Well, it’s official. I’m on the board come November. So are Julia Marchant and Eva Vigil. We have one district with no candidate and one with two candidates running. It will be interesting. Why? Because we are in the midst of a TDIP program. That stands for Targeted District Improvement Plan. Also known as haul the district up out of the depths of despair and fix it!
We’ve had a very sports centric board for way too long, and our test scores show it. Now we have to fix things and this new board should be interesting. I’ve been on the board twice before. Julia was a principal for 32 years and Eva was a teacher for about the same length of time. In some ways you could say that the pendulum is about to swing in the other direction. Here’s hoping we can get our act together fast and pull together for the best of the district.
For the last 8? years I have said I would never run for school board again. Our school district has been a part of the Targeted District Improvement Plan for a year and while they have raised 10 points in their ratings, they still have a long way to go. Dan and I have talked about running and neither one of us thought it was a good time to run. Too much going on, etc.
Then we really started talking about it. Dan has too much going on and he said I should think of running. That was at 6pm last night. After the meeting I found out that no one was running in my district. Akkk!!! My civil duty minded brain couldn’t ignore that, so…. I took out a petition. I got home and suddenly worried that I hadn’t updated my voters registration. So, this morning I went to the court house and checked. Everything was in order. So, I was legal. Certifiable probably, but legal.
Dan checked too and he signed my petition. Then we had to give a report on Workforce and Youth council. Then we went down to the office. I got some signatures on my petition and then I went back to the office. Nothing went according to plan today either. sigh…. We finally got off at 6pm. We got paid for a job and we were able to get Bryan some teeshirts for work. He started work at Peakview Elementary this morning. Katie has a job to interview for next week too.
Oh, and the work on the Wendy house and main house is going well. Tomorrow we take a ton of stuff to the dump. Wheee!!!
This has been an interesting election season. Lots of stupid stuff, tons of really heartbreaking moments. Living in Colorado, it has been interesting. There has been a heavy dose of candidate attention especially from the Obama campaign. The picture in the Sunday edition of the Pueblo Chieftain was amazing.
CHIEFTAIN PHOTO/JOHN JAQUES -- Sen. Barack Obama addresses the crowd lining Pueblo
For me, this election was about the local issues as much as the Presidential election. Growing up with Martin Luther King, and in adulthood, Nelson Mandela, I have never been one to let the colour of someone’s skin be an issue. It’s the issues the candidates stand for that are important. I voted for Obama, because I feel he holds a clearer view of what this country needs in the next four years. Something that was made more clear to me as I spoke to Daniel this morning.
I was awoken at 8:45am by Daniel who was on his way to vote for the very first time. He was worried about choices. Obama, McCain, or no one. Should he vote, should he just vote for local issues. As he walked to the poles, we talked. I told him where I stood on local issues. What I was voting for, and who I was voting for. To me, party lines don’t mean much. It is the person who is important.
When he got nearer the poles, he said he understood which issues that hadn’t gotten national coverage were important. He was also still uncertain about who to vote for for President. He’d heard a lot of stuff from friends. Some of it good, some of it bad. Trying to explain dirty campaign tricks over a cell phone is difficult. Daniel is so “in the moment” that he doesn’t see the long view whereby people want to subvert the mind of the voter via misleading adverts and interviews. So, this made it difficult for him to understand what was truth and what was lies. I did my best to clarify some misconceptions. I told him that in the end, it is his choice. We ended the call and I called the high school to let him know that Daniel would be late because he was voting. Gee…. the secretary was fine with that!
About 30 minutes later, he called back. He’d voted for Obama. Not because I wanted him to, or that his grandma who urged him to register to vote wanted him to, but because when he thought about it, Obama was the right man. Obama and his campaign had made enough of an impact on an 18yo who normally thinks no farther than the next day. Gives me hope for a lot of things.
Now of course, we are watching the election information roll in. It’s 9:15pm, and Obama has 306 electoral college votes. What a moment in history.
