If the promoter Michelle Mayans had ambitiously staged her Students-Ask-the-Candidates forum every week during the campaign instead of one fleeting time, all 40,000 Culver City residents of indiscriminate age would have been inspired to come out next Tuesday and vote for their three favorites in the School Board election.
Instead, as candidate Robert Zirgulis likes to remind audiences, a scant 4,000 of the fairly motivated will dribble to the polls.
For one night, though, Ms. Mayans’s Kids Scoop Media organization, under the banner Ask2Know, drove to the highest elevation in the electoral galaxy.
Not only did she turn out a record 500 students inside West Los Angeles College’s glamourous, late-model Fine Arts Theatre at easily the most spirited forum of the season, they asked more poignant questions and showed adults, behaviorally, how to make a forum effective.
By miles, this was the best show of the campaign season.
With the favorite foods of every human under the age of 75 available – free – outdoors on the patio, the seven-way performance offered West L.A. College’s impressive president, Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh, an opportunity to showcase the most underrated community college campus in the state.
“Welcome to West!” his words rang out, and the crowd cheered wildly.
This came after Dr. Tony Spano and his band of merry musicians from the AVPA, the Academy of Visual and Performing Arts, cheerily put the arriving capacity crowd in the mood with easily recognizable melodies out on the west end of the patio.
Billed as a festive night for smart teenagers – Cassidy McConnell and Isaac Harris from Culver City High School were the co-moderators – they were forced to share the klieg lights with two equally astute grammar schoolers, one noticed, the other strictly private.
[img]1993|exact|Dr. Steve Levin||no_popup[/img]Before the serious inquisition of the candidates began, Dr. Steve Levin was sitting on the lip of the stage with a visitor, speaking quietly. Off to the right, in the front row his three children, ages 15, 10 and 8, were aligned.
Bashfully, 10-year-old Shaina strolled over, thrust a magnificent pencil-written note into her father’s hand. She had scratched a brief message that would have melted a rock. “I love you, Dad. Shaina.”
Dr. Levin’s visitor only had sons, who thought such sentiments only should be expressed by the opposite sex.
All evening, the children’s imaginative questions forced Dr. Levin, Vernon Taylor, Sue Robins, Kathy Paspalis, Robert Zirgulis, Karlo Silbiger and Claudia Vizcarra to abandon their pat responses and even be creative. Your favorite pizza? stumped at least two of them.
Ms. Robins chose three types “because people have different needs.” Dr. Levin picked three kinds “because there needs to be variety on the Board.” Mr. Silbiger ordered “one kind of pizza with everything on it because that is how I think of myself,” a full-service member of the School Board. Twisting it a little, Mr. Zirgulis “ordered the works on mine because I will work for you.”
Third-grader Laura Taylor’s question was, what does a school board do?
Just the opening Mr. Taylor – easily the hottest candidate of the night – wanted served up.
Based on past forum performances, where he has been gentle and genteel, quintessentially collegial, the underdog candidate launched a series of scorching answers meant to land on the foreheads of the two incumbents in the race, Ms. Paspalis and Mr. Silbiger.
Choosing hammer-strength tone and words, Mr. Taylor excoriated them and their colleagues for being a do-nothing Board the past four years.
[img]2100|left|Vernon Taylor||no_popup[/img]When Ms. Paspalis said that the Board would like to have done more financially for teachers, would have liked to install widespread air conditioning, cleaned up bathrooms that have the opposite effect of perfume, Mr. Taylor pounced with a never-before-seen vigor.
On the attack ferociously, he scolded the Board for putting itself first and giving members raises while sloughing off the allegedly modest pay level of teachers.
All it would have taken to achieve the unfulfilled seemingly emergency objectives, said Mr. Taylor, were creative thinking and stern desire. Both, he suggested, are AWOL with School Board members. Facially, Ms. Paspalis seemed to take umbrage. Mr. Silbiger’s expression did not move.
(To be continued)
