Editor,

Ms. Manning-Davis, one of the candidates running for school board, says she “is about engaging with the community ….” I find myself being suspect of her claim.

She has quoted figures from the state’s educational “report card” for our district: 63% for English, 46% for math, 58% for science. What she’s fails to mention is that our district is 11 percentage points above the state average – which paints a very different picture of our schools and our current board.

I’ve visited all three of the challengers’ Facebook pages and have asked them important, challenging questions. Most of these have gone unanswered. Further, I can not longer get to their FB pages, either because they’ve been taken down, or because I (and perhaps others) have been banned by the candidates, simply because we have asked them questions and expect real – non-political – answers.

Before this “change” I did pose questions to another challenger Ms. Bree Kramer-Nelson. She acknowledged the challenges facing our schools, including changing demographics (an increasingly aging population, which has been happening for 20 years), and very big changes in our economy. These larger trends are not the fault of our school board — nor do they have control over them.

Still, Ms. Kramer-Nelson side-steps these facts and instead talks about a “magnet school” without telling us what this really means, or how she intends to achieve it.

For people running for three separate, non-partisan positions, Ms. Manning-Davis, Ms. Bree Kramer-Nelson, and Ms. Tarantino are all acting like politicians running for office. And all of us know how evasive and full of false promises politicians can be.

David Freed

Clinton