Now what’s up with that?
Didn’t anyone check the calendar? This isn’t one of those years when Kansas voters bother to pay attention to who gets on the state Board of Ed, is it?
No. The only time most Kansans give a flying spaghetti monster about the state board is after the social conservatives have fouled things up.
You know, after they’ve built a board majority and used that power to make the entire state of Kansas look like a bunch of nut jobs. By rehashing the evolution thing all over again. By trying to get rid of sex ed. Or hiring someone to run the Education Department who doesn’t believe in public education.
Or giving aid and comfort to the book banners.
The craziness we’ve seen over and over again for the past decade.
But the current board isn’t like that, which is to say the majority is behaving in a sane manner, so why should anybody give the school board races any thought this year?
Simple, said Jack Krebs, president of Kansas Citizens for Science.
“Because the conservatives have led us astray two times when we haven’t been paying attention,” he told me.
Yes, that’s the lesson Kansans keep forgetting. It’s off years like this one that make possible all those embarrassing headlines later on.
It’s in these off years when candidates aligned with the religious right tend to win in the Republican primary because the moderates are napping.
However, don’t count on that happening this year (the napping part, anyway), said Krebs, whose group is co-sponsoring a series of candidate forums along with three other left-leaning groups: the Mainstream Coalition, Kansas Families for Education Foundation and the True Blue Women.
“One of the goals of the forums is to let people know how important this is,” he said.
Five of the board’s 10 seats are up for election and only one of them features an incumbent, Kathy Martin of Clay Center.
She was part of that anti-evolution majority a few years ago. Another member of that faction, Steve Abrams of Arkansas City, is stepping aside to run for the Legislature.
Three board moderates also are moving on.
There are primary races for all five positions, including the District 2 seat that represents northern Johnson County.
Four candidates are seeking the spot held by Republican Sue Gamble, who wants to replace Nick Jordan in the Kansas Senate.
In District 2, independent Steve Roberts and Democrat Sue Storm will face off against whoever wins the Republican nomination, Mary Ca Ralstin or Brandon Kenig.
It’s Ralstin, a longtime PTA official, who has backing from moderate Republicans.
Which makes Kenig the anti-evolution, religious right conservative — or does it? He’s certainly being portrayed that way by the mods, but the 22-year-old Republican committeeman told me that he can’t be easily pigeonholed.
Yes, he leans to the right. And true, he was endorsed by the group most closely aligned with that wing of the state GOP, the Kansas Republican Assembly.
But he did not seek the KRA’s support, he said. Moreover, he believes in evolution and is opposed to teaching creationism or so-called intelligent design theory in science classrooms.
“I have many conservative friends who disagree with me on that,” he said. But he considers issues such as teacher pay to be more important than rekindling the debate over human origins, which jibes with what the other candidates are saying.
In other words, the District 2 school board race could turn out to be a thoughtful but dreadfully dull election.
However, when it comes to the state school board, dull is exactly what you want.
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