TNT endorsement: Tacoma Public Schools Pos. 1

The right candidate for Tacoma School District’s board Position 1 is not hard to choose this year. But that doesn’t mean one candidate is perfect.

Lisa Keating, the incumbent, is also the executive director of the Washington State LGBTQ Commission. She has institutional knowledge and experience that makes her an asset to the school board in a time of budget uncertainty. Her challenger, business owner and pastor Caleb Fahey, lacks the depth of knowledge and experience needed to guide the school board. Keating wins our endorsement.

Her experience showed in her answers. She knew details off hand about the intricacies of the budgeting process, the current network of youth programs outside of school hours and the ways TPS partners with neighboring districts to make sure students without stable housing get to school.

On the other hand, Keating, who is 54, could have given more precise answers on some topics. When asked how she’d build trust with the school district’s community after the cuts used to balance this school year’s budget, she leaned heavily on the idea of communication and partnerships without specifics.

Generally speaking, candidates who are already in office run the risk of simply defending the government they’re a part of, rather than voicing their own visions for the future.

Keating isn’t uniquely bad in that regard. But voicing specific strategies for dealing with known problems, even if they won’t fix the problem entirely, go a long way to proving a candidate will do more than throw their hands up.

Here’s why the choice is simple in spite of that frustration. Fahey’s answers were even more lacking in actionable ideas. His answers to multiple questions about addressing students’ needs hinged on parent or community volunteers.

Families and community organizations should absolutely be involved in our schools. But Tacoma Public Schools already has a network of parent and community volunteers who do things like read in classrooms, which was one solution he suggested. That is wonderful for many reasons, but it can’t make up for a lack of funding for trained literacy instructors.

Fahey, 40, speaks perhaps most passionately about protecting students from religious families from being bullied by people who disagree with them. He said protections for a marginalized group of students possibly could turn those kids into bullies toward other groups, particularly students from religious families.

Regardless of how you feel about that idea, it’s not enough to hang a campaign on, and it’s not an issue that ranks among the district’s largest challenges. It also echoes a nationwide political campaign that isn’t focused on Tacoma.

That’s another reason why Keating, with her familiarity of the issues and possibilities here in Tacoma, is our choice.

The News Tribune Editorial Board is: Laura Hautala, opinion editor; Stephanie Pedersen, TNT president and editor; Jim Walton, community representative; Justin Evans, community representative; Bart Hayes, community representative.

This story was originally published October 8, 2025 at 5:00 AM.