Incumbent Jim Leigh and challenger Richard Potter advanced from Tuesday’s primary election as they continue to seek a position on the Shoreline School board.
Early election results released just before press time showed Potter winning 51.3 percent of the votes for Position 5, and Leigh winning 36.7 percent. The other two candidates — Chad Nelson Cudworth and Tayo Bolonduro — had received a combined 11.6 percent.
Cudworth announced he was dropping out of the race earlier this month.
Only about 12 percent of eligible ballots had been counted at press time.
“I am overwhelmed. I am to the point of being speechless,” said Potter, an engineering team leader at Boeing who spoke Tuesday evening from him home about the early returns. “I figured the incumbent would have the advantage of name recognition while I had the advantage of not having to defend their record.
“I guess I had the advantage there,” Potter said.
Potter also had the advantage of campaigning from Shoreline, said Leigh, who has been in Singapore on business since late June.
He is planning to return to the States in the next 10 days, though, and he plans to start seriously campaigning then, he said.
“It has been kind of a bad time to be away from home, but we all have responsibilities,” said Leigh, who spoke Tuesday night from Singapore on his cell phone. “Now I’ll go out and campaign full-swing, and explain to the public what is going on.”
Both Leigh and Potter said budgetary issues would dominate the campaign as it moved towards the Nov. 6 general election.
Part of the problem in Shoreline is that the community doesn’t know what is going on, said Bolonduro, who has trumpeted ‘transparency’ as the most important thing for the next school board.
Bolonduro threw his support behind Potter Tuesday night and said a new attitude was needed on the school board.
The community cannot help cope with a financial crisis it doesn’t fully understand, he said.
“If there is a financial crisis, then the community needs to be convinced of it. But the community is not convinced. I’m not convinced,” Bolonduro said. “We need to get the numbers out there.”
According to Leigh, getting the truth out there is also necessary.
And the truth, he said, is harsh.
“We have to close a school. There are no ‘ifs, ands or buts’ about it,” he said Tuesday night. “I will tell anyone the truth. We have to close a school.
“I’d rather not get elected rather than go back to robbing the kids of the future. We have to do the right thing,” Leigh said.
In the last four years, the current school board has done much to expose 18 years of bad management and poor decision making, Leigh said. It is important to continue that process, he said.
The district should also get back to acting legally, Potter said.
He proposed a three-step decision making process that board members should undergo before taking any actions such as school closure: Is it best for the kids? Is it legal? It is ethical?
“If they had asked those three questions, I don’t think we’d be in the financial mess we are in today,” Potter said.
“Also, I think the incumbents need to learn, and I think they’ll learn it after tonight, is that they need to listen to the community and accept their ideas. If they’d listened to us earlier, I don’t even think I’d be running.”
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