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Meet four candidates you know absolutely nothing about

If there was a million dollars laying around, it would gladly be yours to keep, if you could name the eight members of the State Board of Education and the four candidates running for two seats on that illustrious body this November.

Well, there is no million dollars, and there is nobody — not a single person — who can name those 12 politicians.

It’s a sad commentary on the gross lack of media coverage and citizen attention to that pretty important board that is tasked with making sure all of our children get a top-drawer education.

There is no higher calling, but, when voters come to the SBE portion of the ballot, most will lament, “Who the heck are Ellen Lipton, Jason Strayhorn, Michelle Frederick, and Tami Carlone?”

The only information you can garner from the ballot is that the first two are Democrats and the other two are Republicans.

Think you can cast an intelligent and an informed vote based on that?

But rejoice. Help is on the way. Read on.

A week ago, the Macomb Intermediate School District had all four candidates on the videoconferencing software Zoom for a 90-minute conversation on the issues. Thanks to MISD Superintendent Mike DeVault for continuing that one-man mission to inform the voters.

Here’s what we learned.

The two Republican oppose raising the state sales tax with the revenue earmarked for K-12.

“Absolutely not,” cries out Ms. Frederick, a first-time candidate running for statewide office. She adds: “We need accountability on how schools are financed currently,” and the sales tax would “adversely affect poor people.”

Her running mate, Ms. Carlone, adds, “We are taxed to death already. The money is there. We’re just not spending it properly.” (Ms. Carlone, by the way, ran two years ago and won 82 counties, but, when the 83rd county — Wayne — came in, she was toast).

Former state rep. Ellen Lipton is all in on hiking the sales tax, noting that “we are underfunding our schools. We have to grow resources.”

Her running mate, Jason Strayhorn, a former star jock on the Michigan State University Nick Saben teams of the 1990s, would raise the tax only as a “last resort.” He, instead, wants the philanthropic community to step up and help fund K-12, as it does for higher education.

Another hot-button issue is diverting state tax dollars into private schools, which the GOP-controlled Legislature did, without blinking an eyelash at the state constitution, which forbids such a practice. Lawmakers allocated $250 million to those private and religious schools to cover the cost of state-mandated programs.

A real shocker here: the quartet are all against it.

Ms. Carlone contends that with money comes strings attached, and that is going to “bring private school down at the lower level of the public schools.”

Ms. Frederick comments, “I don’t think the state should be mandating anything to private schools.”

Ms. Lipton argues private schools raise their own money and are privately managed and, “I do not support using taxpayer dollars” for them.

Mr. Strayhorn adds, “I think private schools should be self-financed and self-sufficient.”

The unanimity, however, ends with masks and the governor’s order that K-5 kids mask up.

“I don’t believe the science is there to support it,” opines Ms. Frederick.

Ms. Carlone thinks it is OK to clean schools and follow social distancing guidelines. But masks? No way.

“I do agree with the governor on masks … Those kids aren’t the cleanest,” reports Mr. Strayhorn.

And, for those who think the kids don’t know how to wear them, Ms. Lipton supports the policy, concluding, “children as young as 5 can be taught how to use the bathroom. We can expect them to wear masks,” too.

None of them favor diverting K-12 dollars to pay for higher education, which has been done in the past, and each said they would resist pressure from their respective party leaders if they leaned on the board members to do something the members did not support.

Each said standing up for kids might mean standing up to their leaders.

Hopefully, this report will allow you to be in the minority of voters who actually know something about the four candidates for the SBE … assuming you got this far.

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