Many of you may be new to the politics of our Board of Education.
But let me flash back four or five years to a previous School Board.
Imagine trying to contact your School Board member by email or phone, and never ever getting a response.
Imagine trying to speak at a public meeting, and having to wait hours – sometimes until after midnight – because the Board scheduled public comment at the very end of the meeting.
Imagine a Board of strangely-inaccessible and inscrutable men and women, almost all of whom didn’t even have children in our schools, making decisions that seemed almost completely out of touch with the parents and community.
Then Scott Zeidman was elected. He actually had kids in our school. He knew parents, and he worked tirelessly to interact with the community. He was the first School Board member ever to respond to one of my emails.
I know plenty of others who shared this same experience. It may not seem like a big deal, but it makes a huge difference to parents like me.
I believe Scott changed the whole culture of the School Board, from one of absolute inaccessibility and inscrutability to one of increasing openness and inclusiveness.
Public comments now are heard at the beginning of the meeting instead of at the end. Board members actually treat parents more like partners than adversaries.
There is a much greater sense that someone on that Board actually is listening to us (even if the Board didn’t always do what we want). It may not seem like much now, but this was a fairly revolutionary change at the time. Scott started that trend, which continues today with some of our other Board members (like Kathy Paspalis and Karlo Silbiger).
Did every single one of Scott’s decisions please everyone in town?
I don’t know.
But no one would challenge how hard he worked on them. In my mind, he did as good of a job as a leader can do. He listened to the public He tried to help them when he could. If he made any decision (popular or unpopular), he always had an extremely, well-thought-out explanation for why that decision was made.
He set an incredibly high standard for all other school board members to aspire to.
He spent hours upon hours performing the duties of this (almost) unpaid position.
After all of that, the public failed to re-elect him.
I’m devastated that he lost. Not just on a personal level, but on a moral and philosophical level.
How can someone do such a superior job and still be unappreciated by a majority of the voters (and non-voters)?
I think that is what troubles me the most — that, perhaps, is why so many people don’t vote in the first place.
Mr. Derevlany may be contacted at johnderevlany@yahoo.com
