When the 2017 Indiana General Assembly voted to eliminate the partisan election of the superintendent of public instruction, they cited the need to take politics out of education. They also identified politics as the cause of discord and dysfunction in state education governance.
And now they want to introduce politics into local school board elections? Why?
School board issues do not require a particular political skill set. There is no Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green way to plan facility improvements or approve calendars.
Requiring partisan elections and opening the floodgates to political parties funding races for school board offices seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Worse, this action would potentially reduce the number of qualified candidates for office since those covered by the Hatch Act cannot engage in politically partisan activities.
There are school board members currently serving who would need to re-evaluate their ability to continue serving as board members.
The Bloomfield school board president is currently Darren Burch, an employee at the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center. Gary Plummer, school board member of the Tipton Community School Corporation, is an employee of the U.S. Post Office. Michael A. Morris is a board member at the Monroe Central School Corporation and works for the United States Department of Defense as well as serving in the Air Force reserves.
Do we want to make it more difficult for people like this to serve on school boards?
While they could run as Independents, they’d be competing against political candidates who have the advantage of political party funding as well as the obvious advantage of straight ticket voters who oftentimes fail to even notice the down-ticket races.
Remember how straight-party voting led to Democrat Crystel Myers winning the Hancock County coroner’s office in 2012 against two well-qualified Republicans who had to run as independents?
According to Michael Adamson, director of board services for the Indiana School Boards Association, school boards are “accountable for everything but manage nothing.”
While I agree that school board members have to shoulder a great deal of criticism; I strongly suspect he was joking when he said that they “manage nothing.”
School board members create district school policies, and we all know how much havoc this has wrought lately with pro- and anti-mask groups; requests for book bans; and critical race theory being portrayed as something taught in kindergarten rather than colleges.
Boards are expected to provide education programs as well as transportation and meals for students; approve personnel decisions; and make decisions about construction and buildings.
They also manage budgets and pay bills that are far beyond the scale that most of us would feel comfortable overseeing.
According to a Daily Reporter article published on Oct. 12, the budgets for our Hancock County Schools were expected to be: Southern Hancock: $41.3 million; Eastern Hancock: $15.4 million; Mt. Vernon: $56.08; and Greenfield-Central: $55 million.
In return, school board members were paid — according to an article Oct. 7, 2020 in The Indianapolis Star — “up to $2,000 per year as well as meeting stipends that are restricted to a maximum of $112 per regular meeting and $62 for a special meeting.”
That’s a very low level of compensation for the amount of kvetching that one must tolerate as a school board member, let alone the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they are expected to command. I can only assume that many people who take on these tasks see it as “community service” or “paying forward,” and I wonder just how many would still wish to make this contribution if they had to go through a politically partisan process to do so.
School boards are certainly not immune from political conflict, but inviting politics into the board room through partisan school board elections seems like an incredibly bad idea.
Indiana took politics out of state education back in 2017. Is there really any good reason to put it back in to education in 2022?
