I have lost count of how many school board elections I have covered as a reporter. I started in the late 1970s and have watched as a journalist school board elections for Hamilton Southeastern (HSE) School Board since 2012.
I perused with interest two commentaries in a recent edition of the Indianapolis Business Journal’s Forefront opinion publication. It centered on Indiana school board elections.
Most states, 42 to be exact, run their school board elections as nonpartisan. In other words, no political party is attached to any candidate running for a local Indiana school board seat.
Forefront featured two views on the subject. First, State Senator Gary Bryrne, representing a district in southern Indiana, argues Indiana needs to change the law, allowing local school board elections to become partisan, so candidates identify with a political party, as is the case in most other elected offices in the Hoosier state.
Byrne argues that many voters in his district do not even bother to cast a ballot in the local school board elections. He believes school board elections are already partisan and conducting school board elections as partisan is just recognizing that reality.
Terry Spradlin, Executive Director of the Indiana School Boards Association, takes a very different view. His experience tells him most school boards in Indiana do not operate on a political basis.
As a retired federal employee, I know while I was employed as a civil servant, the Hatch Act prevented me from running in a partisan election, but I could have run for school board in Indiana. Also, Spradlin points out any employee of the Indiana court system would be barred from running for a local school board due to the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct.
State lawmakers are once again mulling over a change in state law making our local school board elections partisan. I would hope members of the General Assembly would take into consideration a few thoughts.
Indiana puts school board candidates at the very end of the ballot procedure, so many voters skip it for that reason. It should also be noted that Indiana is one of only six states that continues to allow straight party voting (casting one vote for all candidates of one party). If Indiana did away with that, as most of the nation has, I predict voting in school board elections would rise dramatically.
As someone that has covered plenty of school board election campaigns, I do not find that voters have any trouble understanding what a candidate stands for when making a decision on casting a ballot. Even within the major political parties, I have found dramatic differences in individual candidates’ approaches to an issue like education.
I come down on this with a very simple notion. It’s a saying I heard quite often from relatives in southern Indiana – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”