Reader comments
Tad Walch: School board selection may get less murky

Bob G | 5:54 a.m. April 19, 2008

Another rigged election? Shouldn't the school districts choose their own candidates and have them register like all elected officials? The governor should not be picking the candidates to choose from, it takes away voters rights to select and vote for the board members. What if he only picks a number of candidates for the positions available? Where is the choice of voters? Still in the governors party and personal politics to play favorites with his buddies. The board has too long been a list of buddies to the governor he wishes to reward for their support in elections or financial gains and putting them in charge of billions of dollars in education funds. And the graft and corruption in education goes on.

BBking | 7:54 a.m. April 19, 2008

Tad, one additional point of information to your story, this committee and process has existed since 1993 or 1994. It was changed when you mentioned to create one committee with business members on it.

The history is pretty vile. Mike Leavitt did it to ensure that only smart education people could represent education. So basically, Mike Leavitt created it, with Rob Bishop as Speaker of the House, so that Mike was the primary process. Mike Leavitt didn't trust us to make these kinds of decisions.

For a decade instead of one committee each district had a committee that removed anyone who basically did not conform to the Unions standard mantra that all we needed was tax increases to save education. The first thing it did is boot two business minded state school board members off the state school board. Then it held Unionesque control until 2002.

So in 2002 it was changed to a process that was slanted towards business minded people, and yes business generally believe in vouchers.

I personally believe it should be scrapped altogethre and just have a normal American-style election. This Soviet stuff has got to go, though what was good for the goose...

What is next? | 1:55 a.m. April 21, 2008

Maybe, Margaret Dayton will say that the governor has a "property rights" issue with the right for the public to vote.

Add your comment

Comments are monitored. Any comments found to be abusive, offensive, off-topic, misrepresentative, more than 200 words or containing URLs will not be posted.

Words Remaining

E-mail address: For internal use only. We may want to contact you to publish your comment (not your e-mail address) in the newspaper or for a separate story idea.