‘Wenatchee Record’ takes aim at Wenatchee School District again
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The January 2025 edition of The Wenatchee Record was published Thursday.
WENATCHEE — A political mailer last seen in 2023 reached local mailboxes on Thursday with renewed claims that the Wenatchee School District is failing due, at least in part, to its diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
As with the first edition, The Wenatchee Record was published ahead of an election — the district is asking voters to approve a levy Feb. 11 — and its compliance with state election law appears to toe the line of election laws.
The mailer was printed by World Commercial Printing, a sister company of The Wenatchee World, and distributed on Thursday.
Newsletter embed
World Commercial Printing, located on Ninth Street in Wenatchee, prints newspapers and publications for a variety of companies and organizations in the Northwest.
Both are owned by Wick Communications, but The World newspaper and its staff, including editors and reporters, do not vet or screen print jobs contracted by World Commercial Printing. World Publisher Sean Flaherty declined to provide details on the company’s transaction with The Wenatchee Record, but published an opinion column Thursday afternoon about his decision to print the mailer.
Six thousand copies of the first edition of The Wenatchee Record were distributed Nov. 2, 2023 and bore the headline: “The State Superintendent of Public Instruction Says: WENATCHEE SCHOOLS ARE FAILING.”
The mailer included opinion pieces written by conservative candidates for the Wenatchee School Board, Randy Smith and Tricia Cleek. Both lost their races — Smith by just 14 votes and Cleek by nearly 1,500.
Glenn Dobbs, a former state representative and mineral mine executive, paid for and partially wrote the Wenatchee Record in 2023. While he’s again listed as the paper’s editor, it’s unclear if he paid for the latest edition. The World has requested comment from Dobbs. He was not immediately available for comment Thursday afternoon.
The Wenatchee School District declined to provide a comment for this story.
Public Disclosure Commission
Not long after its publication, The Wenatchee Record and two flyers endorsing Tricia Cleek and Randy Smith for Wenatchee School Board were the subject of a complaint to the state Public Disclosure Commission (PDC), which regulates election finances and disclosures, alleging the mailer and flyer did not include sponsor identification required for political advertisements.
The case was closed with a written warning issued to Dobbs because he was unfamiliar with PDC requirements.
But in its investigation, the PDC found that Dobbs had failed to report independent expenditures in a timely manner as part of the requirements for political advertising. He also failed to comply with sponsor identification requirements.
“The Commission will consider the formal written warning in deciding on further Commission action if there are future violations of PDC laws or rules,” according to the PDC’s 2023 decision.
The latest Wenatchee Record, again, did not include any recognizable form of sponsor identification. And as of Thursday afternoon, the Wenatchee World could not locate any independent expenditure forms filed with the PDC on their website under Dobbs name in 2024 or 2025 for this latest edition of the Wenatchee Record.
Independent expenditures must be reported, per state law, if anyone expenses more than $1,000 supporting or opposing a candidate or ballot measure within five days of the expense, according to the PDC’s website.
It is not clear when the transaction between World Commercial Printing and Dobbs occurred or how much it cost.
In 2023 filings, expenditure reports showed Dobbs spent more than $2,000 in producing The Wenatchee Record and other campaign materials, recorded to the PDC towards Randy Smith and Tricia Cleek’s school board races.
Natalie Johnson, PDC spokesperson, said in an email that the PDC had not received any filings or reports from Dobbs or the Wenatchee Record as of Thursday.
The fallout from the 2023 edition of The Wenatchee Record is ongoing.
The Wenatchee Record’s first publication spawned a PDC investigation into the school district after a complaint claimed Superintendent Kory Kalahar “violated state election law by using school resources for political activity to influence an election during the final days of the 2023 General Election.”
The complaint, lodged by Bill Sullivan of the Wenatchee Values Alliance, included an email between Wenatchee School District Communication Director Diana Haglund and former World education reporter.
Haglund requested in the email “for limited media exposure on any issues that could be considered controversial and further any false narratives” and to publish an editorial by Kalahar refuting claims in The Wenatchee Record.
The Wenatchee World did not oblige Haglund’s request, however, as per The World’s editorial guidelines, the paper did publish an Op-Ed written by Kalahar.
Another email included as part of Sullivan’s complaint was an exchange between Kalahar and a student following the publication of The Wenatchee Record.
“This article contains so much hate and disrespect to so many communities of Wenatchee,” the student wrote. “I know so many students who felt disrespected and misrepresented with these people even being considered candidates for this reason I am asking what can I do as a student to speak up!”
Kalahar made some suggestions like organizing students to inform others about how to voice their opinion via voting as well as writing to the newspaper or planning a walkout.
The matter remains under investigation by the PDC.
Report card
In an article titled, “THE STATE OSPI REPORT CARD SAYS WSD FAILURES PERSIST,” The Wenatchee Record cited a state report that found “59% of (Wenatchee) students are performing below their grade level in English Language Arts (ELA), discouragingly worse than the 57.9% achieved during the 2022-2023 school year.”
Here’s some context.
According to the district website, Smarter Balance Assessment (SBA) scoring is divided into four categories of performance called “achievement levels,” which go from one through four levels. The cut score that divides achievement level 2 from level 3 is referred to as the standard.
The SBA ELA and math tests are administered to third through eighth-grade and tenth-grade students.
The Wenatchee School District report card on the OSPI website shows that in the 2023-2024 school year, 41% of the 3,620 students who took the ELA portion of the test met the standard.
In comparison, 50.3% of all students across the state met the standard and are on track for college-level learning without needing remedial classes.
In the math section, 28% of the 3,626 students who took the test met the standard, in comparison to the 39.7% in the state.
For the science assessment students in fifth, eighth and eleventh grades take the Washington Comprehensive Assessment of Science. In the district, 31.6% of 1,561 students who took the test met standard, compared to the 43.5% of students in the state.
In the 2022-2023 school year, 42% of 3,635 students in the district met the standard in ELA; 28% of 3,641 students met the standard in math; 34.7% of 1,642 students met the standard in science.
The OSPI report card also states that in the 2023-2024 school year 7,127 students were enrolled in school at the beginning of the school year.
In a Wenatchee School Board meeting in June 2024, the annual average full-time equivalent number of students including running start and open doors was 7,073.
The total number of full-time students enrolled at the end of the year without including running start and open doors was 6,740.
Full-time students drive state apportionment funding beginning in January and is based on the average of each month’s full-time equivalent and changes after each monthly enrollment count.
In the printed piece, the mailer accused the district of a low attendance rate in the 2023-2024 school year, saying that less than half, 48.2%, of enrolled Wenatchee High School students attended school regularly — 90% of the time.
However, OSPI data shows that 53.3% of students at the high school are attending 90% or more school days in 2023-2024. It’s an increase from the previous year, which had 48.8% of students attending 90% or more school days.