On the cusp of the vote for the Addison Central School District Board, two challengers have announced that they are running against incumbents Victoria Jette, Mary Gill and Jennifer Nuceder. The challengers’ ads claim a platform of “transparency,” but their ads were run with no information on who funded them. These ads make thinly veiled — and unfounded — accusations that the current ACSD school board is unjust, unethical and non-transparent. The fact is that the current board has spent — literally — years on the ACSD School Board carefully studying the issues that the district faces (unlike the challengers), and the board has been entirely reasonable and forthright in all of their deliberations.
No Bloomberg-esque blitz of ads, videos and demonstrations is a substitute for rationality and experience, which are what our current ACSD School Board possesses, and what our district needs — now more than ever.
I hope that the residents of our district can see this coup attempt for what it is: a move by specific groups to attempt to prevent the board from doing what must be done. This push is anything but transparent — it comes from groups that do not represent the whole of our district (despite claiming the domain “We are ACSD”) and would ruin our entire district financially (despite calling their other site “Save Our Schools”).
The stability and experience of our current board are what we need in this time of need, not delaying tactics from those who simply want to disrupt the deliberative process that is taking place to do the best possible for all of our children.
Frank Swenton
Middlebury