Deb Lalley
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your family.
I have been married for 30 years to Patrick Lalley, MD, Family Physician at HealthPartners. We have three grown children (James, Dan, and Erin Lalley) who graduated from Apollo High School. I am a Clinical Specialist in Child/Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing at CentraCare, providing mental health care to children through the outpatient clinic and also at Clara's House Partial Hospitalization Program. My husband and I live in rural St. Joseph.
What experience do you have that prepares you for public office?
I was elected to the Board in 2000, and then stepped down for two years before running again in 2005. I am currently in my seventh year on the Board, and am serving as chair for the second time. I have been involved in many volunteer organizations in the past, including the LEAF Board, Kids Voting of Central Minnesota, and the Children's Mental Health Task Force. Because so much of my professional life involves children and families, I am very aware of their school needs and priorities and care deeply about the importance of good schools in our community.
Why did you decided to run for this office?
I am running for re-election because my 9 year span of involvement can be helpful to the board and the new superintendent. We have cut millions of dollars and instituted many efficiencies over those years, and the transparency of operation in the district needs to continue. I am interested in continuing to serve and feels that my experience on the board will be helpful as we attempt to work with our legislators to create funding change at the state level.
Top three issues you would tackle, if elected.
- Excellent educational opportunities for all students, preserving our music and arts programs and enhancing extracurriculars, preschool and all day kindergarten programs. We need three "yes" levy votes to pass to provide these and other programs and to avoid significant cuts in services and school closures.
- Equitable funding from the state so that our community's children have the same opportunities to succeed as those in other districts.
- I believe that the current system NCLB testing serves no useful educational purpose, and that it simply provides a way to steer valuable resources away from public schools with diverse populations and high levels of special education/poverty/transition students. We should be measuring student growth from beginning to end of year, not this year's fifth graders against last year's fifth graders. NWEA Measures of Academic Progress testing should be across our district, with specific targets for achievement clearly define and reported to our community. I support the convening of an "achievement summit" to define goals, expectations and measurement parameters with broad participation from all community stakeholders. Our business, secondary education, human services, faith community, health care and local government leaders benefit from a well educated student population, and need to be invited to the table for setting expectations and defining outcome measures to evaluate just how well educated our students are. NCLB is failed policy contributing to a failing public education system; it's time we reclaimed our vision of effective public schools and held our elected state and federal legislators accountable for adequately funding it.