Meet Our Team
Pete Peterson
Pete Peterson began teaching high school English in 1996 and enthusiastically coached football, girls basketball and track. It was during this time that Pete began to be active in contract negotiations, working on his district’s first extra-curricular contract following the Castle Rock Decision as a teacher representative. Pete then received his Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership from Washington State University and embarked on his career as a building administrator for the next 18 years. During this time he worked on behalf of his districts negotiating with the WEA, PSE as well as his own principals associations.
Pete earned his superintendent credential at WSU in 2015 and began serving as a school district superintendent in 2018. He immediately created a collaborative culture with bargaining units there and has had no work stoppages while negotiating multiple contracts and MOU”s during COVID and beyond, while working with local and state legislators to change and better fund the K-12 system. Pete currently serves as the SAC President for the ESD 123 region and works with educators around the state to better prepare administrators for their careers and mentors new administrators and superintendents. Pete’s mentoring focuses on creating positive culture and relationships within school systems and encourages administrators to reflect on their many positive attributes before tackling challenges.
Pete, his wife Shelly and two German Shepherds enjoy spending time at their property outside Randle, WA, where they enjoy nature, nurture yearly crops of blackberries and blueberries, and dodge the wayward elk that wander through from time to time.
Jeff Hardesty
Jeffrey MacDonald Hardesty, EdD began his career in education during the mid-90s as teacher and co-developer of a new school for students struggling in the mainstream setting. This experience drove his curiosity about systemic barriers to meeting the needs of all students in a school system. Over the past 27 years, as teacher, principal, and now superintendent, Dr. Hardesty has worked to inform instructional practice, policy development, and legislative decisions to address his perceived system barriers.
During this career journey he pursued a master’s degree at Eastern Washington University to study research taking shape in the 90s around attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adolescents, where he then promoted more informed instructional practices for students struggling with ADHD. Twenty years later he pursued a doctorate through Washington State University to understand better the role that educator disposition, namely empathy, plays during collaboration about instructional practice when serving underrepresented students. This study, coupled with decades of initiative implementation, advanced a deep understanding for how, when and where policy and practice fragment at the local level, and for how this fragmentation can be prevented through systems-thinking and procedural alignment.
While serving his remote and rural community in eastern Washington State, Dr. Hardesty enjoys construction, gardening, hunting and fishing with his wife, children, and brothers, and on occasion, working with legislators and the wildlife commission to inform state policy to support wildlife populations.