Rochester School Board Election

The League of Women Voters promoted a candidate forum among the Minnesota House and Senate Candidates in the area on November 25 at the Heintz Center.

During a break between debates in the commons area, I decided to make my way to the other room where debates were being conducted when I heard someone call may name. It was DFL activist and school board candidate Gary Mullen-Schultz. He introduced himself and proceeded to tell me that he knew I didn't like him very much. You see, we had sparred online regarding the left-leaning content of his columns when he used write to the Rochester Post-Bulletin. Apparently liberals take dissent as a personal affront, not as honest disagreement. It would seem that they don't think their viewpoint should be challenged. They are "right," after all.

I tried to tell Mr. Mullen-Schultz that my disagreement with him was ideological, not personal. He wouldn't have it. He said I had been "rude" to him online. I replied I could have said the same about him but wouldn't. Then I excused myself and walked away.

Mullen-Schultz, along with Sandra Soltis, must not be elected to the school board. They are a threat to taxes and education. They are the latest products of a certain "social concerns committee" in town. They are the same folks who gave us Sheila Kiscaden, Ann Lynch and Kim Norton. DFL activists see the school board as nothing more than a stepping stone for their own to be elected to higher office.

Soltis is a professional bureaucrat. She promotes her experience in education administration as an asset but it is actually detrimental. If elected, she will become an advocate of the interests of the bureaucracy not the students. Moreover, she denies that she is a product of the "social concerns committee" as per a conversation that we had on the phone about a month ago.

Parenthetically, I know very little about Larry Gifford, but his brochure has enough mispelled words in it to tell me that perhaps he should go back to school instead of joining the school board.

Let's reelect Fred Daly and elect Dan O'Neil and Diane Hermann-Blakley to the school board so as to keep it from becoming a lab for the failed liberal ideas of the DFL.

Daly is a decent man who has been a champion of the interests of fiscally conservative residents of the Rochester school district.

I have interviewed Dan O'Neil and found him to be honest and straightforward in his answers. He supports choice schools, particularly core knowledge. One of his children attends Washington Elementary, where two of my children are students as well.

Diane Hermann-Blakley is a small business owner who has the business common sense the current school board sorely lacks.