Incumbent and former teacher compete for Pajaro Valley Unified School District trustee Area 6 seat

Three out of the seven seats on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District governing board are up for election this November, with contested races on the ballot for trustees in Areas 2, 3 and 6. 

Newcomer Jessica Carrasco and appointed incumbent Adam Bolaños Scow are competing for the trustee Area 6 seat, which includes the Freedom area. 

Carrasco leads programs at a local nonprofit focused on providing art opportunities to local youth, has a child who will enter PVUSD kindergarten next year and is a former teacher in the district. 

“That’s what I’m bringing to the table,” said Carrasco, about her teaching experience. “I did it myself, and I know what works and I know what doesn’t work.” 

Scow, an environmental consultant and musician, was appointed unanimously to the seat last February. He sought the appointment and is running for a full term, he said, because he wants to keep fighting for living wages for district staff and maintain and expand arts and music programs. 

“[Teachers] asked me to run because they felt they weren’t being treated that well, and certainly not paid that well – and it’s now getting better since I’ve been on the board,” he said.

In the two other races for the board, incumbent Georgia Acosta is facing newcomer Carol Turley for trustee Area 2, and incumbent Oscar Soto and newcomer Gabriel Medina are competing for trustee Area 3. Lookout sought in-person interviews with all the candidates and is publishing articles on each of the three trustee area races, starting with the race between Carrasco and Scow. 

As the largest district in Santa Cruz County, PVUSD serves more than 15,000 students, and another 1,000 at its six charter schools. It employs 2,379 employees: 1,116 are classified staff and 1,263 have teaching credentials. The district has 31 schools stretching from Aptos, La Selva, Freedom and Watsonville to Pajaro in northern Monterey County. 

For the past year, the district has faced tensions between school board members and dozens of students, teachers and community members over its ethnic studies curriculum. Last September, the board decided not to renew a contract with a firm over what some district officials say are unfounded allegations of antisemitism. The firm, Community Responsive Education, helped teachers develop the district’s ethnic studies curriculum – which itself is largely supported by students, the district and the board members opposed to renewing the company’s contract. 

Despite the widespread approval of the curriculum and repeated calls from many students, teachers and community members to renew the contract with the firm, the board has not taken the debate back up. The issue has been a significant question for many in this election, and partially prompted candidates Turley and Medina to run. Both support renewing the contract, as do Carrasco and Scow. 

In separate interviews with Lookout, incumbents Acosta and Soto said that they believe the curriculum is good for the students and enriching, however, they felt the district needed to wait to make a decision until Assembly Bill 2918 runs its course through the state legislature. 

Authored by Assemblymembers Dawn Addis (whose 30th District includes part of PVUSD) and Rick Zbur, the bill aimed to improve ethnic studies curriculum in schools and “respond to incidents where antisemitic and anti-Israel content appeared in ethnic studies courses and teacher training,” according to a statement from the authors. 

However, Sebastian Aguilar, a representative from Zbur’s office, said the bill shouldn’t affect the district’s decisions currently.

“AB 2918 did not move forward this legislative session, so it shouldn’t have any impacts since it didn’t pass,” he wrote via email.

Soto and Acosta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about the bill’s status.

In a Monday evening forum hosted by a community group that supports the curriculum, Scow said he found nothing antisemitic about the curriculum or the firm. Similarly, former interim superintendent Murry Schekman previously said he didn’t see anything antisemitic. 

“I believe I’m one of three [board members] – I can’t say that for certain – who are comfortable with the CRE contract,” Scow said at the meeting. “If the votes are there, then I believe it will pass.” 

In addition, PVUSD, like many school districts across the state, has struggled to recover from learning loss caused by the pandemic, declining enrollment and budget challenges, teacher retention and the youth mental health crisis. 

In 2023, students in the district on average scored 70.4 points below standard for English Language Arts and 102.2 points below standard for mathematics. Engagement scores were low as well, with 37.3% of students chronically absent that year, meaning they missed 10 percent or more of the instructional days they were enrolled.

To address aging infrastructure, the district is asking voters in its boundaries to approve a $315 million bond this election as well. The bond would go toward renovating its schools, some nearly 100 years old, updating old classroom technology and improving teacher retention by building workforce housing. 

The PVUSD governing board, like boards across the state, are responsible for steering the direction of a district as it navigates those kinds of challenges. For example, this past year, the board unanimously voted on hiring its new superintendent, Heather Contreras, and it also voted to place the bond measure on the ballot. 

Scow: incumbent, musician and political/environmental consultant

While on the board, Scow was part of the vote to hire Contreras and to place the bond measure on the ballot. By renovating schools and building workforce housing, he says he thinks the district can keep more students enrolled and retain its workforce. In addition, he supports using the funding to enrich Pajaro Valley High School’s offerings. 

“It still lacks a theater and a pool,” he said. “PV High has some of the best arts and music programs in our district.” 

Scow, age 41, was born and raised in Fresno, but spent a lot of his youth visiting family in the Watsonville area and his career working in the area in environmental advocacy. For about 14 years, he worked for Food and Water Watch, a D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on corporate and government accountability regarding food and water. 

Shortly after moving to the area about six years ago, he ran as a democrat in 2020 for U.S. Congress for the 20th District seat held by Jimmy Panetta. He lost in the March 2020 primary, in which he earned more than 25,000 votes. Scow said many of the local teachers supported his race, and later encouraged him to run for the PVUSD board in 2020. He earned more than 2,400 votes in the race but lost to Maria Orozco. 

After Orozco was elected to Watsonville City Council in 2022, he sought her vacated seat on the PVUSD board and was appointed last February. Orozco endorsed him for this race.

While on the board, Scow said he’s fought for raises for staff – particularly for administrators as he did early on in his tenure. 

“It’s been a pleasure, honor to serve, and there’s no question, I’ve made a positive difference for our teachers and our students,” he said. “I led the board in delaying an administrative raise in my second meeting. It was a lot of pressure. Some board members wanted to say just, ‘No.’ Some said, ‘We should do it now.’”

Scow recalled how an argument against the raise for administrators was that the district was struggling with vacancies for teachers at multiple schools, which teachers argued was largely due to low pay. So rather than voting yes or no in the moment, Scow instead motioned that the board delay the decision. Shortly after that, the district and the teachers union agreed to a 10% raise for 2022-23 and 5% for 23-24: “That led to the largest raise ever won in the union.”

“Then what happened is we gave administration the same percentages, because that’s often how it works,” Scow said, adding that he doesn’t think that’s always fair for lower paid employees.

The teachers union, the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers, endorsed Scow for this election, citing his “proven track record of backing PVUSD staff, his commitment to the arts, and his activism concerning the use of pesticides near schools.”

Carrasco: a former teacher, parent and artist

Carrasco, 36, was raised in Watsonville and went to PVUSD schools, including Amesti and Starlight elementary schools, Lakeview Middle School and Aptos High School, from which she graduated in 2006. 

She started her career in education at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, working in the Chrysalis Center Autism Program, which serves preschool through 12th grade children. Her first position in PVUSD was teaching as a long-term substitute at Lakeview Middle School for one year. She later taught world history, U.S. history and ethnic studies – U.S. history and social justice at Watsonville High School. 

She resigned from Watsonville High after three years in the fall of 2023. She was teaching, raising her baby and also in school at Cal State Monterey Bay, to earn her teaching credential. Carrasco said the program was costly ($4,000 a semester) and it was too much to juggle all at once.  

“This is part of my reasoning as to why I would love to run for school board, because I can tell you exactly how you can retain more teachers,” she said. “Because I went through this system, and I went through it fearlessly – I told myself, I’m gonna get this done. And I burnt out very bad.”

She’d like to help start a program where teachers seeking credentials can teach part-time and attend school part-time – rather than doing both simultaneously full-time. 

Now, she’s leading youth art programs at Arte del Corazon. This is her first time seeking a position on the school board. She has previously served as a parks and recreation commissioner for the City of Watsonville. 

Over the summer, after hearing for years from several people that she should run for the school board, she decided to throw her hat in the ring. If she serves on the board starting now, she said she will have time to implement changes that her daughter and other students can benefit from. 

“This is what I’m focusing on: empowering you, supporting teachers and increasing resources and programs that support our diverse community,” she said. 

To empower students, she wants to support the ethnic studies curriculum as it has proved to increase student engagement; increase hands-on learning; support dual language programs, increase academic support and parent/guardian involvement; increase mental health resources; and provide alternative options for post-graduation such as vocational training and internships. 

For teachers, she wants to provide training so they can better understand ethnic studies; provide additional staff support to increase the number of dual language programs; increase mental health resources; and recruit more teachers from the Watsonville community. 

“Something that I think that would really help in the school district is if it hired more people from this community,” she said. “A lot of the times when we were trying to do events in Watsonville [after school], we would hear from teachers, ‘We gotta go – we gotta beat traffic, I gotta go to Santa Cruz and pick up my kids.’” 

She said the more teachers that are from the community, living in Watsonville and seeing their students, the better. 

FOR THE RECORD: This story has been updated to reflect the status of Assembly Bill 2918 and add comment from Assemblymember Rick Zbur’s office.

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