Five people into three seats
won’t work—at least not in a public forum—so voters will do the math in
November to determine which three people will be the next to serve on the
Unionville-Chadds Ford School Board from Region C.

The region is comprised of
Chadds Ford and Pennsbury townships.

The five people are Republicans
Timotha Trigg, Frank Murphy and Sharon Jones, along with Democrats Kathleen Do
and Gregg Lindner.

Trigg and Murphy are
incumbents—with Trigg being the current board president. Lindner served
temporarily to fill a vacancy when Ed Wandersee stepped down from the board,
but lost to Murphy in a special election in 2009.

Several factors make this
campaign more interesting than most others. Murphy will run as both a
Republican and Democrat, so he’s pretty much a lock for another term—a full
term—on the board. He was able to earn that distinction because school board
elections are billed as being nonpartisan and he was on both parties’ ballots
in the primary. (Trigg and Jones were also cross-filed.)

Yet, everyone knows how
partisan school board elections really are. It was the overriding number of
Republican voters who elected Murphy over Lindner in the special election.

Lindner and Do are on the
ballot because of a write-in campaign that began just 10 days before the May 17
primary. Democrats had no candidates on the primary ballot before the write-in
campaign.

Do is one of the vice
presidents of the Unionville-Chadds Ford Education Foundation and has been a
vocal presence at school board meetings for several years.

By contrast, Jones is a
relative newcomer to the public even though she is a Republican Committee woman
in Pennsbury Township.

Another ingredient in the mix
is that there is still no labor agreement between the district and the
Unionville-Chadds Ford Education Association. The teachers’ contract expired at
the end of the 2009-2010 school year and teachers worked under status quo
during this past academic year. If there’s no agreement by the November
election, will voters take that into consideration to vote for a new face or
two, or will GOP numbers win the day?

Looking ahead, the new board
will still have its share of controversy. During the heated debates over the
high school renovation project and the two referendums that voters rejected,
there was already talk of a similar project for the middle school, even
consideration of adding another school.

In addition, there will always
be another debate over raising taxes, just as there was this year and virtually
every year before that. As reported, the current board raised taxes for next
year during its June 20 meeting.

The election may be a good
indication of how many of those registered Republicans really are Republicans
and how many are Democrats who registered with the GOP only because they “might
need help from supervisors” one day.