Four candidates have registered to compete in the upcoming November election for two director positions on the Berkeley Unified School District School Board.
Berkeley residents Judy Appel, Norma J.F. Harrison and Tracy Hollander are challenging incumbent School Board Director and Clerk Beatriz Leyva-Cutler in an election for two seats, including the seat vacated by current School Board Director and President John T. Selawsky, who will be retiring when his term expires after the election.
In Berkeley, the school board is composed of five elected directors who serve staggered four-year terms, one student director elected annually from Berkeley High School and the district superintendent — currently Bill Huyett, who plans on retiring once a suitable replacement is found — who serves as the secretary.
The first to file candidacy was Appel, a mother of two who served as the Oxford Elementary School PTA president for two terms, on Oxford’s Site Council for four years and as a community representative to Huyett’s budget advisory committee, according to her website. Appel currently serves as the executive director of Our Family Coalition, an organization working to promote the equality and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer families with children.
“School should be challenging and nurturing for all students. We need to continue to provide access to opportunity by closing the academic achievement gap so that all students can succeed,” Appel said on her website, which lists her priorities as equity in education for all students, smart spending aligned with district goals, fostering a positive school climate and strengthening family and community ties.
Appel has been endorsed by the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, the entire Berkeley City Council, including Mayor Tom Bates, and three current school board members, including Leyva-Cutler.
Leyva-Cutler, who was elected to the school board in 2008 and appointed by the other board members to the clerk position, is the executive director of the Bay Area Hispano Institute for Advancement in Berkeley, a bilingual child-development program that provides support Hispanic families in the school system. She has won multiple awards for her work in the Berkeley area.
Leyva-Cutler was not available when reached for comment.
Hollander, a former teacher in San Francisco and New York, is an active Berkeley PTA council member and a representative on Huyett’s Budget Advisory Committee. She said she hopes to provide a unique teacher perspective to a school board that she said is currently without any professional teachers.
Hollander — who has been endorsed by Selawsky, City Council members Laurie Capitelli and Susan Wengraf and 11 former and current PTA members across the district — also said she is running not as a politician who seeks any higher office but as an educator.
“One of my main priorities is to be very accessible and remain connected to our school community and the community at large,” Hollander said. “I would commit to visiting all schools on a regular basis as well as holding office hours at cafes throughout the city where the regular community can have the opportunity to meet and speak with me about their concerns.”
Also among her priorities, Hollander said, is closing the achievement gap by following the district’s 2020 Vision plan and supporting teachers by giving them the resources they need to reach every student.
The final candidate, Harrison — who also ran for school board in the November 2010 general municipal election — has a significantly different message than her opponents in the election.
“I’d like us to come to the recognition that we don’t need compulsory education,” said Harrison, a self-described advocate for a socialist or communist revolution. “We need people to be able to be doing things in our world that fulfill our desires, tastes, ambitions and to have people doing that together outside of school and not segregated by age.”
In November, city residents will have the ability to vote for any school board candidate, unlike in the City Council election, which limits residents to voting within their city districts.
“City Council members only have to focus on their specific districts, whereas the school board members have to run their campaigns citywide,” said district spokesperson Mark Coplan. “It’s a much more daunting task for them.”
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Norma J. F. Harrison
I’m old. I’m a born-again communist, a fundamentalist marxist, a devout atheist, a communist all my life…
The top issue of a socialist campaign is to enable people to declare that the rulers have stolen our language. Socialism-communism — these are how we can speak of what we’re about. It’s bad enough we on the actual left lack the material — the money, the permission — to build our political work. We can’t continue as well to sacrifice the century-old, enormous theft of our language. Talking socialism as Sweezy has said, requires that we preach it — much as did King preach for justice as far as he went — as a song we can sing together. It’s ours. I want people to feel free to reclaim it.
I want people to be able to know we are able all to provide comfortably for us all, opposite the scarcity
capitalism would have us succumb to, placing materials — housing, health care, bridges, repair in time of catastrophe beyond our reach as too costly.
And I want people to know that these objectives belong to all people everywhere; no exceptions.
Sorry — there’s a 4th objective here, implicit but needing stating nevertheless. Arrest and imprisonment must be entirely different from what has ever been done to people — except say, in Cuba. We must be care for criminal behavior, any leftovers of capitalism’s brutality, by helping people deal with unacceptable behavior in healthy, encompassing ways, making sure alternatives and healing are plentiful. Any long-term incarceration must be as totally humane as anyone’s pleasant home.
http://www.vote-socialist.org/p08/questionnaires/harrison.html
And with people like this in Berkeley, you wonder why nothing ever changes…
Are you actually referring to some situations? … or to what, if you don’t mind. Things in Berkeley have, like the rest of the country, the rest of the world, in many ways, more strongly taken positions to the right of the struggle for our benefit.
There still is rising concern by our Owners that resistance to our submission is an undercurrent, perhaps growing – to where it can manifest. We’re working on that.
Berkeley is fairly heroic. Although years of this kind of comment here, and so many places, have held sway to where Berkeley has even greater difficulty now than it did 40, 30, even 20 years ago, analyzing the cause of limitations on our freedom to care for us all. Berkeley used to be able to point to the country’s warring, and assaults on our social benefits as basic to local deprivation and conflict, – street crime for instance.
But Berkeley’s been told so often, erroneously, to deal with local matters and not national, that people are more and more confused by our failures to be able to deal with our comfort and security. For instance, the enormity of outrageously increased costs to go to school to get trained to fit into our Owners jobs, and for the transportation and housing and study materials to be able to use the classrooms – we’re not easily allowed to point to national policy as cause!
So, we keep trying to let people see the origins of our oppression so we CAN come together to change that.
People hate school – same as they hate jobs. These are the results of the stultifying experience school is.
Age segregation is not a way for us to live. Living together as our interests and all take us – these promote all facets of living, including being a contributing member of society REGARDLESS of age.
We’re all geniuses. Genius is not a genetic factor. Just think how it would be if our teaching were not owned by school and if study were just the way we’d live…. Figure why we’re not all exemplifying genius throughout our life.
Teaching is one of capitalism’s commodities. Study is put upon us at a time. Then we go to work and all. Life is wrongly limited.
I want a seat on the board that looks at this and makes moves to change it.
Thanks for that example of the type of kookery that is representative of Berzerkeley politics. I’m glad I left 2 days after graduation and never bothered to come back…
Self-oppression, refusal/inability to realize our relationship to the system is essential so the rich, our Owners, can retain control of all of our stuff. Some of our stuff is your mind, your way of life, your submission to THeir rule, as exemplified by your comment. I’m trying to make available a tool for people to say that things are not being done for us. One sharp evidence is that you’re bombing people. Many similarly oppressive, brutal attacks are happening to us all the time. A mainstay of that oppression is school, the opposite of education. That’s why you hated school so hard – but had to do it.