From the May 10 Rapid City Journal letters (reproduced with permission by author)
School board race needs the better candidate
Rapid City schools are struggling with harsh budget realities and the need to continue to provide a quality education to all our children.Heather Gosch’s entry into the school board race should cause concern.
Of course, anybody has the right to run for school board.The problem with Heather,who’s married to a local legislator, is that her children attend private schools! How can she be an advocate and cheerleader for public schools when she boycotts those schools personally? Arnie Laubach, the current board member, has two children in the Rapid City schools, and therefore gets daily reports about what is and isn’t working.
Our state aid formula is an expenditure per student. Therefore, a parent who removes her children from the public schools is depriving them of thousands of dollars. In these difficult times, as everyone makes sacrifices, our hard pressed teachers need board members who are loyal to the public schools and committed to maintaining excellent education at all grade levels.
Let’s not put someone on the school board who doesn’t even trust her own children to the public schools. Let’s work together to maintain quality public education as we weather the current economic storm.
RITCHIE
NORDSTROM
Rapid City
Suzan Nolan - retired longtime school counselor, advocate for kids, candidate for SD House in 2006, founding member of Democracy In Action, advocate for women and children
Arnie Laubach - businessman, long-time majority voter on our current out of control school board
Candice Estes - can't find anything on her online
Heather Gosch - all I know is that she is a CPA and is married to Brian Gosch, who voted against funding our schools Pierre.
The Fightin' Area One
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10 people will know this, remember this information and let it guide their decisions. Most of the rest of the voters will walk in the booth and vote for the unknown and hope for the best. That's democracy....stumbling through the dark without sight, touch, hearing, taste or smell...after all...the nation elected George W. Bush....and look at the stink he left behind.
ReplyDeletePolitics aside, I wouldn't view putting kids in private school or home school as a disqualification from running from school board any more than not having kids in school at all. We're all taxpayers; we all benefit from the public education system; we all have an interest in participating in the governance of that system. And we should be careful with that "depriving the school" argument: that family still pays property tax, same as everyone else. Conceivably, you could argue that someone who builds a $100K house is less qualified to serve on the board than someone with a $400K house, since the former is "depriving" the school district of the tax dollars it could have gotten from a bigger house.
ReplyDeleteFair point, she has a *right* to run, but is she really qualified, and we the voters certainly have a right to question her agenda, especially since her husband has consistently voted against increasing funding for public education in a state which contributes 50th of 50 states per pupil to education.
ReplyDeleteAnd, the person who built the 400k house is more likely in this town to be homeschooling their kids. It's a west-river (and west-side?) cultural thing and it's not pretty.