My wrap-up on the 2024 school-board election, starting from a small note from Florida with a big tie-in to Caledonia. It’s all about this question: should school-board elections be partisan or nonpartisan?
Education won a small victory in Florida, where education very much needs some victories: voters rejected an initiative to make school board elections (openly and officially) partisan. Read the screenshot.
Here in the Caledonia Community Schools district, the big push to make school-board elections partisan has come from State Representative Angela Rigas. Rigas is not educated beyond high school, does not understand education, has no more competence in the administration of a school district than she has shown for statewide governance (which is zero, for those who are unaware of her spectacular lack of achievements, or even meaningful participation, in the state legislature), doesn’t understand what books are for, and presents a false image of herself as a moral hero in order to con voters who support traditional morals. (On the two latter points, see https://verbasparsa.org/2024/10/26/always-running-sex-integrity-and-caledonia-community-schools/.)
And yet in 2022, Rigas appointed herself as kingmaker (well, trusteemaker, but that’s not a word) in school districts that fall within the 79th MI legislative district, including Caledonia, Thornapple-Kellogg, Byron Center, and Lowell. Based on her notoriety as a scofflaw and ill-informed complainer with regard to COVID restrictions; her absolute and loud fidelity to Donald Trump; her comprehensive, unreasoning opposition to even the sanest, mildest, and most popular regulations aimed at reducing gun crimes; and her movement’s vicious slanders against the most vulnerable of students (those struggling with gender identity or identifying as gay, bi, or trans), Rigas quickly built up a following.
And in 2022 she sponsored an openly partisan-political slate of three candidates for three openings on the Cal school board. Alarmed to see this happening, various individuals and informal groups scrambled to put up an opposing nonpartisan slate. (Yes, I’m aware of the problem of putting “opposing” and “nonpartisan” in the same description: that was the bind we were in.) On the opposing slate, one person was a Republican (Eric Van Gessel), one was a Democrat (that was me: an independent my whole pre-Trump life, Democratic in response to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party), and one who preferred not to be identified as either (Mary Ann Timmer, who had previously served on school board).
Rigas’s partisan slate was well organized and well funded, operating with support from billionaire-backed outside-of-Caledonia interest groups; the whole district was flooded with their lawn signs. Our nonpartisan slate had no PAC backing and was overwhelmed in the lawn-sign contest. We received moral support and some help in canvassing from some members of the small local Democratic club, and on that thin basis were falsely tagged as a Democratic slate, but we had no official support, and no financial support, from any Democratic Party organization or PAC. In the election, the Rigas crew won a clean sweep.
(For my archives from the 2022 election, see https://verbasparsa.org/category/ernest-for-caledonia-community-schools-2022/. For an overlapping archive of my posts regarding Caledonia Comunity Schools, see https://verbasparsa.org/category/caledonia-community-schools/.)
In 2024, Angela Rigas attempted to repeat her 2022 triumph by recruiting two candidates to run using the same PAC-funded lawn-sign strategy that worked so well in 2022. This time, her two candidates for two open seats were Jessica Kohn and Earlina Velting. But there were significant differences this year.
1. In 2022, the one incumbent who ran for reelection, Tim Morris, chose to identify with the Trump-Rigas partisan campaign. That decision paid off for him. In 2024, the one incumbent who ran for reelection, Marcy White, emphatically insisted on being left out of any partisan effort or group effort. She expressed little interest in waging any sort of political campaign for reelection. She preferred to run simply on her record, which was absolutely stellar. I don’t know how many years Marcy served as board president. She was unanimously reelected to that role in January 2023 by the new board that consisted of three Rigas partisans and four nonpartisan members. When she finally agreed to stand for reelection, people like me were overjoyed—but were not able to do much to support her candidacy because she didn’t want to mount a political campaign and didn’t want to be identified with either side in our local Rigas-induced culture war. She lost.
2. There was no opposing slate of candidates. Marcy ran simply on her own record, as stated above. No one ran as an anti-Rigas candidate. The other incumbent, Jason Saidoo—who, like Marcy, had been an outstanding, always-well-prepared, always competent trustee—was targeted for hate by members of the Trump-Rigas public, who also attacked his family members. Whether for that reason or for other reasons of his own, he decided not to run for reelection, so the second open seat this year had no incumbent candidate. But the network associated with the three opposition candidates in 2022 did not find and support any candidates this time.
3. Here things get even more interesting. In addition to the two Trump-Rigas candidates, another candidate registered: Shawn Collins. To all appearances, Shawn is conservative and Republican. Perceiving that he was a conservative, Rigas approached him to urge him to stand down, leaving the field clear for her slate of two; but having no interest in playing Rigas’s partisan-politics game with the school board, Collins rebuffed her and continued his candidacy. (This according to a confidential source that I will not disclose—not Shawn, with whom I have not spoken, but someone else whose veracity I trust.) The anti-partisan network (friends of mine from the 2022 effort), seeing Shawn as conservative but nonpartisan, thought he was kind of perfect for this district; so I endorsed him on this page. I don’t know what positions he might take on some issues that are important to me, but by all accounts he is an intelligent, reasonable, and benevolent person, and that’s all good.
4. In the 2022 campaign, the three Rigas candidates said essentially nothing during the campaign. It was all lawn signs and dog whistles related to fake issues. If you were to find the archived versions of their campaign websites, you would find very little text, and nothing in that scarce text to indicate any familiarity with real issues or any serious thought about how to address them. This year Jessica Kohn’s campaign website was different. It did contain the one huge, central dog whistle of this stupid era in school-board wranglings: “Parental Rights.” (See https://verbasparsa.org/2024/10/06/again-with-parental-rights-the-return-of-a-dog-whistle/.) But there were words, even paragraphs, on other issues, and they were coherent. Some of it looks wrong-headed, but it made me think: this person might be interesting to try to work with. I noted, for example, her mention of the need to improve the district’s treatment of special-needs children. This is a genuine weakness and need.
5. And, finally, this huge difference: the outcome. This time the Rigas slate did not win everything. The top vote-getter was Jessica Kohn, but I’m not sure how much of that was due to Rigas’s influence; Jessica herself appears to be well-known and well-liked. But the second highest number of votes went to Shawn Collins! Now, it is a travesty and tragedy of the highest order that Marcy White, possibly the best trustee and president the Cal school board has ever had, was not reelected. But in the current climate, it can only be seen as a noteworthy upset that Team Rigas did not win the day. This may be in part because the district is tiring of Rigas’s nonsense, and partly because in the closing days of the campaign Earlina Velting chose to launch a mean, stupid, and false sign-stealing accusation against Terry Gates. Terry, a local Democrat who was putting up signs for Kamala Harris, was asked by someone who asked for a Harris sign to remove a Velting sign that had been placed on his property without his consent. (It was, by the way, one of scores or hundreds of Kohn and Velting signs that were illegally placed.) On the property owner’s request, Terry returned the illegally placed sign to his neighbor Earlina—only to have her privately and then publicly threaten criminal prosecution. But Terry is well-known and well-loved throughout the community, and is known to be eminently fair and honest, and no one who knows him was going to believe that he was out stealing signs. So I think that may have backfired on her. And apart from that, I’m not aware of anything she said or did in the campaign to make anyone think she belonged on school board. In one interview, she embarrassed herself by suggesting that the district should hire the interim superintendant on a permanent basis—which the district had already done seven months earlier!
What is my point in all this? That this year’s school board election results give us reason to hope that the Rigas spell is, if not completely broken, at least weakening, and that Caledonians may be headed in the direction of returning to the days when school board elections were nonpartisan and we elected trustees who represent the community’s values and offer evidence of competence to serve rather than candidates who push the right partisan hate-and-fear buttons.
In closing: my congratulations to Shawn Collins and Jessica Kohn on their election. And my deep appreciation and thanks to Marcy White and Jason Saidoo; I hope, for the good of the district, that we have not seen the last of either of you. Also, to the returning members of the Caledonia school board, and to the district’s administrators, teachers, and staff: my fervent best wishes for a new year in which good-hearted people with the interests of our students foremost in their minds will work together, listening carefully to parents, students, and teachers with real concerns; taking serious disagreements seriously; resolutely dismissing frivolous and unreal distractions and provocations; and working though to solid consensus on every issue that they are responsible for overseeing. To Angela Rigas and her partisan camp followers: please just stay away—no more abusing school board meetings with your disingenuous partisan grandstanding and meddling. To all: be serious, and be good. That’s what we need from you.
Verba Sparsa 