Thursday, November 17, 2011
[Updated] Tedesco vs. Glazier for DPI Super? We can sell tickets.
- photo by Jeremy M. Lange
- John Tedesco strikes an upward gaze.
Glazier versus Tedesco? Articulate supporter of public schools versus voluble tea-party critic of same? Save me a seat for that one.
[Update, 11/17: WRAL checks in with JT. He's mulling ... and now comes the N&O with same.]
I saw Tedesco the other day at the Wake schools magnet fair in Raleigh. He didn't mention a DPI candidacy. (He has been speaking to conservative audiences all over NC.)
He did, however, say that he's getting married soon, to a woman with a son, and was at the magnet fair not simply in his capacity as a school board member but in his prospective parental capacity also. John took some heat for using family-style pictures in his '09 campaign, including one with a child on his shoulder, even though he was single. Now he'll be a family man, he said. He was beaming.
Combined with the four wins by Democrats in October, Hill's victory makes the 5-4 Republican school board majority go away as of the first week in December. The new board will have the five Democrats elected this year and the four Republicans, including Tedesco, who were elected in '09.
Another of the Republican members, Chris Malone, has already announced his candidacy for a state House of Representatives seat in the 2012 elections.
I would think Malone will be under some pressure to resign from the board once he becomes an active candidate for the legislature. Ditto Tedesco if he launches a statewide run. They wouldn't be required to step down, but the time demands of campaigning would seem to favor it. They would be required to do so if they won.
Should they leave the board, their replacements would be picked by the remaining board members, i.e., by a board dominated by Democrats. Thus, a 5-4 Democratic majority could soon become 6-3 or 7-2 ... but in any event, the Republicans will be in the minority through 2015 at least.
Malone's replacement in District 1 might well be Rita Rakestraw, a Knightdale Democrat who ran for the seat against him. In District 2, Tedesco ousted Horace Tart, a Republican who ran with Democratic backing. Not sure Tart would be picked — he might be — but the Democrats might well want to name a moderate Republican like Tart as a gesture to the good ol' days of bipartisan, or nonpartisan, school boards.
Comments (2)
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Jeff -- i take your point. I would say, however, that the politics of running for DPI Superintendent are amped up about 1,000 percent since 2004. We could check with Bill Fletcher to see how much time he spent campaigning around the state and how many Board of Education meetings he missed back then as a result. I suspect the numbers would pale in comparison to how much time JT would spend on the road.
Remember, too, that public board sessions are only part of a Wake board member's duties. Committee meetings, meetings in their districts with their own district advisory committees and with 15-20 school committees each, special panels to hear transfer requests and appeals from disciplinary decisions (literally thousands of both) -- being a board member takes an enormous amount of time.
I'm not saying JT wouldn't be able to keep up -- we'll know when and if he runs.
As for Chris, he has a full-time job in addition to his Board seat and a legislative campaign. Again, if he can juggle all three, fine. (Or juggle all four, if you count having a life.) But running for the legislature these days, at least in a competitive district, is also a much bigger time-burner than it was even just a few years ago.
I'm not demanding that JT and Chris relinquish their board seats if they run for other offices. I am saying that if running prevents them from carrying out their duties on the board, they should relinquish their seats, and I would expect that they would.
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Bill Fletcher ran for the the state superintendent in 2004 while he was a member of the Wake County Board of Education. There was no pressure on Fletcher back then to give up his seat on the BOE (and he did not), so why should there be any pressure on Tedesco to give up his seat if he decides to run? And if Fletcher can run a statewide campaign without giving up his seat, surely Malone can run a local one without having to give up his seat.
Or is it because Bill Fletcher was a strong supporter of the diversity policy and regularly voted to reassign students from one school to another in order to balance diversity, something Tedesco and Malone strongly oppose.
You've complained about partisanship on the Wake BOE for the past two years, and now you want to promote more partisanship by suggesting that a couple of R's give up their seats early.
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