Friday, August 24, 2007

The Race is On

This week, I filed Form 3-T Nominating Petitions with the Franklin County Board of Elections, indicating my desire to be a candidate for a seat on the Board of Education of the Hilliard City School District.

Our district falls in the size range which requires at least 150 signatures of registered voters on the petitions. With the help of several friends, a total of 243 signatures were collected for my petitions. The next step is for the petitions to be certified by the Board of Elections.

I was surprised to get a call already from a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch yesterday afternoon, wanting to talk to me about running for the Board of Education. We spoke for several minutes about why I was running, but the only thing that made it into today's paper was a couple of facts.

One of those facts is incorrect: I am not currently serving on the Board of The Hilliard Education Foundation; my term of service ended in 2003. This was a wonderful experience, and the reason I became interested in the governance of our school district. In 2000, I had the opportunity to serve as chairperson of the Evening for Excellence, the primary fundraiser of the organization.

The HEF is an entirely volunteer organization. The members I served with were, and are, dedicated and accomplished community servants from whom I learned a great deal. One of those is Dave Lundregan, who is also running for a seat on the School Board in this election. Dave is a good man, and I look forward to the dialog that will be generated during this campaign.

I was asked to serve as one of the initial members of the team now called Act for Schools , which was created in 2004 to educate the community on school funding and to mount a lobbying effort aimed at the state legislature. My belief then was that community education had much higher priority than lobbying, and was vocal about it, so I was asked to instead serve on the Citizens' Finance Commmittee, which I did through April of 2005.

At some point, the community newspapers will likely do stories about the four candidates for the two seats available. In the meantime, you are invited to read the substantial amount of research, analysis and opinion I have posted over the last year and a half on this blog and on the companion website.

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