When the Seattle School Board of Directors named Ben Shuldiner, 48, as the finalist for superintendent of Seattle Public Schools on Nov. 5, its president said that the educator, who had been superintendent of the Lansing School District in Michigan since 2021, “reflects the hopes, values and purpose” of the district’s community.
Shuldiner, who is Jewish and slated to assume his new role on Feb. 1, told JNS that deep-blue Seattle is a better fit for him than somewhere like Kentucky.
“Politically, it’s a lot better for me,” he told JNS in a video conversation, in which Beverly Redmond, the Seattle district’s chief of staff, also participated. “I can say words like ‘equity’ and not look over my shoulder too often.”
According to its website, Seattle Public Schools educates 49,226 students in 104 schools, employs 6,486 staff in its schools, and has a budget of $1.172 billion as of late 2023. The district lists 1% of students with a gender of “X,” or other than male or female, and is 14% black, 15% Hispanic and 13% multi-race. Spanish is the most-spoken language in students’ homes, and Somali, Amharic and Arabic are among the top 10.
“At Seattle Public Schools, we are working to dramatically improve academic and life outcomes for students of color by disrupting the legacies of racism in our educational system,” the district states. “By actively becoming an anti-racist educational system, and ensuring students furthest away from educational justice thrive, conditions in Seattle Public Schools will improve for all.”
JNS asked Shuldiner about some of the ways that conditions do not appear to be improving for Jews in the district.
A former principal in the district, who was announced as facilitator of a “listening session” for Jewish and Israeli families in the Bellevue School District in Washington, is accused in a federal lawsuit of having failed, in his previous job, to shield a Jewish student from escalating antisemitic harassment.
A teacher in the district was put on leave in 2024 after saying that Israel “deserved” to be attacked on Oct. 7.
“The first thing you have to do is make sure people are safe and feel safe, not just physically but mentally,” Shuldiner told JNS. He added that he plans to put safety and security “first and foremost” in his new job.
“If it’s antisemitism, that’s huge,” he said. He also referred to a non-Jewish student, who was killed, reportedly after trying to break up a fight, in a school parking lot in the district in 2024.
“If there are issues of antisemitism, which I know there are, then we must address it, so that our Jewish students feel safe,” he said. “If there’s issues of gun violence in our schools, which I know there are, we have to address that so those children feel safe.”
Shuldiner declined to comment on a recent lawsuit against the district alleging Jew-hatred at Nathan Hale High School, and he responded to JNS questions specifically about Jew-hatred by talking about hate universally.
“If somebody is feeling unsafe, if somebody is feeling attacked, then you have to look at that and decide if that is true or not,” he said broadly. “At the end of the day, all I can tell you is I would want every child in the district to feel safe and secure and be able to go to class unencumbered and go to school unencumbered.”
“That would be for a Jewish child, a Muslim child, an East African child, a kid that lives down the street,” he said. “If that didn’t happen, that’s something we would have to address.”
Of the teacher, who remains on administrative leave, the district told JNS, after saying that Hamas was “justified” on Oct. 7, Shuldiner said that “everybody gets due process. That’s kind of the deal.”
“I would hope that if I was ever accused of something, I would be afforded due process as well,” he said.
“It’s really sad to hear these stories,” he added. “I wasn’t there, but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to be the superintendent in the district, and these are the kinds of things that we have to address.”
‘I’ve taken loaded guns off of children’
The New York native, educated at Harvard University and City University of New York, told JNS that he is the “child of educators and a grandchild of educators.”
Last month, Shuldiner told the School Superintendents Association that his leadership “ is, in many ways, an expression of my faith.”
“From the earliest days of my life, my secular humanist Jewish faith has been both a personal anchor and a guide for my public service. The values, rituals and historical consciousness I carry have deeply shaped the way I approach my work in education,” he said. “I do not separate who I am from how I lead.”
“Being Jewish means carrying the weight and wisdom of a long history, a history of resilience in the face of hardship: slavery in Egypt, the Spanish Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust,” he said. “We have been ‘the other’ for millennia, denied full belonging, denied security and, at times, denied the right to exist.”
Those experiences “remind me daily of how fragile belonging can be and how essential it is to build schools where every child feels safe, valued and included,” he said. “But it is also from this history of unsettledness that creates education as the fabric of who we are. If place and property can be ripped asunder, education, knowledge and tradition are all that truly bind us.”
“The oft-repeated line ‘but they can never take away your education’ is seared into our faith,” he said.
He added that Jewish learning is about questioning, in addition to memorization, and about taking part in the education, as on Passover, which has inspired him to think about schools as “places where students are active participants in their own learning, where curiosity not only is allowed but celebrated, and where each child can see themselves in their education.”
He also said that the concept of “repairing the world” and the requirement to seek forgiveness before Yom Kippur have inspired his thoughts on being an education leader. His understanding of Judaism has also led him to work to “make our schools places of justice and equity,” he said.
He told JNS that he and his wife—whom he called a “much more impressive human being than I am”—plan to hunt for apartments in Seattle over winter break and that they hope to start a family soon.
In his new role, he intends to focus on reducing violence, as he has tried to do in Michigan.
In Lansing, schools have “secure vestibules, we have bullet-resistant film, we have fences, we have cameras, we have metal detectors,” he told JNS. Instead of police officers in the schools, the district has “public safety officers, who are trained,” he said. “The nice thing about having your own officers is they work for the district.”
“They actually know the children, and many of them are also like the football coach or the basketball coach or the tutor,” he said. He told JNS that one thing he thinks is absolute, and not about the desires of individual communities, is that there be a single point of entry to a school.
“Sadly, I’ve taken loaded guns off of children,” he told JNS. “I’ve done that personally. I did it in New York. I’ve done it in Lansing. This is stuff that I’ve experienced.”
Keeping schools safe is about more than locking certain doors; it must also be practical, he said. “We have to really make sure that we are not putting up extra burdens on our children,” he said.
JNS asked him about a proposed state law, initiative IL 26-638, that would bar biological males from competing with and against females in athletic competitions.
“I hate to punt on this,” he told JNS. “I would want to actually understand what the initiative is and what the question is.”
“I think that the whole purpose of a school district is for kids to feel safe and feel that they can participate, and so depending on what that means in individual situations, I think it’s a difficult one,” he said. “I am supportive of our children feeling safe and being able to participate as freely as they feel comfortable doing.”
“That’s true for all things,” he said, “that we have to really make sure that we are not putting up extra burdens on our children.”
Shuldiner turned to Redmond, the Seattle district’s chief of staff, and asked about the district police.
“Our policy is that we’re supportive of trans students, and we’ve held that position,” she said. She added that Chris Reykdal, the state’s public instruction superintendent, “has asked us to follow his lead in terms of anything.”
