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The Real Deal on School Closures

2 min read

By Sarah Launius

There’s some real mixed messages coming from some of the TUSD Board Candidates on where they stand on school closures. You may have seen these signs up at Campbell near 6th Street.

tkf_lies

When I saw these new signs last week I had two thoughts. First, the signs seemed completely inaccurate based on what I know. Second, I was infuriated that the “TUSD Kids First” assume that the general public is so stupid that they somehow wouldn’t know this.

Here’s the thing, beyond anything else, the TUSD Kids First campaign is endorsing Stegeman, Rustand and Betts. Of all the candidates, Stegeman is the ONLY one who has, in fact, closed schools. So, give me a break.

We’ve written about the responses to our school closure questions at the TUSD Candidate forum on October 13 here, where we include background necessary to aid our neighbors in making an informed decision.

David Safier, writing for the Tucson Weekly, also recently published on how candidates have shifted their statements on school closures during the race as well as contradictions with the voting records for the three incumbents.  You can find Safier’s piece here.

Safier mentions a few pieces that we missed. First, he discusses the operational efficiency audit that we reference in our previous blog (see too Sedgwick’s comment to Safier’s piece – but you might get disgusted if you read all the comments like we did). He also identifies statements from Rustand and Sedgwick from the forum at Palo Verde High School that indicate they believe closures should be on the table. Sedgwick discusses the possible need for school consolidations in a response to gender-neutral bathrooms in schools–which was probably an honest response from her but certainly didn’t require her to discuss consolidations. You can find that here around 1:12:00. She takes it up again around 1:35:00. Rustand discusses how TUSD may have to make hard decisions about school closures. You can find it here around 1:34:00.

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