Langley – Langley Board of Education Chair Candy Ashdown announced August 24 that she will seek re-election as a school trustee this October as part of the Langley Strong team, joining sitting trustee Charlie Fox.
Ashdown has chaired the seven-member Board since November 2022. She said the District’s ability to keep pace with enrolment growth and secure new school spaces depends heavily on its working relationship with the Township Mayor and Council, a relationship she believes needs to improve significantly.
In February 2025, the Woodward slate on Township Council unilaterally suspended the joint park-school site land acquisition program. Since the early 1990s, the Township and the District had bought land together so that new schools opened with parks and playing fields beside them. The District was not consulted before the vote.
Ashdown is a graduate of the District she now helps lead and spent more than a decade volunteering in school communities before she was first elected, serving as President of both the Uplands Elementary and Wix-Brown Elementary Parent Advisory Councils. She served as a Trustee from 2011 to 2014 and returned to the Board in 2022, when her fellow trustees elected her Chair. She also chairs the Board’s Policy Committee and serves as the Board’s representative on the ya:yestel Indigenous Education Council.
Langley’s Board of Education serves both the City of Langley and the Township of Langley: five trustees are elected in the Township, two in the City. Ashdown will seek a Township School Board seat, along with Fox. General voting day is Saturday, October 1.
