Renée Wise, Aaron Schultz, Ken Santema, and incumbent Brian Sharp are running for three available seats on the Aberdeen school board. So is incumbent Kevin Burckhardt, but he didn’t the forum, so he gets no air time in this post.
With a juicier battery, I was able to get all of the statements from this portion of the League of Women Voters/Chamber of Commerce candidates’ forum Saturday. Here we go!
Candidates grapple with the thorny question of dealing with parent/staff conflicts and grapple mostly correctly, pointing out that school board members don’t get into those thorns but let the process play itself out at the teacher and administrator level:
What can we do to get more businesses to partner with the school by offering internships?
School lunch? Cheapest good meal in town, I say! Blogger Ken Santema steals the show by saying he would love to get rid of all federal funding for our school and raise our local taxes. Wise suggests growing school lunch in a school greenhouse.
Someone raises concerns that class sizes have gone up, particularly in the vocational classrooms. Again, Santema delivers the memorable line, noting that he appreciates the importance of having good supervision in shop class, since “as someone who’s lost a piece of my body to a power tool, I don’t want that to happen to a high school kid.” (Watch Aaron Schultz subtly glance over and try to count Santema’s fingers.)
And closing statements!
As with the city council candidate videos from Saturday, I’ll offer more commentary and analysis in a separate post