The League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork will host a forum on school boards and how to get involved next Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at LTV Studios in Wainscott.
A panel will discuss “School Boards, the Training Wheels of Democracy: What You Should Know and How to Get Involved.” During a time of divisive national politics, school boards do more than serve the interests of local families and taxpayers in shaping school policy. They are also among the only elected offices that are still largely nonpartisan, according to the league.
Andrea Gabor, Bloomberg professor of business journalism at Baruch College, will serve as moderator. Ms. Gabor is a former education columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the author of “After the Education Wars.” Panelists will include Robert Vecchio, a former 18year member of the William Floyd School Board and now executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association; Assemblyman Tommy John Schiavoni, a former high school social studies teacher, Southampton Town councilman, and Sag Harbor School Board member; Germain Smith, a current member of the Southampton School Board and a member of the Shinnecock Nation, and Kate Rossi-Snook, a recent six-year Shelter Island School Board member.
East End school board members, PTA leaders, parents, residents, and high school students who will be serving as ex-officio school board members for the first time have been encouraged to attend.
“Public education has been recognized by some of the most influential thinkers on democracy and capitalism as crucial for developing an engaged and thoughtful citizenry,” Ms. Gabor said in a statement. “Yet today, public education faces a host of challenges: culture wars over everything from masks to mascots to gender issues; privatization; the need to provide a host of services for underprivileged students, and the federal government’s plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.”
“At the center of these challenges are local school boards, which serve two important functions: first, to represent the concerns of citizens, taxpayers, and parents to school administrators, and second, to represent the needs of the students and schools to citizen stakeholders. They also frequently serve as a stepping stone for higher elected office, and thus serve as the training wheels of our democracy.”
A question-and-answer session will follow the forum.
LTV has asked for registration for the free program at ltveh.org. The forum can be viewed live and later on LTV’s YouTube channel, and will also be available live and later for Spanish speakers.
A follow-up to this forum, the league’s Running and Winning program for East End high school students, is scheduled for Nov. 19. It will focus on how to run for school boards, as this year, for the first time, each school district in New York State that has a high school is required to include a student as an ex-officio member to represent students’ interests.