We sit down with a teacher, a superintendent and a student to discuss how they plan to meet the challenges ahead.

This month school is back in session in Washington after the most turbulent and disrupted years in our lifetimes. The pandemic is easing, we hope, but in its wake are gaps in academic achievement and opportunity, challenges with hiring and retaining teachers and staff, teacher strikes, questions about safety and security, debates about the curriculum, and calls for more support around anxiety and mental health in the classroom.

For this month's episode of the Civic Cocktail podcast, host Monica Guzman discusses how to tackle these challenges with three local leaders: 2021 Washington State Teacher of the Year Brooke Brown, Tacoma Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Garcia, and Pavan Venkatakrishnan, the student representative for the Washington State Board of Education.

Our guests attempt to answer the difficult questions: Are we ready for this academic year? What have the past couple years taught our educational leaders that they can apply to better educate our kids? And what is next for a strained public education system that we increasingly expect not to just teach our kids, but to care for them too?

"We have the kids one-third of the time and they are in the community two-thirds of the time," says Superintendent Garcia. "And so we keep putting more and more pressure on what happens in that one-third of the time."

This conversation was recorded on Sept. 7, 2022.

Civic Cocktail is a production of Seattle City Club and Crosscut.

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Credits

Host: Mónica Guzmán

Podcast production: Mark Baumgarten

Event production: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara