Charm City Indivisible is thrilled to endorse Ashley Esposito for reelection to the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners!

Plenty of candidates can tell you they believe in educational equity. What Ashley Esposito brings to it is a rare combination: she knows firsthand what vulnerable students need to thrive—because she was one of them—and she has the governance and systems experience to build that support into how the district works. Both of those things are real expertise, and together they make her exactly the kind of board member Baltimore’s kids need. She has earned our endorsement through her record, her values, and a vision for Baltimore’s schools that is as specific as it is ambitious.

Who is Ashley Esposito?

Ashley barely graduated high school with a 1.4 GPA, after years in the foster care system, navigating undiagnosed learning disabilities and selective mutism. What carried her through wasn’t any one program—it was the people who showed up: the case managers, the social workers, and an art teacher who saw her when it counted. She talks about those adults with real gratitude, and about how much it matters that a kid gets that kind of support at all. That’s the conviction she brings to this work: when support like the kind that carried her through is left to chance, the system can fail the kids who need it most. But she knows that the answer isn’t to walk away from public schools; it’s to build that support into them, deliberately, so it’s there for every child who needs it. So when she talks about the students most likely to be overlooked—foster youth, unhoused students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities—she isn’t speaking from a briefing memo. She’s speaking from experience, and now, as the parent of a neurodivergent kindergartener in our city’s public schools, she told us she’s bearing witness to that experience all over again.

Ashley is also a systems thinker. She spent a decade as a data analyst and database developer—a skill set she didn’t build with the school board in mind, but one that turns out to be exactly what the role needs. She can read a school district from the inside out and from the top down, seeing how it actually moves information, money, and accountability, and where the supports that help vulnerable kids can be built in by design, so that they reach every student, not just the lucky ones. It’s that combination—lived experience and systems expertise—that first moved her to seek a seat on the Board, back when every seat was filled by mayoral appointment. She was told she wasn’t qualified and advised to volunteer instead, despite the fact that she already was volunteering. So in 2022, when Baltimore voters got to elect two Board Commissioners for the first time ever, she ran instead—and won, becoming the first mom elected to the Board in the district’s history.

Transparency by Design

Ashley is one of only about twenty school board members in the country certified in Empowered School Board Governance, and she’s clear-eyed about what the job actually is: not the moments in Board meetings that go viral, but the slower work of policy, research, and showing up for students and educators. She also understands how to be effective as one of just two elected members on a board of twelve—frequently outvoted, and unwilling to play what she calls “the buy-in game” of trading away a position to get along. When she believes something is right for students, she votes that way and makes sure the community’s position is part of the public record, because a board that votes against what residents have asked for should have to answer for it. It’s a theory of accountability that treats transparency itself as the lever—which is exactly why her platform is stacked with concrete transparency mechanisms: plain-language explanations of every board vote within 72 hours, a real constituent inbox with personal replies, quarterly community meetings that rotate through neighborhoods, and public student-success dashboards, broken out by demographics.

That same instinct showed up early: when she joined the Board and heard colleagues were moving to change the rules to rein in the new elected members, she wrote them a letter asking them not to act until they’d actually met the new members. The results, she said, weren’t quite what she’d hoped, but she doesn’t regret it—as in Board and committee meetings, she sees the value in naming an issue plainly and putting it on the record. And her commitment to responsiveness isn’t theoretical. This past winter, when unclear communication around snow closures left families scrambling, she got more than 200 constituent emails—and answered every one personally, not to hand out logistics, but to thank people for reaching out and to affirm that their advocacy mattered. For Ashley, being there for the community comes before her own agenda, every time.

Policy Informed by Experience

The clearest example of how Ashley works is the district’s foster care policy. The old approach used a tiered system that decided how much support a student received based partly on that student advocating for themselves. Having been that kid—exhausted, dealing with selective mutism, unable to speak up in real time—she knew firsthand how much that asks of a child. So when the policy came up for review, she brought what she’d learned firsthand—everything her own childhood taught her about what’s asked of a kid expected to advocate for themselves—to help strengthen it. That’s the throughline: she pairs lived experience with a systems lens and puts both to work where students most need the system to show up.

It’s there in the way she champions community-raised priorities as Policy Committee Chair, including the district’s arts policy, which is deeply personal to her as an artist herself. It’s there in her thinking on special education: she went looking for which states do it well, found that Connecticut trains all its teachers in special education rather than siloing it to specialists, and brought that lesson back to Baltimore. And it’s there in her labor record, which is extraordinarily strong: unequivocal support for teachers’ right to strike, a firm line that charter staff should remain unionized employees of the school system, and a flat no to vouchers and right-to-work laws. She shared her AFL-CIO endorsement questionnaire with us, and we found it a true joy to read.

Why This Matters Now

Ashley was clear-eyed in our conversation when we talked about the stakes of this election. Public education, she warned us, is where the right is quietly gaining ground while progressives look the other way. Groups like Moms for Liberty are still targeting school board races nationwide—precisely because those low-turnout contests so often fly under everyone’s radar, allowing small but well-organized groups to win, even when they don’t represent the interests of the community. And she also had a warning for state legislators that stuck with us: the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is a great plan, but nothing that happens in Annapolis matters if a local board can gut it at budget time. Several of them, she said, had never thought about it that way.

She’s also keenly aware of another front in this fight: the right-wing media machine that profits from majority-Black cities like Baltimore looking like failures. She’s publicly declined to participate in coverage of the campaign from Sinclair-owned Fox 45—not to dodge accountability, but to refuse to be part of a reductive story about her city’s kids. Her answer isn’t defensiveness; it’s internal accountability so robust that bad-faith actors can’t fill the vacuum. And she’s careful to separate them from good-faith critics—she’ll go back and forth with a reporter from the Banner or the teachers union all day long, no matter what criticisms they might have, because she knows that they share her goal of a strong school system that serves all its students.

Her antidote to all of it is the same: a public engaged enough that no outside actor gets to speak for it—and she builds that from the schoolhouse up. She’s helped to grow student government from almost nothing to having a presence in nearly every school, with the student Board Commissioner now elected by the student body instead of being handpicked. She wants high school students working the polls as election judges and hosting voter pre-registration drives in every building, because the habit of showing up gets built young or not at all.

This is the second time in Baltimore’s history that voters get to directly elect members of their school board, and there are two seats on the ballot. Ashley Esposito understands that strong public schools are built through transparency, community power, and an unwavering commitment to the students who need it the most. For all of these reasons, we’re thrilled to endorse her for reelection to one of them. 

How to Support Ashley Esposito

• Donate to support her campaign in these final weeks
• Volunteer to help reach voters before Election Day
• Talk to your neighbors—tell them why you’re voting for Ashley and encourage them to join you
• Vote for Ashley Esposito! Check your registration and find your polling place today. You can vote early from June 11 to 18, or vote on Election Day, June 23.

Because this is a nonpartisan race, every Baltimore City voter can vote in it on June 23—including unaffiliated and third-party voters who can’t cast a ballot in the partisan primaries. If that’s you, this is your race.

We’re voting for Ashley Esposito, and we hope you will too.

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A note on our endorsement process:

Our endorsement process begins with a thorough questionnaire, which we make available to all declared candidates in a race. Completed questionnaires are evaluated, and candidates who score well are invited to an interview with our endorsement committee. In some cases, a sitting officeholder with a strong legislative record may qualify for a streamlined track: in place of the questionnaire, our committee prepares a review of the candidate’s record to ground the interview. Because this path could otherwise advantage incumbents, we hold those candidates to a higher qualifying standard, not a lower one. After all interviews are complete, we deliberate and announce our endorsement of the candidate who most aligns with our values.

Charm City Indivisible evaluates all candidates using the following criteria: alignment with our values, thoughtful policy positions, demonstrated commitment to constituent engagement, and a track record and/or clear vision of fighting for working people over wealthy interests. We apply these standards equally to all candidates we evaluate. We believe voters deserve to understand not just who we endorse, but how and why we made that decision.