A huge “Bravo!” goes out to Boys & Girls Club CEO Pam Estes, KXFM General Manager Tyler McCusker and BGC Board Member Jimmy Azadian for hosting the third and final 2020 School Board candidate debate.
How fitting that our wonderful Boys & Girls Club, serving kids from all walks of life, stepped up with community-oriented, locally-owned radio that also serves our youth to host the most well-organized, comprehensive, fair, and transparent School Board debate ever. From the heart, I also want to thank the candidates who put themselves on the front line to make our great schools even better. Having been a candidate, I know it’s hard, but also a civic duty, and we thank you.
Anyone who watched live or sees the video will gain insight on strengths and weakness in an excellent field of candidates. The debate clarified clear choices voters have between governing philosophies and comparative practical knowledge of the candidates.
That’s thanks to positive, honest, unbiased format, and content of the questions BGC gathered from the public, and how those questions were selected and presented. There were no trick questions or surprise tactics we’ve sometimes seen in past school board debates.
Lamentably, in 2016 the League of Women Voters debate allowed an ostensibly neutral moderator to ambush targeted candidates with an old political rally gimmick ritualistically favoring some candidates in order to disqualify un-favored candidates. If LWV, an organization I have worked with here in town since 1968, gets involved in future debates, I hope it will study how BGC and KXFM produced this year’s debate.
As a Thurston Middle School student with too much free time on my hands, I found my way to the old Main Beach facility that was predecessor to our beautiful BGC in Laguna Canyon. I found classmates, younger and older kids, made friends, played sports, listened to the Temptations and Beatles. It was what we refer today as safe socialization.
We made a lot fewer bad choices and got into a lot less trouble than kids in town who found less positive ways to spend free time. This week’s debate reminded me how grateful we should be to Jimmy Azadian and so many others who make BGC an irreplaceable civic asset without which we would be tragically diminished as a community.
Howard Hills, Laguna Beach
