Election 2002
Education
By Shamrock McShane
Full Disclosure
I’ve been a public school teacher in the state of Florida since 1979
and in Alachua County since 1987. I teach Language Arts to eighth graders
at Westwood Middle School. I am a member of the Alachua County Education
Association, which I am at pains to point out is not just the teachers’
union, but rather the union of all the workers for our school district.
Furthermore, I’m a member of A-Tiger, the political wing of ACEA.
So, if you can accept that what you are about to read has been filtered
through those lenses, then you may be able to see your own objectives clearly
in the school board race. In fact, this article may act for you as a perfect
reverse barometer: what I say is good you may well treat as bad, and vice
versa. Either way, I hope to be of service.
A Ship at Sea
My first principal told me, "Being a teacher is like being the captain
of a ship at sea." Following the logic of that simile, I gathered that
a teacher could radio for help like the captain of the Titanic, but it
might not arrive before you entire career sank, if not worse.
With that in mind, I think most teachers view this year’s school board
race with mixed emotions. The best the school board can hope to do is patch
a battered ship and buck up a battered crew. For sure it won’t be calming
any seas. Francis Bacon had it right. "The only way to command nature is
to obey her."
Meanwhile, Back at Kirby-Smith
Our school board is composed of five members, presently: Bill Cake,
Chester Leathers, Bev Carroll, Jean Cauthen, and Barbara Sharpe. The latter
two will remain at least until the next election. Perhaps retiring having
fought the good fight, perhaps preferring not to be voted out of office,
Cake, Leathers, and Carroll are stepping aside.
With three seats up for grabs, the balance of the school board could
conceivably swing dramatically from the status quo imposed by the career
administrators and political careerists who have hitherto held sway. The
question is: in what direction will it swing?
The combination of school board and superintendent, along with a cadre
of administrators headquartered at Kirby-Smith, sets policies for our school
district. They make up all the rules for school, except the ones ordained
by the federal and state government, which we are told are such that they
handcuff our right-minded local school officials.
The school board members presumably control the budget. They hold the
purse strings. Not all of them. Education comes, if it comes at all, with
lots of strings attached.
The Educational Merry-Go-Round
The school board hires the superintendent. Only Barbara Sharpe will
remain of the board members who set in motion our current superintendent
merry-go-round. The new board is likely to give it another spin.
It didn’t all begin with itinerant superintendent Robert Hughes in the
late eighties, but that’s where I came in. Hughes had been superintendent
in a nearby county before taking over here. Then he made a lateral move
to become czar of the Florida High School Activities Association, still
just a six-figure job.
The school board conducted a nationwide search to replace Hughes, carefully
overlooking any candidates in its own backyard who might prove too savvy
of our ways and means to be sufficiently malleable. The board found just
the man it was looking for in Robert Marazza of Ohio, who didn’t know diddly
about Alachua County but appeared willing to follow the board’s dictates,
muddled as they might be, like a sheep.
But the board, believe it or not, was deceived. Marazza was a wolf in
sheep’s clothing, not to mention The Gainesville Sun’s Educator of the
Year, when he left under a cloud of sexual harassment charges.
Accountant Mary Chambers was named interim superintendent, then the
real thing. So quickly did her star rise in fact that she began looking
for an even more lucrative superintendency elsewhere.
A Whole New World
Among its priorities then, the new school board might well be considering
a new superintendent. That’s a marginal issue with teachers, who are more
concerned with class size and a pay scale that has us ranked near the bottom
of the state than with who signs the check.
In This Corner . . .
All voters get to vote in all three races. The candidates are matched
up like this.
District One (vacated by Carroll): Tina Turner versus John Banks
District Three (vacated by Leathers): Wes Eubank versus Bill Boe
District Five (vacated by Cake): Ginger Childs versus Heather Danenhower
The Issues
All the candidates have said warm and fuzzy things about raising teacher
pay. But they tread a thin line. Naturally, they’d like the teachers’ votes,
but not at the expense of the general population, who might be all for
teacher raises, but don’t want to pay more taxes. And why should they if
jillions of dollars are being wasted?
Zoning
Another thorny issue to be faced by the school board is zoning – how
to balance the ever-sprawling west side of town, with its new and overcrowded
schools and comparative affluence, against the depressed and under-populated
east side.
Everybody who lives in a nice neighborhood is in favor of neighborhood
schools. But if you’ve got kids and live in a crappy neighborhood, you’d
prefer to send your kids to the nice new school across town. That’s reasonable.
And nobody really has a problem with that either.
The problem comes about when parents have gone to all the trouble and
expense to move into a nice neighborhood near a brand new school only to
find that their kids are going to be bussed across town and go to school
in a crappy neighborhood. That doesn’t seem fair.
Of course if you know anything about how capitalism really works, then
you realize that all that trouble and expense has been built on the backs
of working people, who are already condemned by harsh economic reality
to live in a crappy neighborhood. Now do they have to send their kids to
school there too? That doesn’t seem fair either. It seems rather to perpetuate
a cycle of poverty.
District One
In District One, where Banks faces Turner, is the choice really as simple
as black and white, east and west? Yes and no.
Banks is a longtime teacher at Littlewood Elementary with ties to the
Black community and local education extending decades into the past.
Turner is on a leave of absence from well-heeled Chiles Elementary and
the Haile Plantation environs. She thinks, "Local and county officials
are on the right track as they try to spruce up the east side of town."
Banks trailed Turner by 10 percent (32% to 22%) in the primary. Turner
also dwarfed Banks’s campaign finances, $16,000 to $7,000.
Follow the money
The most heavily financed campaigns are all in the lead after the September
primary. Surprise, surprise.
Wes Eubank out-financed Bill Boe to the same tune of 16 grand to seven,
and won 45 percent of the vote to Boe’s 29 percent.
Ginger Childs hauled in nearly 19 grand to Heather Danenhower’s 11 grand,
and captured 42 percent of the vote to Danenhower’s 34 percent.
District Three
In District Three, Wes Eubank says he wants to "heal the district,"
implying that it was once well. That must have been before my time.
Bill Boe is a go-getter who’s run for the school board before. Boe is
a public relations consultant who not only knows how to get good press,
but, more importantly, how to get grants. That’s the good news.
Vouchers
The bad news is Boe favors vouchers, and that notion is an anathema
to public school teachers because it means taking money away from our already
under-funded public schools and giving it to private schools.
Eubank won the ACEA’s endorsement despite the fact that he counts "Nine
years of management responsibilities with the School Board of Alachua County"
to his credit. Do I detect an oxymoron here?
District Five
The contrast between status quo and new blood is most dramatic in District
Five. Ginger Childs is a career administrator. For the last several years
Childs was a high level official at Kirby-Smith, until she was relieved
of her position by Superintendent Chambers.
As a board member, Childs would be in a position to turn the tables
on the superintendent. Childs knows the ropes. The problem is she’s used
them mostly for bondage on school board employees, voting to freeze our
wages more than once.
Heather Danenhower knows the ropes too, those of an investigative reporter
used to haul in answers to disagreeable questions. She’s a familiar face,
not only from her stint on TV-20’s education beat; we also see her around
campus when she serves as a substitute teacher.
The vernacular labels that working "in the trenches." While it is troubling
that the metaphor seems to place teachers back in World War One as history
forges a new millennium, it still strikes us as a noble effort.
Odds Favor the House
To some teachers, well, to me, it seems like there isn’t much to be
gained in two of the three races, and the odds are against us in the third.
But that’s why they play the game. Because you never know who’s going
to win. Even the Damn Yankees don’t win em all. Muhammad Ali shook up the
world. Team USA beats the Soviet Union for the hockey gold. Do you believe
in miracles?
The difference, of course, is that with the electoral process, we aren’t
fans; we’re players. The odds-on favorites are such based on the results
of the primary. But maybe you’ve changed your mind since then. Or maybe
your candidate lost. Or maybe you didn’t vote at all. Now’s your chance.
The Class Size Amendment
Both Aristotle and Jesus were convinced that class size should not exceed
a dozen, which was the student population imposed among the peripatetics
as well as the apostles.
The class size amendment would limit classes to 18 student through third
grade, 22 students in middle school, and 25 students in high school. If
the "Education Governor" is to be believed, the class size amendment would
bankrupt the economy of western civilization and we would be overrun by
the Mongol hordes.
Apocalypse Redux
Jean Luc Godard, the radical auteur filmmaker, was asked if he thought
Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Copola’s antiwar masterpiece then in the making,
was excessively expense, considering the fact that the film’s budget had
spiraled to a then unheard of seventy million dollars. Godard shot back
that if the movie cost a hundred times that, it might begin to give people
an idea of the true cost of the Vietnam War.
The class size amendment is like that. If it were to give legislators,
and beyond them all the citizens of the state, the idea that educating
the populous truly is an expensive proposition to be performed by professionals,
then the babysitting and warehousing of kids would end and the education
of students would begin. |
