Overshadowed by the governor’s race is an important local
Democratic primary: for Rochester School Board. Given the city’s heavy
Democratic voter registration, the winner of the September 12 primary is
virtually certain to win the November 7 general election.
The two Democratic candidates — attorney Van Henry White
and financial manager Allen Williams — are certainly qualified to serve on
the School Board. For non-incumbents, they have a reasonably good grounding in many
of the issues facing the board, and for the most part, they seem to understand
that there are no quick fixes to urban education problems. They both note that
the CitySchool
District can not solve the problems of academic
achievement, dropouts, and school safety by itself. The roots of those problems
lie in the community: in concentrated poverty and related problems.
Community leaders seem to grasp that fact — or at least
pay lip service to it. But little progress has been made on an initiative that
could help address those problems: Superintendent Manny Rivera’s proposed
Children’s Zone.
White and Williams would bring different strengths to the
board. White would probably be the more vocal, and he could be a forceful
spokesperson for the district itself if he didn’t use his position to grandstand
and to be an obstructionist. He has been a harsh critic of the district and of
Rivera, particularly on the issue of school safety, but in his interview with
us, he backed off, saying that he recently sat down and talked with Rivera and
had changed his opinion of him. “I think he’s really trying,” he said. We would
hope that as a board member, he would seek information before he lobbed
charges.
White also wants the district to help pay for
non-educational programs like residential lead inspection, and we think that’s
misguided. But we can picture him becoming a high-profile advocate for greater
community financial support of lead inspection and for the Children’s Zone and
other initiatives that could help counter poverty’s effects on Rochester’s
children.
Williams is the less flashy of the two, but he is no less
passionate about the district and its students. Like many non-incumbents, he
sometimes makes naïve or impractical suggestions. He says Rivera and the School
Board need to set goals for improvement in academic achievement and the
drop-out rate, for instance. They already do that. And in a Monday op-ed piece
in the Democrat and Chronicle, he said that the school board, not the
administration, should handle the bidding, hiring, and oversight of the
district’s big school-modernization project. That is not the board’s job, and
it shouldn’t be. On the whole, though, we’ve been impressed by Williams’
thoughtfulness, maturity, business background, and knowledge, and he would be an
asset on the board.
Traditionally, this newspaper makes endorsements in primaries
as well as in general elections. In this School Board campaign, we can’t find a
reason to favor one candidate over another. Voters probably won’t go wrong
regardless of whom they support.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2006.
