A current Washington-Liberty senior experience coordinator and substitute teacher within Arlington Public Schools has announced she will be running for a seat on the Arlington School Board.
With over forty years of experience in education, Sandy Munnel firmly believes “retirement is overrated.”
“I have worked with students and teachers of all grade levels,” Munnel told ARLnow. “As such, I have a unique perspective that is not currently represented on the School Board and that will enable me to hit the ground running if I am elected.”
Heading into the November 2020 general election, two seats on the School Board are up for grabs, with neither incumbent running for reelection. Board member Nancy Van Doren and Board Chair Tannia Talento both announced they will be retiring after their terms conclude.
Prior to her current role and candidacy, Munnel was the Instructional Technology Coordinator at W-L for fifteen years. In her time there, she served on the Building Level Planning Committee (BLPC) for the 2009 construction of the new W-L complex.
Munnel’s platform for school board emphasizes four “smarts:”
- Smart capacity planning
- Smart services planning
- Smart instructional planning
- Smart fiscal planning
Addressing the issue of overcrowding, “Arlington will require good data, vision — and some hard decisions,” Munnel said.
“We have empty seats available. But they are not where we need them now. Decisions on where we build new classrooms will be critical,” she says. “My work on the Schools Committee of the Civic Federation convinced me that we have not always used the best data in taking past decisions. I want to make certain that we know what we need to know when we need to know it.”
School Board elections are nonpartisan, however Munnel hopes to receive an endorsement from Arlington Democrats at their July caucus.
Munnel will face off against the other confirmed candidate, Cristina Diaz-Torres, and anyone else who enters the race. Diaz-Torres announced her candidacy in November and is running a platform emphasizing equity and, similarly, data-driven transformation.
Photo via SandyForSchools.com