Her name won't jump out at you from the ballot, but Julie Walson is one of the people Cincinnatians will be voting on 10 days from now.

        She and 3,100 other teachers are running under the Cincinnati Public Schools levy but, sure as with any other candidate, it is her life you are voting on. Her future. Her performance. Indeed, where you place that punch will affect the smallest details of her job.

        Almost every teacher in Cincinnati Public Schools feels, at least in some unconscious way, that you are voting on him or her.

        And, more poignantly, that you are voting on every child who comes into their classrooms.

        The complication of looking at the election this way — and not writing it off as a vote about too many taxes, or Superintendent Steven Adamowski, or urban school districts or public education in general — is that Julie Walson cannot be shrunk down to a stereotype.

        She is bright, thoughtful, hard-working and devoted. She has a bachelor's degree in elementary education, and a master's degree in counseling.

        Her principal says any school would hire Mrs. Walson. She admits she's considered making a move. But then she remembers what keeps her at Bramble Academy in Madisonville: The little faces behind those first-grade desks.

        “I love them,” she says simply. “There's such potential there — we all feel it. It may be harder to get to those successful moments than it is in the suburbs, but when we do, those moments are really, really great.”

        They are the moments, Mrs. Walson says, that the public never sees, and perhaps doesn't care to. At parties, she spends a good deal of time defending her district and profession.

        “When I tell people what I do for a living, they ask where Bramble is, and then I tell them and eventually we get down to that it's a Cincinnati Public School. They assume we're an inferior school. That is just not true.”

        So she tells them that Bramble has steadily rising test scores, attendance that rivals suburban districts and a reputation for strong young writers. The faculty has won numerous awards and, since 1994, more than $300,000 in grants.

        But there are so many other things she does not tell them. An indifferent ear wouldn't appreciate the agony the Bramble staff went through when they had to decide between using funds for smaller classes or a visiting teacher/social worker.

        She does not tell them that she appreciates the part-time art, music and technology teachers, but she misses the librarian the staff had to trade to get them.

        She does not tell them how the staff yearns for a counselor — which some levy funds would be spent on — to help children.

        Julie Walson is not whining when she says such things. She is not dramatizing, apologizingor begging.

        What you decide in 10 days will affect every part of how she does her job, from the literacy training she will or won't get, to the software and instructor's assistant she dreams of. It will affect every area — save one. For no matter what you decide on Nov. 7, Julie Walson will be at her desk the next day. She knows who she is, what she does and where she's needed. She's a Cincinnati Public Schools teacher, and her loyalty doesn't come up for a vote.

       Write Krista Ramsey at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202, or e-mail her at krista_ramsey@hotmail.com.

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