Longtime teacher of teachers running for a seat on PSD Board of Education
Tom Griggs, who spent most of his professional career teaching teachers, is running for a seat on the Poudre School District Board of Education in the November 2025 election.
Griggs, 71, is running for the District D seat currently held by Jim Brokish, who said he is not running for reelection.
Candidates must live in the geographic district they represent but are elected by all voters in the school district, which spans more than 1,800 square miles. The volunteer directors serve four-year terms.
Serving on the PSD school board 'is just an extension of my career, my professional interest, my fascination with teaching and learning,' Griggs told the Coloradoan on April 28. 'It's a chance to serve the community that has supported me for the 25 years.'
Tom Griggs, a retired education professor and Fort Collins resident for 25 years, is running for the District D seat on the Poudre School District Board of Education in the November 2025 election.
Griggs has two adult children who attended and graduated from PSD schools while he was teaching education classes for 20 years as a professor at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. He was previously a professor at San Jose State University. Many of his former students, he said, are teachers and administrators in PSD and other Northern Colorado school districts.
He earned a teaching license and master's degrees in education for teaching English and social studies at the secondary level and in arts for teaching English as a second language at UCLA. After teaching high school in Salinas, California, Griggs went back to school to earn a doctorate in teacher education from the University of Toronto, he said.
Griggs has also worked internationally, receiving a grant to work with Brazilian public school teachers of English as a foreign language in the fall of 2016. That led to a Fulbright Distinguished Teaching Award that turned into a visiting international professor's position at a university in Brazil. Griggs said he returned to Fort Collins from Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since worked as both a full-time and temporary substitute teacher and social emotional learning specialist in both the Poudre and Thompson school districts.
He is a former president of the Colorado Association for Bilingual Education and was a chair and co-founder of the group now known as Advocates for Public Education Policy, Griggs said.
'I think I have some unique perspective to add to the mix of perspectives that are on the board currently,' Griggs said. 'Unique and, I guess, valuable. I think there's a real advantage to know what the school system looks like and how it works from inside and out from a scholarly point of view. I'm a systems thinker, and I approach study with an open mind, looking at it from other people's perspectives.'
Griggs is the only candidate so far to announce their candidacy and file official paperwork for the District D seat, according to the Colorado Secretary of State's online database. District D is located in north Fort Collins.
Two candidates in other districts have also announced their candidacy for Board of Education seats in the November 2025 election — Sabrina Herrick in District C (northeast Fort Collins) and Andrew Spain in District E (northern and western Larimer County, including Wellington, Red Feather Lakes and Poudre Canyon). Another potential candidate who had filed an affadavit and paperwork with the secretary of state's office in February, Ashley Hale, told the Coloradoan on May 5 that she had changed her mind and would not run.
Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell, threads.net/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Longtime teacher of teachers running for seat on PSD school board
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