The Final Week
Fence-sitters have until Aug. 15, one week from tomorrow, to make their call to join the competition for chairs that Marla Wolkowitz and Stew Bubar will be vacating.
What the community will get if it elects Mr. Elmont three months from yesterday is a feisty, strongly spoken fighter for his beliefs. Friends say the violets in his garden do not shrink.
In Mr. Elmonts words: If I open my mouth, I am going to put my body behind it.
Verdict Has Been Simmering
His decision to challenge for the School Board was not sudden. For the past two years, I have been considering a run, he said. Initially, I was comfortable sitting in the audience, wagging my finger or clapping my hands when appropriate.
No longer.
We have great schools and great teachers in Culver City, he said. But we are facing real hard choices. One is the growing challenge of declining enrollment, if the projections are accurate.
Why Choose Him?
Given his background, Mr. Elmont believes he is uniquely positioned to impact the consensual decision-making process.
Topics at the top of one prospective School Board members mind, he says, are maintaining the quality of programs in our schools and dealing with the appropriate structure of the school system.
Based on earlier projections, Mr. Elmont said that the School District stands to lose about 200 students, which adds up to $1.1 million in government funding.
The Anniversary Waltz
He and his wife Teri, who celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary in July, are in the midst of a decades-long commitment to be active not passive eyewitnesses to the education of their three children.
Their elder daughter graduated Culver City High School 2 years ago, and their 10-year-old boy and girl twins enter the 5th grade in September.
We had our kids on purpose, he says with fatherly pride.
Since the early 1990s, Mr. Elmont or his wife has consistently represented the family at School Board meetings and functions, and PTA events.
Aside from monitoring the persons who guide his childrens lives for 8 or 9 hours a day, what, he was asked, keeps him coming back?
A Set of Family Priorities
Getting involved in the education of your children is sound parenting, Mr. Elmont suggested, the sociological fuel that always has powered the development of civilization.
Let me take a breath first, the management consultant for a San Francisco-based employment agency said this afternoon.
Participating in the education of his children, he said, is foundational. It is societal. It is the whole basis on which our species has evolved, up from the way my grandparents raised their family and my parents raised their family.
East Coast Native
In the Massachussetts of the 1950s, the Elmont home in Newton was typical working class for the time, says son Alan. He derived his traditional values from his blue-collar father, an auto mechanic, and his mother, a housewife who formed the spine of their family.
The elder Elmonts wanted their children to do better, to accomplish more than they had.
As the first member of his family to earn a college degree, in political science, Mr. Elmont, ambitious and focused, boasts that he only has missed voting in a single election since coming of age.
His Only Miss
When he moved to Culver City from Massachusetts, he said, he arrived too late to register for the election in which Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter for the White House.
He ticks off the timeline of his early days in the community. In 1983, he and Teri were married. Two years later, they bought their first home.
A family man in the tradition that his parents brought him up, Mr. Elmont is proud of the personal data in his resume that will become increasingly public and familiar during the 90-day campaign
The Gutsy Calls
Preparing to launch his first ever campaign, Mr. Elmont promises not to sugar-coat his message to voters. He will tell them he is capable of making difficult calls. The School Board must base its decisions on what is best for the students, what is best for families and what is best for the community at large, he said. But the answers are not always going to be in alignment.
That, Mr. Elmont hopes, is where his role as a new Board member comes in.
