George,

A few comments on Lloyd Snook's recent response to David RePass on elected school boards.

I urge Lloyd to study the experience of other school boards before making claims that there is no difference between appointed and elected boards.

According to Steve Koleszar, the Albemarle County School Board used to have as its primary concern keeping taxes low. Then, when the Board became elected, the focus shifted to improving the performance of the schools. Moreover, elected board members have had the authority (because they were elected) to make the tough decisions that needed to be made to tackle the achievement gap. What we saw last year in Charlottesville is that an appointed board, no matter how good its intentions, lacks the political capital to implement important, if potentially controversial, reforms.

Contrary to what Lloyd claims, electing the school board is consistent with the principle of representative democracy. We the voters would choose board members to carry out school-related decisions on our behalf for four years. Moreover, turnout for school board elections tends to be even higher than for local governing body elections because education of children arouses intense interest in most communities (it certainly does here in Charlotteville).

To discredit the notion that school boards are more responsive when elected by invoking the example of the U.S. Congress is silly. A school board member would represent only several thousand individuals instead of hundreds of thousands (or millions). Also, Lloyd may not be aware of this, but the U.S. Congress IS more responsive to the citizenry than the appointed legislatures in nondemocratic countries. (I've spent my professional life studying communist regimes, so I'm not being glib in making this claim.)

Because Lloyd refuses to study the example of other elected Virginia school boards, he is able to claim that an elected board member is likely to achieve nothing more than an appointed one. In Albemarly County, however, a board member ran on a platform of introducing Spanish into elementary schools. Because she won the campaign and made a public promise to voters, Spanish is now being introduced in Albemarle County elementary schools. If board members in Charlottesville win an election on a platform of introducing preschool for three and four year olds or introducing more arts into the curriculum, etc., City Council will take notice and likely support such measures. I for one believe that it would have been harder for City Council to torpedo the Jefferson School if there were elected board members who had committed themselves to saving that school. City Councilors didn't want to save the school, however, and the board members had no political capital to challenge that (ill-advised) decision.

I do not underdstand why Lloyd continues to make the spurious claim that "if we have wards for the election of School Boards, we will have wards for the election of City Council as well." He conceded to me in an email last spring that this is at most a possible outcome rather than a necessary outcome. As I've said before, there are many significant hurdles that would have to be crossed before city council could be elected by ward. The chances of those hurdles being crossed in Charlottesville are minimal because there is no political support for moving to ward-based council elections. Just look at how Council responded to the report of the ad hoc election task force last year.

In closing, I urge Lloyd to pick up the phone and spend 15 minutes talking to Steve Koleszar and other members of the Albemarly County School Board. He will quickly discover that many of the same arguments that he (Lloyd) makes against electing the school board were made a decade ago in the county, and that none of those fears has proven justified. In fact, the schools in the county have gotten better during the past decade, and much of the credit goes to the elected school board.

Jeffrey Rossman (electronic mail, September 28, 2005)