Organizers deny candidate forum was 'campaign stunt' for teacher seeking state Senate seat
'Some were very willing to meet with us; others never bothered to return our phone calls or emails.'
MUNCIE — A start-up group that is a defender of public education attracted four Democrats but no Republicans to its “bipartisan forum on education issues” for state legislative candidates.
The candidates were questioned on issues including teacher shortages, school funding, teacher certification, book bans, textbook fees, mental health, LGBT, virtual learning, privatization of schools, COVID, and whether to politicize school board elections.
“It was just too obvious that it was a campaign stunt for my opponent,” said Scott Alexander, a real estate appraiser, president of Delaware County Council and the GOP nominee for the state Senate District 26. The district encompasses Delaware and Randolph counties. “You didn’t have to dig very hard to find out … that this was about as much of a setup as it could possibly be for one group of candidates.”
Alexander’s opponent, Democrat Melanie Wright, a Daleville public school teacher and ex-state representative, was one of the four Democrats at the forum on Oct. 25 at the Minnetrista museum and gardens.
Unlike Alexander, Wright didn’t shy away from attending a forum regarded as unfriendly to her — one in Randolph County sponsored by Farm Bureau, which endorsed Alexander.
Wright is the underdog in the race. She is far behind in fundraising ($285,087 for Alexander, $13,191 for Wright, as of Oct. 14). Also, he collected more votes in the Senate district last spring, winning the GOP primary by 1,807 to 1,043 in Randolph County and by 5,081 to 1,323 in Delaware County. Wright ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, collecting 299 votes in Randolph and 3,379 in Delaware.
Much of Alexander’s campaign spending has gone toward mass mailings, including a couple of attack ads tying Wright to President Joe Biden’s “dangerous big-government agenda.”
Wright has focused her campaign on education, including an endorsement from Jennifer McCormick, the former Republican state superintendent of public instruction.
Experienced Educators of East Central Indiana, a group of mostly retired educators that sponsored the forum at Minnetrista, organized earlier this year out of concern that the Republican-controlled state Legislature “was following a path pushed by someone's far-right agenda on a national level,” Gayle Gernand told me.
She is a retired Wes-Del Community Schools teacher and a former principal at East Elementary School at South Madison Community Schools.
“Teachers and administrators currently working are too overwhelmed with the day-to-day responsibilities of their jobs to truly fight for public education,” Gernand said in an email. “We called the Statehouse frequently to have messages never returned and felt as though they were often ignored.”
The first thing members did was to educate themselves, “because people were talking about things like … critical race theory and Drag Queen Story Hour in kindergarten. We never heard of these things happening at our schools … We learned that CRT (critical race theory) was really a college-related topic for law students that could possibly end up in an AP high school course, but not likely. We never found a Drag Queen Story Hour.”
The group’s website quotes author Stephen King as saying “book banners insist the entire community see things their way and only their way.” And documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was quoted as saying that being American means “reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice,” and that “the dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.”
Experienced Educator is also raising the alarm about bills being passed in GOP-controlled state Legislatures to privatize public education — including taxpayer-funded vouchers for kids to attend private, mostly religious schools that aren’t open to all, as well as publicly funded but privately run charter schools.
“… it siphons off money that is best spent in the public schools, where everyone must be accepted, and stringent accountability measures are in place,” Gernand said. “The same rules do not apply to the charters regarding accountability.”
Members of Gernand’s group invited legislative candidates to meet with them in early summer. “Some of them were very willing to meet with us and hear our concerns,” she said. “Others never bothered to return our phone calls or emails. Scott was one of the people that was contacted by a member of our group.”
Gernand and Judy Valos co-lead the group. Valos’ background includes work as a teacher, principal, and central office administrator in Muncie Community Schools.
(On her personal Facebook page, Valos’ cover photo is an advertisement for Democrat Dave Williams for Delaware County Sheriff, an elected office that she called an important one for school safety).
At the candidate forum at Minnetrista, Gernand and Becki Clock, a former high school economics and history teacher at Muncie Community Schools, asked the questions. Kathy Flatter, a retired elementary teacher from Liberty-Perry Community Schools, was the timer.
Linzi Rogers, a career coach at Ivy Tech Community College, moderated.
“We specifically asked her to do this as someone who is removed from our group and has had no discussions with any of us about the issues at the forum, Gernand said of the moderator. “We wanted a completely neutral party in that position, just as we wanted completely neutral questions.
“We collected our questions by asking members of our group to submit questions for the forum. We did meet ahead of time to review the questions, to make sure there were no duplicates, and that we covered a variety of topics. The questions were kept private from all participants to the forum until they were asked. We also were able to field questions from the audience that night.”
The audience frequently applauded the answers given by the candidates.
Democrat John Bartlett — an Indiana University political science/history graduate, father of four and an IT professional seeking to upset Rep. J.D Prescott, R-Union City — drew applause when he said public schools should provide textbooks and other curricular material at no cost to each student. “We should not be the last (state),” he said. “We’re one of eight (that still charges).”
Bartlett also was applauded when he said all publicly funded schools, including charter, private and home schools, should be subject to the same academic and financial accountability as traditional public schools.
“How we get schools playing by a separate set of rules and still getting public funding is beyond my comprehension,” he said.
At Deerfield Elementary School in Randolph County, a family received state funding to homeschool their children but later “decided they couldn’t deal with homeschooling their kids, so they turned them back to Deerfield Elementary,” Bartlett said, quoting a teacher there. “Do you think that money went back to Deerfield Elementary? Oh no; it stayed with the family. I have no qualms about homeschooling, but if you’re not going to homeschool your kids, you need to give that money back to the school so they can afford to educate those kids.
“And when they don’t have to pass the (student achievement) test — ISTEP or ILEARN, whatever we call it now — and they don’t have to pass those tests, be it a private school, a charter school, or a homeschool — and public schools are held to that standard, how is that equal?”
(Rolland Abraham, superintendent of Randolph Central School Corp., told me in an interview that if the parents of homeschooled children transferred those children to Deerfield after “count day,” or Sept. 16, “then we don’t get any money.” However, there is a second “count day” in February, and if those same children remained enrolled at Deerfield then, “we’d get half the dollars.”
(But Abraham has no idea what that actually happened because the names of the family and the teacher are anonymous. In addition, to his knowledge, homeschooled families “don’t get anything from the state,” Abraham said. State eduction department spokesperson Holly Lawson confirmed that, saying, “While school funding follows the child, the money never flows directly to a family.”)
The audience applauded veteran Rep. Sue Errington, D-Muncie, who is facing a challenge from Republican Dale Basham, a retired Muncie educator, when she said, “For so many years, it’s been a top-down thing with the Legislature telling school personnel, administrators and teachers what they need to do. It hasn’t been a two-way street, listening to what they have to offer. As a result, we find ourselves micromanaging the people who know the most.”
Republicans hold supermajorities in both the Indiana House and the Senate.
House Bill 1134, authored by Rep. Tony Cook R-Cicero — whose district enters Delaware County — and co-authored by Prescott, gained a spotlight at the forum.
The bill, which eventually was defeated, would have restricted what teachers can say about race, history, politics and other topics in Indiana classrooms. On the Senate side, a similar bill provoked national outrage after its author said it would require teachers to remain neutral on subjects including Nazism, Marxism and fascism.
Democrat Brad Sowinski, a youth services librarian at the public library in Alexandria and a 2006 Ball State University graduate, called HB 1134 “one of the most demoralizing” bills aimed at public education in recent memory.
Sowinksi is an underdog who hasn’t raised any funds in his campaign to unseat Rep. Elizabeth Rowray, R-Yorktown. Sowinski said HB 1134 “would have micromanaged educators and censored public schools and public libraries. We need a Legislature that actually listens to teachers, administrators, librarians and counselors. It is my hope that public education not be viewed as some sort of machine of indoctrination.”
The father of two public school children who is happy with their school, Sowinksi went on: “We cannot be frightened to teach the past … We in fact need to find the courage to discuss topics without defining ourselves as left or right or Democrat or Republican. History is not there for us to agree or disagree” but “to document what happened” and add new information for discussion when it’s discovered.
Rowray told me in an interview that she supported HB 1134 largely because the lawmaker who introduced it was Cook, now retired, who spent his career as a teacher, coach, principal and superintendent.
In addition, lawmakers were receiving “a wealth of information about reports coming in regarding inappropriate materials” being used in schools across the state, in violation of Indiana Department of Education rules and regulations, she said. One example she cited was a book containing “a cartoon drawing of a male prone on top of a female in bed,” covered only from the waist down by a blanket. “I don’t know the name, but it was in a K-6 bulding,” Rowray said. She quoted Cook as saying “in no way shape or form” are teachers being restricted if they follow state education-department guidelines.
Another focus of attention at the forum was House Bill 1182, which would have politicized school board elections by requiring candidates to declare their political party affiliation on the ballot. School board races currently are nonpartisan. Prescott, the bill’s author, said at the time that the bill aimed to create more transparency and give voters a better idea of what candidates stand for. The bill did not pass.
Democrats and the Indiana School Boards Association were among opponents of the bill. “It should be a focus on the children, not the (political) party,” Sowinksi said of school board elections, generating applause.
Just because bills like HB 1182 and HB 1134 were not enacted in the last session of the Indiana General Assembly doesn’t mean they won’t come back, Wright said.
“Those bills will be piecemealed out into other bills, which typically happens,” Wright said. “A lot of it is based on the misperception of school indoctrination that just isn’t happening.”
Errington added: “My concern is what new is coming up in addition to what may come back. I keep hearing about education savings accounts, which would be money going to individual parents to use as they see fit for their children’s education.”
In other media:
How Indiana’s curriculum bill about racism motivated a new wave of candidates
Previously, in Greater Muncie:
GOP lawmaker candidates skip debate, BSU moderator takes offense
State GOP aims at teacher Wright in mass mailings
Good reporting, Seth. It would be nice if more of our representatives focused on solutions to all of their constituents’ needs, education being a prime example, and ran for office on the merits of their ideas and ability to implement them. If the new republicans take over completely—run elections the way they think is “right”, for example—your substack will eventually get shut down, so keep up the good work (in retirement).