Posted on 11/08/2005 11:05:11 PM PST by jennyp
Dover CARES swept the race for school board Tuesday defeating board members who supported the curriculum change being challenged in federal court.
After months of fierce campaigning that included some mudslinging from both sides, new members of the board are Bernadette Reinking, Rob McIlvaine, Bryan Rehm, Terry Emig, Patricia Dapp, Judy McIlvaine, Larry Gurreri and Phil Herman.
The challengers defeated James Cashman, Alan Bonsell, Sherrie Leber, Ed Rowand, Eric Riddle, Ron Short, Sheila Harkins and Dave Napierskie. Results are not official until certified by the county.
“We’re still in shock because we were expecting to have some wins,” said Dapp, who won a two-year term. “We weren’t expecting to have all eight.”
Dapp said “we recognized very quickly that we were a very cohesive, well-working team. I think that is one of our many strengths of what we will bring to the board.”
Candidates weigh in
Board members Bonsell and Harkins, who had voted in favor of adding intelligent design into the ninth grade science curriculum, received the least amount of votes, with 2,469 and 2,466, respectively. Bonsell and Harkins did not return phone calls about the results Tuesday.
Reinking, who was running for a four-year term, received the most overall votes with 2,754.
“It’s a nice thing,” she said. “I’m very flattered and very humble about the whole thing.”
During the campaign, the eight Dover CARES candidates had questioned the incumbents’ truthfulness and fiscal responsibility, while the eight incumbents touted their achievements in keeping taxes in line and the ability to provide quality education.
Cashman, who was running for a four-year term, had said during the day Tuesday that “I expect to win, but it’s not a big celebratory thing.”
About the loss, Cashman said, “We put our effort into this and we tried to manage the school district as conservatively as we could. I have nothing to be ashamed about.”
Rehm said he believed the voters responded because of the challengers’ combined efforts. It wasn’t one thing. They went door-to-door, held public meetings and didn’t exclude anyone, said Rehm, who won a four-year seat.
A major topic in this year’s race was the 2004 curriculum change that added a statement about intelligent design to the ninth-grade science curriculum.
The elected board members oppose mentioning intelligent design in science class. Rehm was one of 11 parents who sued the board in U.S. Middle District Court. The trial concluded Friday and Judge John E. Jones III hopes to have a decision before the year’s end.
Effects on ID Case
Regardless of the election results, those six weeks of the trial have not been lost, according to attorneys on both sides.
“The suit goes on,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Steve Harvey of Pepper Hamilton. “The mere election of a new board does not change anything.”
Harvey and defense attorney Richard Thompson of Thomas More Law Center said Jones has a set of facts to use to determine his ruling.
Harvey said he did not want to speculate on the fallout of what the new board might do. Thompson gave several scenarios.
The new board could change the policy and determine how it will handle legal appeals. It could keep Thomas More or choose another firm if it wishes to continue the case to keep intelligent design in the curriculum.
If the judge rules against the board, Thompson said, the new board could decide not to fight and could therefore be stuck with the plaintiffs’ legal fees, as requested in the suit.
“What is done is done,” Reinking said about the court proceeding, “but to take it to the Supreme Court? To me that won’t be an issue.”
ACLU attorney Witold Walczak said if the board abandons the intelligent design statement, the plaintiffs want a court order stating the new board won’t re-institute it.
“It actually is a way to conclude the litigation,” Walczak said. “The parties sign essentially a contract that says they will stop the unconstitutional conduct.”
Outside ID
Though intelligent design has captured international attention, it was not the only issue in the election.
For example, Dapp said looking at the district budget is one of the new board’s first challenges.
Property taxes, fiscal responsibility, a teachers contract and full disclosure of board members’ actions arose during the campaign.
Roughly 200 teachers attended the board meeting Monday night to show their support for a new contract. Their old contract expired in June.
Sandi Bowser, president of the teachers union who lives outside of the district and didn’t vote for board members, said the union didn’t officially support one group, but the teachers who have been vocal supported Dover CARES.
“I think that the people who are working with Dover CARES have children in the district and are concerned about some of the things that are going on including intelligent design in the science classroom,” she said.
That doesn't even bother me. It only bothers me when people try to classify the supernatural as science. I don't have any problem with creationists who are willing to admit the science isn't on their side (I've been good friends with a few who fall under this category, one of whom was a very competent physicist). I'll concede to any creationist right away that I can't prove the earth wasn't created 6000 years ago with the appearance of billions of years of age & evolution...
Festival of Sore Losers....
Try reading about science from sources other than Jack Chick.
There is absolutely no doubt the Dover School Board was trying to impose a sectarian religious biology curriculum. This was abundantly clear in court testimony; it's not in the least nebulous. The Bill of Rights exists to protect us from governmental overreaching, and a school board is just as capable of overreaching as the US Government is. And, whether you like it or not, the federal courts are the body ordained by the Constitution to enforce the Bill of Rights.
Edited for irony.
:-} Right Professor, whatever you say, you after all are the Professor.
Give me a break.
Yes and no..The incumbent candidates were of course "Christians" and mostly "political virgins"..they didn't want to get down and dirty on this..radio ads ran for three days before the election that mentioned the 19 percent pay raise..the news media ran a front-page Sunday spread that mentioned it even before the radio ads..there was a spy in the incumbents camp reporting back to Dover CARES and I think that led to the news story where a union rep tried to rationalize the demand as a "starting point."
The Monday night rally was driven in part by Dover CARES fears about the issue. The issue that was at least partially mentioned in the literature that the incumbents put out at the last minute...Ronald Reagan once said that politics is like "seeing the world with its pants down."...that's something that was hard for some of these Christian people to understand. This 19 percent pay raise could have won it for them because the anger of the voters in PA yesterday was driven by the 16 to 54 percent pay raises given legislators and legislative leaders, judges and the governor's staff in a middle of the night vote last July by our legislature. Two
Supreme Court Justices were up for retention. Democrat Nigro was voted out by a 30-thousand margin statewide. Republican Newman survived by 100-thousand votes because of Tom Ridge phone calls that went out Monday. The margin against the judges was 2-1 in the Dover area yesterday. The legislature is desperately trying to repeal the raise now before they face the wrath of the voters next year. But back on Dover they should have shoved this 19 percent pay raise in the voters face yesterday and they would have gotten the 100 or less votes they needed to win.
That is the nut of it. The tree created with tree rings.
Of course that's Last Thursdayism, but I have no problem with people who want to believe, provided they accept that tree rings tell us something important about how things work.
*** DING DING DING *** No more calls; we have a winner!
Similarly all states disestablished prior to 14th Amendment incorporation doctrine but now we are left with a 14th Amendment and substantive due process doctrine that activist judges love more than life itself. And the "limited government" folks continue to whistle and build the bridge.
Gotta go now.
That's like saying it wasn't presenting crude forgeries as historical documents that got Mary Mapes fired, but rather [rimshot] her political bias. The two aren't really separable -- anyone without her political bias would find the TANG memos about as credible as an attempt to pass off Plan Nine From Outer Space clips as genuine UFO photographs.
Republicans deserve to get their butts kicked when they embrace garbage like ID as "science". They're just as nutty as Democrats who want to introduce condoms in the first grade.
I agree with your post! These people should ought to have known better and deserve to be given the boot.
Such an extreme demand should have finished the liberal-Democrat-teacher's union candidate. The fact that it didn't shows just how heavily the ID pseudo-science albatross hung around the incumbents' necks.
The incumbents may not have understood, but it appears the voters did.
These so-called Christians and political virgins engaged in an under-the-table scheme to wedge creationism into public school science classes, then committed perjury in an effort to cover it up.
Several readers are worried (and a few gleeful) that I may be suffering from schizophrenia. On the one hand, here I am flailing away at the Intelligent Design people on NRO & by implication lining up with the ACLU meanies in the Dover trial. Meanwhile I'm getting beaten up by the academic lefties for my NRODT article--for having the temerity to suggest that human evolution is still going on.
I have LOTS to say about all this & have just agreed to do a Q&A for a conservative science website. I'll post a link to that when it goes up.
In very brief: Yes, I think science is under attack from both Left and Right. I also believe that the attack from the Left is a MUCH bigger threat--better armed, more ferocious, and international. One of the things that annoys me about the Intelligent Design people, in fact, is that they are distracting conservative scientists from the real fight, obliging them to squander their energy, while intellectual Left-fascists like the editorial writer of Science Week hold the high ground.
There is a conservative case for science, and I intend to go on making it. Intelligent Design is not a part of that case. The entire net effect of the I.D. movement is to make it harder for scientists to take conservatism seriously. These latter-day William Jennings Bryans (and that, by the way, was a man who would have socked you on the jaw if you called him a conservative) are doing nothing for conservatism.
LOL! I love how scientific-illiterates can call ID "garbage," when there are Ph.D-level working scientists who *do* consider it science.
In order to win elections the coalition includes both humanists and Christians, not to mention Jews, Buddhists
and others (I noticed that Muslims showed up to protest gay
marriage when Newsome did his thing in San Francisco. The
gays didn't even bash up their protest, they must have been
in shock). So you better get used to it or you better get used to losing elections and freedom in this country.
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