Father, Attorney, and Geek William Soland wants to Fight for All Students as a Member of the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board

William Soland is on a mission. To make schools better in the Tucson Unified School District as a new member of its governing board.

Running as a father, attorney, and self-described geek, Mr. Soland, if elected, promises to work toward:

• Ensuring that all students are treated equally and respectfully.
• Better compensating teachers.
• Improve student retention.
• Break the school-to-prison pipeline. 
• Advocate for the hiring of more counselors and social workers.

Mr. Soland graciously took the time to discuss questions about his candidacy for the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board.

The questions and his responses are below. 

• Please tell the voters at least three reasons why they should elect you to serve on the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board. 

“My top priorities have been protecting our most vulnerable students and promoting public education. 

The reasons that I think make me unique among the candidates running:. Number one is I would say my legal experience. To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have an attorney currently on the school board, and none of the other candidates running our attorneys. We might have some situations coming up where the school board might need to take a stand, and we might need to have a legal position on things. I know that the school board has in-house counsel, but sometimes it’s nice to have somebody on the board who has an idea of how laws work, and kind of knows not just what the law says on paper but this is how I’ve seen courts interpret this sort of thing in the past. This is how things work when the sausage is actually being made. We saw that when the school district stood up to the governor in terms of the mask mandate and we were successful legally. I would like to see TUSD continuing to take stands and I would like to be able to be there to help guide the board on things like that.

The second reason and this is specific to the kind of attorney I am:. I’m a public defender and I think that has given me a very good, kind of critical thinking, skeptical mindset. You know, in order to do my job, I can’t really take anybody’s word at face value. I read police reports. I listen to what my client has to say. I listen to what the prosecutor has to say, but at the end of the day, I’m not building my case based on what somebody’s told me. I’m building my case on what evidence I can find and what I can verify, and if I just were to take one person’s word for it, I’d be blindsided by all sorts of things. I want to bring that kind of skepticism to the board. When I’m listening to a report, I want to make sure that I’m paying attention and that I’m thinking critically about what goes into that report. I think that’s something that I uniquely bring to the table. 

The final reason is: I’m just a big believer in public schools. I’m a strong believer in the teachers and staff at our public schools. I know they’re very passionate people. I really want to support our kids and make sure they are all treated justly and equally and I want to protect them. 

Those are big passions of mine and I think those are reasons the people should vote for me.”

• Please advise what are at least three main issues in the Tucson School Board race.

“The number one issue that keeps coming up at the forums we’ve had has been, teacher retention, and close behind that has been student retention.

One of the other candidates running, Brianna Chillious, likes to bring to everyone’s attention that it’s a salary shortage, not a teacher shortage. I haven’t exactly seen all the numbers, but I do know that Arizona has been consistently underpaying teachers my entire life. Mr. Val Romero, who’s also running for, the school board as well likes to say that Arizona is 50th in terms of public education. We’re also 49th or 50th in terms of public school funding. So, it’s not really a big mystery how we got there. Um, so, you know, I definitely want to promote public schools.  I will take a position as a member of the school board and use that microphone, that bullhorn to go up to Phoenix and to ask our legislatures to fully fund our schools, to fully pay for our teachers, to make sure our teachers have the benefits they deserve. At the school board level, what I can also do is I want to make sure we’re hearing from the staff and the teachers at the school board meeting. When I’m listening to school board meetings right now, I’m mostly hearing from the administration. I think that the teachers deserve a spot at maybe not everybody, but almost every school board meeting, to give us an update on what the teachers are thinking.  I think we need to hear from the substitutes. I think we need to hear from the bus drivers. I think we need to hear from the librarians. We don’t have a lot of librarians. We need to hear from the nurses. We don’t have a lot of them either. Hearing about the kind of challenges they’re facing on the ground is something that the board needs to pay attention to because we can’t solve problems if we don’t know that they exist. That’s what’s going to help us with teacher retention. 

Moving on to student retention, I think it’s vitally important that we have an environment in our schools that gives our kids what they need to thrive. Part of that is teacher retention. Obviously, if there are not enough teachers to go around if classes are being taught for entire semesters by substitute teachers who haven’t necessarily had the training on the subject matter, that’s going to give Tucson schools a bad reputation. Parents are going to be less likely to want to send their kids to those schools. So, teacher retention helps with student retention. 

I’m also a big proponent of more mental health professionals, more social workers, and more therapists and counselors in our schools. What that does is it allows us to stop attrition before it starts. When a kid is showing problems and then suddenly stops going to school, oftentimes it’s going to be hard to reach them.

But if we have the counselors and the mental health professionals and the social workers in the schools, then we can maybe notice this behavior, notice the problems before they become an issue where kids are just not showing up.

Finally, one of the biggest issues that we’re seeing on the school board and the forums is the issue of the desegregation order that just ended. I think the general consensus is that TUSD has not finished becoming an integrated school district, and we need to keep pushing forward with that. And part of how I intend to address that issue is by dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. To me, that means less reliance on armed guards and more reliance on mental health professionals. I want to be very clear, because I feel like, during one of the recent forums, my position on this was a little bit misrepresented. I’m not saying that a school counselor needs to be the one to talk down an active shooter. What I am saying is that the police have not been able to stop active shootings.

We can see that in Uvalde. They had hundreds of police officers there. Many of them were district-paid police officers. They knew the school. They knew the district. They knew the plan, and they didn’t stop the shooting for hours. What I want to do is stop shooting before it starts. I want to focus on prevention. I want to get those counselors and those therapists and those social workers in there working with the kids so that they don’t feel the kind of isolation that leads to somebody waking up and getting a gun and shooting up their classmates. I think that a lot of what we can do for our students is building a school that everyone can be proud of. That means not walking around and seeing armed guards all the time. It also means treating the arts as an essential and not as a luxury. It means having music. It means having theater. All of these things I think are essential to student retention, but also towards this desegregation issue because we need to be spreading our resources more equally. We need to make sure each school has what it needs and to be certain that all of the kids are being treated to the best of our ability.”

• Please describe your campaign strategy to reach voters, including Independents and disaffected Republicans.

“I’m a registered Democrat. I’m running what I consider to be a progressive campaign. I think my strategy is to talk and listen. The listening part is very important. You deal with clients on a regular basis and what works for one client doesn’t always work for another client because their goals might be different. Some people might be looking for rehabilitation. Some people might be looking just to get things over with. Some people will be looking to fight everything that they can. And I need to be able to pay attention to each individual client. And I think that’s a strength of mine. So when I’m out there knocking on doors, I’m listening to what the voters have to say. When I go to forums, I’m listening to the questions. I’ve met with the Teachers Union, and I’ve met with substitute teachers. I’ve met with a lot of voters and I like to listen to what they have to say because it brings issues to the forefront for me. 

In terms of my ground strategy, I’ve been knocking on every door I can. Some days it’s just me going out there knocking on doors. I got bit by a dog last weekend but I want to reach as many voters as I possibly can. I think that, in terms of reaching across the aisle as it were, I think that schools should be a nonpartisan issue. I think protecting our students and making sure that they have what they need is something everyone should be able to believe in. I think we all need to have strong public schools and in terms of the school-to-prison pipeline that I talk about so much, you know if we have a zero-tolerance discipline program that sends students from suspension to detention or suspension to expulsion to incarceration, all those kids are learning is how to be treated like criminals because society has always treated them like criminals. If we have a restorative discipline process where people are actually paying attention to what the root causes are of negative behaviors, we can actually solve some things. We can actually make sure the kids aren’t going out there and learning how to be criminals, and that’s going to make everyone’s lives safer. It’s going to reduce crime in our community. It’s going to make schools a better place.”

• Is there anything not covered in the first three questions that you would like to tell the readers about you and your candidacy for the Tucson School Board?

I’m an attorney, I’m a father, and I’m a geek.  Being an attorney, what that means to me as part of this campaign is that I have the skills to think critically and to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. This is something that affects all our students, but I’ve learned as I’ve researched this issue that students of color are disproportionately affected by when law enforcement is in schools. They’re disproportionately disciplined and the same thing goes for students with disabilities. They’re singled out about three times more than their peers for discipline. As a father, I care very much about my own kids, of course, but also about all the children. I think right now some groups are especially vulnerable with the news out of Pima County Superior Court recently about Mark Brnovich having pushed to revive a zombie law from the late 1800s.

I think any student or teacher or staff member who could possibly become pregnant is in danger of becoming a criminal. I want to ensure that every student who goes to school knows that they’re not going to be referred to law enforcement for their own reproductive health decisions. They are not going to be referred to law enforcement for their own gender issues or for their own orientation issues. These things are private to the student. I think they should remain private to the student, and I think we should put policies in place to protect our students and our teachers. 

Finally, as a geek, I love learning. I think it makes me very creative and that’s part of what’s behind my drive to promote public schools, to promote arts in schools, to promote ways of making learning fun. Because when I was in school, I enjoyed it. A lot of my classmates didn’t. But I love learning and I want to find a way to make sure that as many kids as possible can share that love of learning that I grew up with. 

Please click on the below social media sites to find out more information about Mr. Soland and his candidacy for the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board.

Please click o the below website to find out more about William Soland and his candidacy for the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board.

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