Second of three parts
Re “Kids Rule at Best Forum of Season – Candidates? Not So Hot”
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No surprises this morning when Ask2Know promoter Michelle Mayans announced the three winners of Tuesday evening’s School Board candidates forum before an almost exclusively student audience at West Los Angeles College.
The nearly 500 Culver City students determined that the three open seats on the Board should be awarded to the contenders who were easily most forceful and outspoken:
Sue Robins, Vernon Taylor, Karlo Silbiger.
One of the marvelous advantages of being young and unadulterated is that you do not enter a political forum burdened by years of single-sided prejudice for or against certain types of people.
Never mind that on Tuesday, few voters who prefer Ms. Robins are likely to round out their ballots with Mr. Taylor and Mr. Silbiger. Similarly, Taylor-Silbiger voters probably will not make Ms. Robins their third choice.
Students participating in record numbers in Ms. Mayans’s Kids Forum appeared to base their selections on these three for separate rather than common reasons:
Case for Taylor
• After displaying the reserved dimension of his personality for the past 2½ months, Mr. Taylor stepped out of character with his first words when candidates were delivering introductory remarks from the stage of the Fine Arts Theatre.
He belted out his opening line – “Do we have any Centaurs in the room,” Mr. Taylor shouted. The students roared back. By then, even a slow thinker could deduce that a new Vernon Taylor was being unveiled.
Unlike some colleagues who dusted off their standard campaign rhetoric, regardless of whether they were addressing the Ladies Aid Society or Atheistic Arsonists United Against Spreading Conflagrations, Mr. Taylor, a father of three, looked the teens and younger in the eye. He stopped just short of saying, “I am you.” No other candidate did that. He spoke, poignantly, persuasively, of a recent evening with students at Denny’s.
He accented his central theme, that when he wants to know what the schools need, he solicits the opinions of students forced to use the dirty bathrooms and other sub-par facilities.
Case for Robins
• Only on the surface would Ms. Robins have been regarded as an unexpected finisher in the top three.
Methodical at the start of her campaign, she has shown remarkable momentum throughout this month, and by now is favored to win one of the three seats.
Two explanations leap to the fore – her early stiffness has been vanquished, and former students and their parents are remembering how authentically fond they became of her when she was teaching Middle School science to sixth and eighth graders.
Scanning the incoming crowd 15 minutes before the forum began, Ms. Robins estimated that her former students may have comprised half of the room.
Aside from her genuineness and her immediate connection with her classes, even the remotely interested students figured out something rare:
Ms. Robins, looking distinguished as a tall intellectual, always would be the smartest person in any room. Life does not offer many chances to learn with a genius.
Case for Silbiger
• An outpouring for Mr. Silbiger could traced to a network of still different reasons.
Despite his almost lifelong baldness, he is, by decades, closest to the students in age. His frequently smiling face is as youthful as his 30ish years. He is interested in what they are interested in – curricular and extracurricular.
Literally and figuratively, he speaks their language.
He says it and lives it. Kids can distinguish genuineness from phoniness.
Appealing also is the notion that he fulfills a traditional notion of a teacher, one you can sit beside, on top of the desk, and talk over the day’s learning.
(To be continued)
