OLYMPIA — Sue Kane, CEO of the NCW Tech Alliance, has been appointed to the Washington State Board of Education, Position 1, according to an announcement from the SBA. Kane lives in East Wenatchee and runs NCW Tech Alliance with offices throughout North Central Washington, including Moses Lake.  

“The world is changing fast, and our schools have such an important role in helping kids build confidence, curiosity and resilience,” Kane said. “I’m excited to collaborate with educators, families and communities to make sure our educational pathways are clear and accessible today, and strong enough to carry students into the future.”   

The NCW Tech Alliance is a nonprofit that works to ensure access to digital education tools and skills for the people in rural communities in the area.

Kane, who has a doctorate in Biological Sciences and Infections Disease from South Dakota State University, said she was excited for the opportunity to advocate for education statewide, but also to represent rural communities like those in North Central Washington, which don’t have a variety of resource levels and unique challenges.  

“Across North Central Washington, there are 29 school districts, and they are all so different, and so having that experience and that breadth is something that I hope to be able to add as we think about setting learning standards, graduation requirements,” Kane said. “You know, the guidance and the policies that our schools are operating under, I want to be able to draw on that breadth of environments that people are trying to implement (policies) in.”  

Kane said she found out about the opportunity to serve on the board after the governor’s office reached out to her this past summer. The process involved putting together an application, a Senate confirmation and a comprehensive review of her qualifications. She’ll be sworn in when the Board of Education meets in February 2026. 

She said it’s important that local control be preserved wherever it can, while ensuring students thrive and are able to move into becoming a strong workforce.  

“Where we can, we want to always break towards giving local control, but we also need to make sure that our public schools work together, so that our employers and our communities get consistency out the other side,” Kane said. “And so there's a balance that has to be there.” 

Big Bend Community College President Sara Thompson Tweedy said she was excited that Kane had been selected for the position. BBCC has a partnership with NCW Tech Alliance and Tweedy said Kane was a good fit for the Board of Education.  

“She sees the big picture of how education fits with talent development; fits with business and industry needs; fits with economic and social justice components of lifting up rural, impoverished communities,” Thompson Tweedy said. “She is certainly somebody who can set a big vision and see a big vision, but break that down into practical pieces.”  

Kane said she hopes to help identify the big picture as she sits on the BoE and help the community understand the challenges today’s students face. She’s seen how test scores and other learning milestones have fallen since the pandemic because students lost opportunities for learning they would have otherwise had, and seen parents’ frustrations as school districts struggle to get standardized goals back to where they were pre-pandemic. While it’s easy to be critical of that situation, Kane said it’s important to understand it, develop a plan to solve it, then move forward with student success in mind.  

"(The pandemic) drew kids away from learning and social development for a significant period of time,” she said. “It disrupted what normal was, and it affects kids differently if they are early education or early elementary, late elementary, junior high, high school. There's some critical periods in there where they are going to be more sensitive to that social deprivation that happened, or they will have gaps in understanding that we're in really critical periods for learning sequence-based skills like math skills, and what we're seeing now when we get these assessment scores, we kind of have amnesia. We kind of forget that there was all this big context that happened.” 

Moses Lake School District Superintendent Carol Lewis said Kane was a solid choice for the state board and has a record of being a great partner with MLSD.  

“Sue is a true advocate for K-12 education and will provide a specific STEM focus to the State Board,” said Lewis. “She has always been a great partner to Moses Lake and greater Central Washington, and I know she will be a wonderful representative of the unique needs and challenges of our area.”  

Kane said the challenges are unique, but that the state and North Central Washington in particular have strengths that will help to get through those obstacles. Many of the educators statewide, and locally, have master’s degrees in their disciplines, are nationally board certified, have industry experience in their fields and are just plain passionate and innovative when it comes to learning.  

“When you get to see (educators) do design work for a learning experience for students, it’s a thing to behold. It’s so impressive the way that they can design the learning and activities and outcomes and how they want to measure what they see and how they’re talking to each other about those outcomes, and how they connect to other learning,” Kane said. “It’s a very intentional craft.”  

Kane said she’s aware of challenges, especially with technical skills, that need to be overcome regionally.  

“There will never be a moment where there's less AI in the world than there is right now. As much as that seems like it's ever increasing, it's only going to be more. And the students that are coming through school right now are entering a space where AI and technology applications are exponentially increasing for good use and for not so good use, and they need to be able to know how to navigate that,” Kane said. 

Kane said she was excited to put her in-person experiences in North Central Washington into the policy-making part of education to help students – and subsequently the regions those students decide to build careers and lives in – succeed.  

“There’s really big opportunities for developing pathways that connect to agriculture and data centers and health care and aerospace and energy,” she said. “And I want to be a part of the creation of the pathways that really help line our students up for those emerging careers.”  

    Kane