by
Chris Busby
At
least three Democratic candidates for seats on the Rochester City School Board will
continue their campaigns, despite failing to get the party’s endorsement at its
May 17 convention. Howard Eagle, Jim Greco, and Woody Hammond say they’ll
gather petition signatures to force a primary this September, in hopes of
running on the party’s line in November.
Domingo Garcia, head of the Ibero
Investors Corp., is still pondering a primary campaign. Garcia also failed to
get the party’s nod, despite having received the support of former board
president Joanne Giuffrida when she dropped out of the race to take a
high-level job with the district.
Eagle, Greco, and Hammond all have
similar complaints about the party’s endorsement process. They charge that it
is corrupted by political cronyism and heavy-handed tactics on the part of
party big-wigs like state Assemblyman David Gantt and Mayor Bill Johnson, the
party’s candidate for county executive this year.
This political arm-twisting, they
say, keeps qualified candidates off the ballot in favor of those with political
connections — connections which ultimately compromise a board member’s
ability to work in the best interests of the district.
“People begin to buy favors at some
point in time, and I understand that,” says Hammond, a first-time candidate.
“But the only thing I want these folk to do is to buy favors for children, for
parents. Don’t buy favors for the political posturing, because that gets us the
same kind of condition our school board is in now.”
Though they went through the lengthy
process of meeting with party committees this spring in order to secure the
right to address the convention, none of the three say they expected to get the
party’s nod.
Greco, a self-described “education
activist,” and Eagle, a social activist who teaches social studies in the
district, have both been vocal critics of the current board, which is comprised
entirely of Democrats. Given that, the party’s unwillingness to endorse them
may be more understandable than its rejection of Garcia or Hammond.
Hammond has over three decades of
experience in the district as a teacher, administrator, and grant writer, but
considerably less experience with local politics. And so far as the top members
of the county’s Donkey Party are concerned, political experience can be just as
important as educational experience when it comes to serving city school
children.
“To have never been a political
person before, as I have not been, you have these grandiose ideas that
everything on the up-and-up and fair, and that people are really gonna look at
your talents and ability and vote their conscience,” Hammond says of the
endorsement process. “That is not the case in this process… There are several
folk who have decided that they are going to try to gain and maintain control,
and they do it.”
County
party chair Molly Clifford says the Dems’ endorsement process is obviously
politicized, because it’s “political by its nature.”
“However,” she adds, “it is an open
process. We have committee people who vote on who they want their candidates to
be, and that’s what happens.”
Clifford takes offense at the notion
that Gantt or Johnson have undue influence over the party’s picks. “I think
it’s a little insulting to the members of the Democratic Committee that they’re
seen as so malleable,” she says. “These are all people who are interested in
the Democratic Party and the democratic process.
“We have people who are part of the
Democratic Party on all ends of the spectrum,” she says. “Some people may look
to David Gantt to give them advice on who to vote for, but many do not. So I
don’t think that that’s a part of it.”
However, Hammond’s lack of previous
involvement with the party does matter.
“I think that, perhaps, Woody is a
new person to the Democratic Party,” Clifford says. “He’s not new to the school
board or the school district, but he was not known by members of the Democratic
Party, and that makes it harder when you’re seeking office.”
The school
board’s efforts to fill Giuffrida’s seat this summer will provide the public
with a potentially ugly view of the way politics influences education in
Rochester.
As City reported last week (“Filling Giuffrida’s sneakers,” May 21,
2003), state education law gives the board 30 days following a vacancy to
nominate and approve, by majority vote, an interim member, who’ll serve through
the rest of the year. If the board does not approve someone after 30 days,
state law stipulates that the board president — in this case, Shirley
Thompson, who’s running for re-election this year — may appoint a
replacement.
But as board member Darryl Porter
points out, when the board voted to change its bylaws last winter, it stripped
the board presidency of much of its power. “They keep forgetting they put that
in,” Porter says of Rob Brown, Thompson, and other board members who supported
the change (Porter opposed it). As a result, Porter says any replacement would
have to be approved by a majority vote, even after 30 days.
Brown says he’s unsure whether the
board’s bylaws supercede state education law in this case. Michael Looby, the
board’s legal counsel, was also unsure which law would take precedence, but he
expects the board will ask him to look into the issue soon. Thompson says it’s
her opinion that the president should retain the power to appoint a
replacement, but says Looby will ultimately make the decision.
Porter says he intends to nominate
Hammond for the interim seat, but he doesn’t expect the veteran educator and
administrator to be approved. “If you were looking at somebody who could hit
the ground running, who you don’t have to sit there and baby-sit, [Hammond] is
more than qualified for that position,” Porter says. “But I can almost
guarantee that they won’t support him. It’s the political season now, so they’d
rather play politics than do the right thing.”
Brown says that since state law
mandates that the interim position be filled by someone of the same party as
the departing member, “presumably, there must be some interest in having the
party’s wishes performed, and it’s clear who the top four [candidates] were.”
Thompson, former board member Willa Powell, youth activist Malik Evans, and
David Perez got the party’s endorsement this year.
Asked what he knows of Hammond’s
qualifications to serve on the board, Brown said, “I know he didn’t do very
well at the convention.”
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2003.
