To the Editor:
Last week’s article summarizing the Guilderland School Board candidates’ forum and the embedded YouTube video of the entire forum was a valuable service to the district voters in that it introduced all 10 of the candidates who are running for the four open seats to the citizens of Guilderland.

Nevertheless, the forum probably raised more questions than it answered, which is probably also a service to the citizens because the back-and-forth commentary during the forum helped to focus the mind on some of the things that were said and perhaps more importantly, things that were not said. 

Two slates are running: Barbara Fraterrigo, April McAlister, Mark Reamer, and Nicole Coonradt — I will call this group Parents Choice Slate 1 — and Gloria Towle-Hilt, Kelly Person, Kim Blasiak, and Kathy DiPierro, which I will call Parents Choice Slate 2.

Then there are two candidates who are running unaligned from either slate, William Kearney and Jennifer Romano.  

The 10 candidates introduced themselves as seemingly reasonable people out to make a positive difference in the education of our children. They ended the forum with bonhomie that they were all probably not that far apart and some views had changed favorably about members of the other slates.

The Altamont Enterprise article also summarized an earlier forum hosted by the McKownville Improvement Association attended by Blasiak and Dipierro of Slate 2 and Coonradt and Fraterrigo of Slate 1 as well as Romano.

During that meeting, several fault lines became apparent between the slates around the topics of teaching American history where race was the key determinant of an incident, LGBT badges and evolving perspectives on pronoun sensitivity around gender identity.

As reported, it seemed that Slate 1 candidates were trying to take issues out of the context in which they arose, while Slate 2 candidates and some audience members tried to bring the discussion back to the original context.

In the same edition was a letter from Elizabeth Floyd Mair, entitled “A platform for censoring teachers” which made some eyebrow-raising assertions about State 1 candidates’ social media posts that were not addressed during the forum.

One wonders then what is really going on here. Which of these various accounts in the same newspaper is more aligned with the truth?

Here are some questions I think would be interesting to raise at the May 9 PTA candidates’ forum or to be answered in letters next week to the Enterprise editor:  

— Each slate should explain its top four differences with the other slate;

— Slate 1: What are the first five things that you would seek to change in the current school board practices that would give voice to the difference you want to make?

— To Barbara Fraterrigo:  You are in effect saying that your board peers should be fired and be replaced by three candidates whose primary experience with the school district is having children in the district. What have your peers done so wrong that you now openly vie for their removal by running on a slate?  What exceptional talents do your slate colleagues bring to the table that would surpass the experience and skill that your board peers bring?

— To each slate: Would you ban any books from our schools? If so, what are five books that you would ban?

— To Slate 1: What is some of the “100% assistance” you received from Jeff Thomas or his Facebook group? What financial or in-kind assistance have you received from Jeff Thomas, his Facebook group, or any other organizations?

— To April McAllister: What are the top five “thorny social issues” that GCSD needs to get away from?

— To each slate: Are you for or against the separation of church and state? If you are against, would you find a linkage of the state with a non-Christian religion to be acceptable? Or would the faithful of non-Christian religions simply have to put up with a Christian church-state relationship, since there are so many more Christians than non-Christians?

— To Mark Reamer: Since you have posted in social media about stopping the current board’s “negative agenda” “well on the way to CRT,” what are five elements of that negative agenda that need to be stopped and how specifically are they leading to CRT?

— To Nicole Coonradt: At the McKownville forum, you said in response to a question about CRT that you don’t want students to be taught that race defines them. Is that absolute, i.e., it does not define them at all? Or does it only define a part of them? Is there any one thing that defines us in totality? Would you exclude teaching about any other partial factors or is race the only one partial factor that you would exclude teaching on?

— To Barbara Fraterrigo: You stated during the Enterprise forum (@ 47:15) that, as a result of being on the DEI Committee, you learned more about American history than in all your years of schooling and college. Should our students come out of GCSD as uninformed about American racial history as you were until you joined DEI?

— To Slate 1: Which of the foregoing topics would you view as teaching that white people are oppressors? The Tulsa Race Riot of 1920? The inventions of George Washington Carver? The Fugitive Slave Laws of the 1850s? Louis Armstrong and the birth of jazz? The written 1930s-1960s federal lending instructions that explicitly prohibited wealth-building housing loans to the red-lined districts Black people were forced to live in? The Tuskegee Airmen? The execution of Emmett Till in Mississippi?  Henry Johnson and his Medal of Honor? The assassination of MLK? The biography of Colin Powell?  The Ku Klux Klan? Michael Jordan as a basketball star? Six-year-old Ruby Bridges’s integration experience in New Orleans in 1961?

— To Slate 1: Are there comments on your website about the school district’s effort to train teachers to be respectful of LGBT kids that are “incredibly negative, hurtful, terrible, really honestly just shouldn’t come out of anyone’s mouth” as one citizen said? Would you be OK to put your website on the screen so that voters can see these comments? Would the website show that you distanced yourselves from those statements?

The reason I have more questions for Slate 1 is because I feel I already know the Slate 2 candidates very well from watching school board meetings. You need only watch a few of these meetings to appreciate the professionalism, courtesy, respect, open-mindedness and fair-mindedness of these candidates.

The Slate 1 candidates bill themselves on their street signs as “Parents Right-to-Know Advocates” this letter is intended to see if they will practice what they preach.

We will have to worry that if the proverbial nose of the Slate 1 camel gets under the big tent that Guilderland has already become; our school board meetings could descend into destructive and distracting farces and significantly disadvantage our students in the global competition for talent while at the same time degrading our property values.

I would urge the Guilderland Citizens to come out in droves to re-elect Gloria Towle-Hilt, Kelly Person, and Kim Blasiak and elect Katie DiPierro to the GCSD Board of Education.  

William Cooney

Guilderland