Ballot is Packed for Evesham Race

By Maya Rao, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Apr. 7–Sue Trimble withdrew all three of her children from the Evesham School District last year.

She sent them to private school after her third grader’s teacher played a controversial video that depicted a variety of families — including those with same-sex parents — and then asked students to discuss their heritage.

Trimble said she worried that her daughter, who was adopted from Guatemala, would get the message she was “from a multicultural adopted family and people need to be taught to tolerate you because of that.”

Now, driven by frustration at how the board handled the video issue, Trimble has become one of 11 candidates for three school board seats in the Evesham district this year — an uncommonly large field in a New Jersey school board race.

“Some school board [elections] go uncontested,” said Trimble, whose children now attend school in Cherry Hill. “Sometimes you have to beg people to get someone to run. Here, people are mad.”

The video, That’s a Family!, which has been used around New Jersey to fulfill a state requirement on diversity education, became a flash point in Evesham in January 2007 for discussions about the roles schools and parents should play in educating children.

Some parents criticized the school board, saying they should have been notified of the material in the video ahead of time. Others simply opposed the material, saying it had no place in an elementary school classroom.

Then the board was criticized for removing the video in February, even after an independent committee and a separate vote by parents favored keeping it. Parents on both sides of the argument howled. The American Civil Liberties Union sued. National media weighed in.

Many candidates agree that, more than a year later, echoes from the video battle have helped drive the unusual degree of interest in running for the school board, which oversees one of the largest K-8 districts in New Jersey.

The New Jersey School Boards Association typically has three candidates for every two seats, spokesman Michael Yaple said. Evesham, which has three seats up each year, has had between four and six candidates for four out of the last five years. Eight people ran in 2006.

Evesham, the largest municipality in Burlington County with a population of almost 50,000, has been the seat of other recent controversies. A tough campaign season last year ended with the ouster of 16-year mayor Gus Tamburro and the end of the GOP’s longtime control over the Township Council, which is nominally nonpartisan. And this year, a controversy over constructing an artificial turf field at Cherokee Regional High School — situated in Evesham, but part of the Lenape Regional High School District — led to protests in February, petitions, and a court ruling.

“There’s been a lot of hype for different reasons over the last year, and I think it’s just caused more people to pay attention,” said candidate Bonnie Olt, who previously served on the school board and recently mounted an unsuccessful bid for Township Council.

Many candidates are making the video fallout part of their campaigns, vowing to have better communication between parents and the district, make decisions and information more transparent, and find new ways to engage parents.

“The communication, the way it was handled, was a big problem,” candidate Ronnie Gilbert said. “Not the actual movie. . . . It was just bumbled from the beginning. It was bad, poor leadership.”

“The majority voted to keep the video intact and to show it, but the school board decided to pull it anyway, and that’s when the ACLU got involved,” candidate Stuart Herold said. “I think it’s a combination of all of those disasters that have sparked this interest in running.”

The video entered discussions at a forum in Marlton Elementary School last week, where candidates in the April 15 election spoke of it both head-on and indirectly.

“Controversy is normal. . . . We need to do it in a rational, articulate way,” candidate Stephanie Rycakzewski said.

Acknowledging the reasons for the large number of candidates, John Hibbs, who is running for the board, said in an interview, “We’ve moved past that now. Why continue to talk about it?”

The school board has come under fire for other issues. Residents have voted down the school budget in three of the last five years, upset over what officials say is the growing tax burden in spite of student enrollment that has held fairly steady at 5,000.

Two years ago, the district administrator charged former board member Sandy Student more than $200 for a public records request. Student is now running for a board seat again.

“There’s a cry for open government,” said Student, who wants to improve the district’s Web site and hold focus groups and conferences for parents. “I felt we never did a good job.”

Board president Rosemary Bernardi, the only incumbent in the field, declined to comment on issues the video raised. The board already has been communicating more with parents, she said, and has changed the focus of its e-newsletter to the school curriculum.

The board also has worked to have a more transparent Web site up within several months, she said, and is reviewing ways to update the district’s policy on how parents handle complaints on school matters.

Deputy Mayor Mike Schmidt, who saw fellow Democrats sweep the longtime GOP-controlled council last year, said the recent controversy over synthetic turf “fell right in line with exactly what happened with the video.”

“I think all of us are challenged to communicate more effectively,” said Schmidt, who was attacked by e-mail and in person over the turf proposal, which a Superior Court judge ruled against last month. That people would be so interested in running for the school board, he said, “tells me whatever’s happening out there, people are starting to take notice.”

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Evesham School Election

For more information, including biographies of the candidates for the Evesham school board, go to www.evesham.k12.nj.us/District_Home/Board%20of%20Education%20Candidates.pdf.

Contact staff writer Maya Rao at 856-779-3220 or mrao@phillynews.com.

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