Frederick County BOE Candidates Form No Slate Slate

By Eric Beasley

You may remember a show called Home Improvement from many years ago. You may remember an episode where Jill tries to explain to Tim that they are going to a “no dinner dinner,” it’s like a dinner party but there’s no dinner. Since logically this makes absolutely no sense, a few rounds of typical Tim Allen/Patricia Richardson dialogue ensues and neither party is closer at reaching an understanding. It seems that some of our local candidates have undertaken a similar logical fallacy, in the Board of Education race.

Before I begin, some disclosures: The Rose family are friends of mine. They are letting me borrow an old lawn mower for the fall because mine somehow caught itself on fire. Literally. 

Today in the Frederick News-Post, Bunitsky, Schaefer, and Kerr stated that they are running a slate-but-not-a-slate and are not actually running a campaign on their ideas. This team of 3 has one single goal in mind, stop Cindy Rose.

This slate-but-not-a-slate has some interesting characters on it. I believe that a slate should be judged as a whole. If you are willing to put your name next to someone else’s on campaign material, you are fully supporting and endorsing their views. Given that, this slate seems to be for tax increases, PARCC testing, and Common Core.

Below is a video of Mike Bunitsky requesting a tax increase from the Frederick County Council:

Candidate Joy Schaefer’s love for PARCC testing and Common Core has already been covered on this blog, back when she was endorsed by Delegate Kathy Afzali. As of writing this initial article, no threatening texts have been received by the writer of this or previous articles.

Now, let’s get to the new stuff. The trio was quoted by the Frederick News-Post as saying they are running a “collaborative campaign” in which they are hosting joint fundraisers, pooling donations for campaign activity, and engaging in campaign activity together. You are not fooling anyone. You are a campaign slate, by every legal definition of “campaign slate.”

On to the good part. According to the same FNP article, Candidate Ken Kerr stated “his campaign with Schaefer and Bunitsky did not mean to block Rose from the seat, only to ensure that the three were elected.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is political Newspeak. The only way to ensure that these three candidate are elected is by blocking Rose being elected. Kerr is engaged in the positive side of a “glass half empty or full” debate. The end goal of this slate is for Bunitsky, Schaefer, and Kerr to be elected.

Glass half-full approach – “We all 3 want to be elected”
Glass half-empty approach – “We want to stop Cindy Rose”

You might think I am reading too much into this. It was a simple change of phrasing, logically valid just sending a positive instead of negative message. To see the true intention, we have to go back down memory lane and discuss the two BoE candidates that have dropped out, Lois Jarman and Shirley McDonald.

Dr. Lois Jarman, former candidate for Board of Education, was quoted as saying that Cindy Rose is a “dangerous” candidate and was dropping out to stop her from being elected.

One day later, Shirley McDonald, former candidate for Board of Education, also formally dropped out of the race and threw her support behind Bunitsky, Schaefer, and Kerr.

There is a pattern here. Whether it’s the candidates, internet bloggers that are too cowardly to put their name behind their work, or the Democrat Central Committee, there is a concerted effort to stop one candidate who is challenging the status quo in education.

Frankly, I am glad that someone is finally trying to make some changes to our schooling system. It’s been broken since before I started public school. Back in California, our standardized tests were a joke. The curriculum was a joke. I learned more from watching the Discovery channel than I ever did in a classroom. The contributions my teachers made to my personal growth were not intellectual but moralistic. My basketball coach Mr. Lundquist, my science teacher Mrs. Felt, and my drama teacher Mrs. Harrell. I would be remiss to not mention the worst teacher I ever had, a man-hating feminist English teacher that literally refused to give any boys an “A” on any assignment to make up for patriarchal oppression. When my parents complained, the Teacher’s Union stepped in and protected this teacher’s sexist grading scheme.

We’ve been trying to same old remedies in education for 50 years and we have fallen behind. Let’s try something new, and that something new would be someone like Cindy Rose.