Cobb school board candidate Julia Hurtado

Candidate profile: Julia Hurtado, Cobb school board Post 5

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Julia Hurtado, Cobb school board candidate

During her primary campaign in her first bid for public office, Julia Hurtado said she was encouraged by the level of engagement with parents and the various school communities that make up Post 5 on the Cobb Board of Education.

During an anxious summer with questions about how the school year would begin, Hurtado had plenty of uncertainties of her own.

“We had a lengthy family meeting,” said Hurtado, a physical therapist and mother of a Sedalia Park Elementary School student.

Her daughter was among those elementary students returning to school classroom learning this week as the Cobb County School District began a phased-in reopening of campuses.

“She misses her friends,” said Hurtado, the Democratic nominee who is facing three-term Republican incumbent David Banks in the Nov. 3 general election.

Hurtado defeated Lassiter PTSA co-president Tammy Andress in the June 9 primary, receiving only 543 fewer votes than Banks, who defeated two GOP contenders without a runoff.

Hurtado said while she was meeting parents and school families, she met “people who weren’t paying much attention to this race” who were eager to hear her thoughts on the school restart.

“It’s an all-consuming topic,” she said. “There has been a lot of fear of the unknown.”

Hurtado’s campaign website is here. East Cobb News has interviewed Banks and will publish his campaign profile shortly.

Post 5, which includes the Pope and Lassiter clusters and some of the Walton and Wheeler attendance zones, has long been considered strong Republican territory.

It’s one of three school board races in which Republican incumbents are facing Democratic challengers with party control of the seven-member board on the line.

Banks is the vice chairman of the four-member GOP majority, and Hurtado said that “I think that Cobb County has outgrown him. I’m the opposite of him.”

Hurtado said he’s getting by on name recognition and that “I have made it a point to have a campaign where everyone feels included.”

She understands she needs to appeal across party lines—her husband is a disaffected Republican—and has pledged what she calls a “platform of transparency.”

Hurtado said she was dismayed the school board didn’t have a special meeting this summer to discuss back-to-school options, as proposed by Democratic member Charisse Davis, who represents the Walton and Wheeler clusters.

“It was a wasted opportunity because we’re having so much engagement from our community now,” Hurtado said. “Some of it might be politics, but this is bigger than politics.”

As she outlined during her primary campaign, Hurtado supports greater efforts at equity in the Cobb County School District, and not just related to racial and cultural differences as Davis has advocated.

For Hurtado, that also includes special-education and other non-traditional students.

“Some of the things we’re doing well are isolated,” she said. “A student might be sent to a different school” that has a teacher or program to suit a particular student’s needs.

“We need to stop operating in silos,” said Hurtado, who has suggested that the district expand partnerships with community organizations suited to address those needs.

Hurtado said she supports a proposed anti-racism resolution that the school board couldn’t agree on—and that was split along partisan lines. She is one of four Democratic school board candidates to sign a resolution condemning racism.

Since the primary, online petitions have been created to rename Walton and Wheeler high schools, due to the racial backgrounds of their namesakes.

Hurtado supports those changes, and said as an example that as a Jew, she could understand students who might be uncomfortable going to a school named after a Confederate general.

In an online advertisement, Banks claims that’s part of what he calls Hurtado’s “radical” and “left-wing agenda” and that “Democrat school candidates put our Community at GREAT Risk.”

The YouTube video includes footage of Hurtado answering questions during an online candidates forum, including revisiting Cobb’s senior tax exemption.

Republicans on the board are sternly opposed to efforts by Davis and Jaha Howard, another first-term Democrat, to ponder the possibility of closing loopholes.

Hurtado said she doesn’t think it would hurt to examine the issue, and noted that she differs with Davis and Howard on some issues.

But she said she’s noticed a cultural shift in the county that also includes how educational matters are addressed.

“That’s not radical,” said Hurtado, who said she’s been talking to more Republican voters during her campaign. “I know I can work with anyone.”

The racial consciousness that’s been going on in the country since this summer, Hurtado said, demands a more proactive response from the school district.

“This is the moment that we’re in,” she said. “There’s a reckoning going on, and we have to prepare our children to better understand the world they’re growing up in.”

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Cobb school board candidate spotlight: Julia Hurtado, Post 5

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Julia Hurtado, Cobb school board candidate

Julia Hurtado said she had never considered running for public office when she noted a familiar name on the ballot for the Cobb Board of Education post that includes her daughter’s school.

David Banks has represented Post 5 since 2009, and four years ago was re-elected without opposition. Hurtado, a physical therapist with a busy schedule balancing her career and family, thought to herself “that it’s time for a change.

“Once they’ve been there for so long, people are asking for something different. And I don’t think anyone should run unopposed.”

With that, Hurtado decided to toss her hat into what’s becoming a crowded ring to challenge one of the board’s most senior figures.

Hurtado, the mother of a daughter who attends Sedalia Park Elementary School, is one of two Democrats running in the June 9 primary for Post 5, which includes the Pope and Lassiter clusters, along with some of the Wheeler cluster.

The other Democrat is Tammy Andress, current co-president of the Lassiter PTSA. Three Republicans, including Banks, are running in the GOP primary. The challengers there are Shelley O’Malley and Matt Harper.

(Hurtado’s campaign website is here.)

Hurtado cited what she claims is a lack of transparency and vision, especially in light of quite a bit of economic and cultural diversity in the Cobb County School System, which has 112,000 students.

“There are people who feel they don’t have a connection with this guy,” Hurtado said, referring to Banks, who’s been extended an interview invitation by East Cobb News.

Like Andress, she’s been critical of the school board’s four-Republican majority’s vote to banish public comments from school board members during its public meetings.

She also pointed to increasing parental concerns over facilities at Eastvalley Elementary School, which will soon get a new campus at the former site of East Cobb Middle School.

But they’ve long complained about aging portable classrooms to handle overcrowding.

“Their kids are going to school in dangerous buildings, and nobody’s listening,” Hurtado said.

“The biggest thing we need to do is to communicate and collaborate. In East Cobb, we do a good job of that, because for so many family the center of the community is the schools.”

Hurtado supports the idea of having an equity officer in the district floated by two current board Democrats, including Charisse Davis of the Walton and Wheeler cluster.

That would include not just racial and ethnic minorities, but would attend to the needs of special education students and others in non-traditional situations.

“We need to give these families a platform,” Hurtado said. She advocates a greater distribution of resources for those students, as well as those in an Individual Education Program (IEP).

Hurtado said the current situation of “distance learning” has been challenging for her, homeschooling an elementary school student, and calls teachers “full-blown super heroes” for how they’ve handled online instruction.

“This has shined a light on some of the weaknesses in our system,” she said, referring to students who don’t have computers or other devices to learn from home.

“But it’s also shown how innovative we can be.”

Hurtado said her main advocacy would be “to offer teachers a platform for what they need,” regardless of learning circumstances to come.

School board Democrats also have raised the issue of examining Cobb’s senior school tax exemption, something else the Republicans, including Banks, have not wanted to revisit.

They rejected a proposal by Davis to study the issue, including possible financial impacts by tweaking the exemption.

Hurtado said the county has grown and changed tremendously since the exemption became law in the 1970s.

“Anytime a question is raised, it’s worth collecting data,” she said. “We can’t even ask questions? There’s never a reason to turn down a chance to find out more information.”

If she’s elected to the school board, Hurtado said her budget priorities would be to provide the resources “so that our teachers stay” in the Cobb district.

“Our school district is defined by the strength of our teachers, and in listening to what they need.”

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