including by working with the community to pass a mill levy override.
- In the wake of the Evergreen High School shooting, student safety remains the central concern the board must address. But as we do so, we need to remain mindful of the fact that physical safety measures to prevent future shootings are only one piece of the puzzle. Preventing bullying and harassment, providing quality mental health supports, and ensuring incidences of misconduct are properly addressed are equally important to make sure that our students and educators feel safe so that learning can occur.
I believe in promoting policies and procedures for greater transparency whenever possible. I also want to work hard to engage with the community in meaningful, two-way conversations about the issues facing Jeffco schools today. Only with transparency and community involvement can we successfully navigate the many challenges we currently face.
An elected official needs to maintain an open mind. That includes openness to new information or facts that were previously unknown; openness to new viewpoints on how different parts of a community are being affected by a particular problem; or openness to understanding how proposed solutions might create different, new problems, a regular occurrence in public policy. Elected officials needs to be able to work collaboratively, even with people they might otherwise disagree with. This also includes navigating situations where different stakeholders are disagreeing with each other, often passionately. When faced with conflicting views, an elected official needs to sift through the noise and conflict to arrive at the best possible solution, while doing their best to continue supporting the part of the community that maybe felt left out by whatever solution was arrived at.
In the simplest, most practical sense, school board members are responsible for educating themselves about the issues that come before the board, attending the necessary meetings, and making the necessary decisions through their vote. That said, doing all of that effectively requires regularly engaging the community in discussions about those issues; connecting with district leadership and school-level educators; and constantly focusing on the core function of any school district: safely and effectively educating students.
I hope to foster more productive conversations, including good-faith disagreements where people have a greater appreciation of each other's viewpoints, even if they don't always agree with them. Hopefully, we can have more trust in the community, despite our various differences.
I remember the Challenger explosion. I was 5 when it happened.
My first job was scooping ice cream. It started as a summer job, but I kept working into the school year until the weather got cold.
Like many lawyers, I always admired Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.
School board members focus on strategic leadership of the district; oversight and approval of the budget; setting district-wide policy; regularly evaluating the district's performance including the extent to which district leadership is effectively executing the board's adopted policies; and selecting and overseeing the superintendent, the board's sole employee. Through all of this, board members should engage with various stakeholders to ensure that the community's voice is being heard, and that board members are effectively representing the community's interests.
I view all of the people living in the school district as constituents. Even if a person doesn't have children or grandchildren attending a Jeffco school, they benefit from quality public schools, and suffer the drawbacks when schools function poorly.
Though there are certain issues that spark considerable disagreement, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, staff, and community members want students to receive a quality education that provides students with a broad set of skills that will allow them to effectively enter the workforce or go on to higher education with the necessary tools to succeed and productively contribute to society. By starting with the basic needs we all agree on, I believe we can then look at creative ways to address the more diverse needs relevant to specific individuals or groups.
I am deeply committed to engaging in meaningful, two-way conversations with all manner of groups and stakeholders. So long as people are interested in having civil, good faith conversations about the issues we all face, I am more than willing to engage with any group, even those that may disagree with me.
While I am always interested in learning more about new teaching approaches, we should keep in mind that our workforce, which includes over 5,000 teachers, already possesses a wealth of skillsets for effectively teaching our students. In fact, a majority of our teachers have master's degrees. They are also full of creative ideas for improving the quality of education for their specific students. However, they often lack the support to effectively do what they already know how to do. Rather than continue to spend money on overpriced consultants and fancy new techniques, we need to get back to the basics and listen to what our teachers need, like up to date textbooks, quality equipment, and safe classrooms. As for measuring performance, standardized testing gives us valuable information, but we need to explore other measures that provide more timely feedback, as standardized test results often come too late to meaningfully impact classroom instruction when it matters.
With state funding already stretched to its limit, and federal funding shrinking rapidly, Jeffco schools will need to pursue a mill levy override to increase local funding sources for attracting and retaining high-quality educators.
I believe we need to approach safety holistically. Everyone is focused, and rightfully so, on preventing the next school shooting, and this usually involves an intense focus on physical security. But we also need to consider other issues like bullying, and mental health supports that will help identify troubled students before they slip through the cracks and act out violently.
Mental health resources are already stretch thin, and it will be difficult to increase funding as we move into lean budgeting years. We need to explore community partnerships to help increase services, and look across the district to identify best practices in individual schools that are effective, both in outcome and cost-efficiencies.
Jefferson County Education Association
First and foremost, students need to feel safe physically AND emotionally to best learn. They also need the space to be themselves, and to have teachers and staff who are prepared to respond to each student's unique needs. They also need multiple pathways to success that are relevant to each student's talents and life goals.
I will actively seek out opportunities to engage in meaningful two-way conversations with parents, through town halls or meeting with various community groups, when welcomed to do so.
We need to keep politics and culture wars out of the classroom. I want to see Jeffco schools focus on teaching the basics as well as possible rather than engaging in fights about sweeping curriculum changes.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2025 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on October 14, 2025
