Part 1
[img]1218|left|Nancy Goldberg||no_popup[/img]As 42 years’ worth of admiring Culver City students will attest, just-retired Nancy Goldberg brings distinct, sui generis, rhythms to the November race for two seats on the School Board.
No one is going to say she reminds him of anyone else in this campaign or any within memory.
Put away the brimstone, the fire and the telephone-pole-length homemade signs that scream “Vote for Me — or Else.”
A carryover from her classroom days, Ms. Goldberg is the cerebral candidate this season.
She will quietly reason through thickets of rhetoric, and deliver her answer after due deliberation. She will discuss denouements as easily as others will talk about endings.
Surely she is a sentimental choice in the four-person field.
When America thinks politicians, the immediate vision is the way that Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner raged at and name-called each other on television last evening.
Not Ms. Goldberg’s style.
Widely viewed with enduring affection, the mother, grandmother and great-grandmother nevertheless still needs to prove she possesses the mettle, the teeth-gritting tough edge, to be a conquering candidate.
Question: Was it a difficult decision to run for public office for the first time in your life?
“I am at that age where I know I still have a few good years left in me. I am very healthy. I am very active, and I knew that it was time for me to back off (from school). I couldn’t take another class. I was only working fourth period.
“I lost my husband (Robert Sydney Goldberg) in ’05, and I was so grateful to have my job with the kids, and the love they have.
“We were married 46 years. There are no sad parts. He knew I was a teacher from the time he was sending me to school and paying for it, and saying, ‘Yeah, you’ll get there,’ and I did. I think he kind of enjoyed that, the fact that I could complete something I wanted.”
Returning her focus to the classroom, Ms. Goldberg said: “I began to realize there was this great big question of testing coming over the mountain, and I am scared of it. The last two years, it became even more onerous, not through any purpose of because of any design by the District. But it is coming down the pike federally.”
Ms. Goldberg’s central objection to the federally ordered testing, she said, “is the time element involved. You are not spending time interacting with students, having them share with one another, having discussion groups of the type that Dylan (Farris, expected to be named the new principal of Culver City High School tonight) did the first time I saw him in a classroom.
“Dylan’s students, by the time I got them in the 11th grade, had a capacity for argument, rhetoric. They were conscious of these things, and actually before then.
“They have a good Scholars program at the Middle School. Our problems are not with that program. Our problem is the Immersion program at the Middle School, where we don’t have sufficient continuation.
“We start out in elementary…
“I am still working on that. I haven’t figured it out yet.
“These problems are so broad-based and voluminous. I take one section, study it, and get as much out of it as I can. Then I propose or influence the right people.
“I realize I could be one of those people, and I might be able to channel what I already have learned about programs for students, and how can I implement new programs where we could afford them and protect the ones I know are essential.
“The school has to be able to protect the students, provide for their health, and provide for their academics. That is cutting it down to the bare essentials.
“Safety is a problem, because we never have had so many students in school. When my children were there in the ‘70s, you could walk down the hall and nobody would bump into you. Now I get knocked into, not by students but by their bookbags.
“Shlepping these things on their backs, and with many young people, their backs aren’t fully formed yet.
“I am looking at it like a mother or a grandmother.”
Which reminded Ms. Goldberg of her recent encounter with a well-known personality whose endorsement she sought. He was forced to decline, he told her, because she does not have children presently in school. And that is a story for the next time.
(To be continued)
