—By Mark Swensen
On Behalf of Joy Renner and myself we would like to offer our congratulations to Christine Napolitano and Brian Widman on their election to the Mineola School Board. We hope they will work hard for the children and taxpayers of the district by asking tough questions and holding the administration accountable for policy and expenditures.
To all of our supporters, we wish to thank each and every one of you. Your words of encouragement and support through this process were a huge help to us.
We are proud to say we ran a clean and civil campaign based on facts and issues. Many of the issues came directly from the voters during countless small group meetings and campaigning neighborhood to neighborhood. To those of our supporters that were subjected to unprofessional social media comments by sitting members of our school board, we want to apologize. We are embarrassed that some of our board members thought it was OK to act in that manner.
We hope Mrs. Napolitano and Mr. Widman will join us in admonishing those board members for their behavior. It is never OK to attack a voter for their beliefs.
During our campaign we asked many questions. We asked about district hiring practices, unspent budget funds, lack of a full time drug and alcohol counselor, poorly executed technology rollouts and failure to provide parents information in a timely manner. These are questions that our new board will need to ask and answer.
Joy and I will continue to hold our school board and administration accountable for the actions they take with our children and tax dollars. We ask that you join us in doing so. We have both made many new friends during this campaign. These new friendships serve to make us a tighter community and for that we are ultimately thankful.
