Race Analysis: School Board District 1

The non-partisan Manatee School Board District 1 race features incumbent Gina Messenger against grassroots activist Bridget Mendel. Because there are only two contestants, the winner will walk into the seat in November. The race is conducted countywide and will be on all Manatee County voters’ ballots for this August’s election.

Messenger scored a major upset in 2016 in defeating Ed Viltz, a well-financed candidate with an extremely impressive resume. A former teacher in another district, Messenger connected with voters in the mostly rural, north river district by convincing them that a teacher’s voice was much needed.

I had high hopes that even though she’d never taught in Manatee Schools, being a Manatee native would further help ensure that she could be a bulwark against an administration that had come to manage the board, rather than the other way around. In fact, one of my chief concerns with her opponent in that election, despite his superior resume, was his unwavering support for former superintendent Dianna Green, who’s reign had raised a number of red flags that later came to fruition.

But while I believe Mrs. Messenger cares about students and teachers in Manatee County classrooms, she seems to have fallen into the same old role of administration apologist that seems to bedevil so many seemingly well-intentioned public servants once they arrive on this long-troubled board. For some reason, an utter incapability to own failures and avoid defending the indefensible seems to be almost contagious for those who come to hold seats.

The most egregious example of this was in a recent debate with her opponent in which Mrs. Messenger bent herself into a pretzel trying to defend the utter dumpster fire that was the district’s ERP upgrade. Messenger laughably tried to claim that because the board had blindly approved a series of cost overruns, it wasn’t over budget. While this may be technically true, it highlights the worst aspect of the disaster: that the board members were not able to provide effective oversight because they had no idea what the district was actually buying let alone what questions to ask as the vendor continuously rooked less sophisticated in-house staff into purchasing modules the district didn’t need and in some cases couldn’t even use.

The system-wide software upgrade ultimately came in at more than three times its initially-promised cost, went live 18 months late in a disastrous rollout that took months more to fix, and the best Messenger could manage was that everything is fine now. Being an incumbent usually means selling the idea that things have gotten better over your term. But the long list of debacles that include a grad rate inflation scandal at the hands of a superintendent that is still running the district and to the detriment of some of its most troubled students, as well as a highly suspect takeover of a popular charter school, suggest otherwise.

Yes, the district has made modest gains academically, although these can be viewed as the ebb and flow of previous modest losses and after taxpayers committed to some of the most expensive additional funding mechanisms in place anywhere in Florida after being promised much more. There’s not much to do in that case other than own those failures, explain what went wrong rather than trying to explain that the wrong didn’t happen, and lay out a plan for improvement that includes finally holding the administration accountable for its shortcomings.

However, the ability to do so may well be compromised by what seems to be a major conflict of interest in that Mrs. Messenger’s husband, who works for the district, was promoted to a lucrative position as supervisor of television services. There’s no way of knowing whether this has stifled Messenger’s ability to be critical of her husband’s bosses, given that he’s the family breadwinner, however, it calls her inability or unwillingness to do so into further question.

Bridget Mendel is a longtime educator who has taught in New York, Chicago, and Manatee County. Mendel has been a parent activist in the Manatee education community, where she first gained attention as a vocal critic of the overreliance on standardized testing. In addition to more classroom experience, Mendel brings an undergraduate degree in economics to the table, which the board could certainly use given its difficulties in managing quality oversight of the financial troubles the district has experienced

Mendel’s dedication is unquestionable. She regularly attends meetings and gives the sort of appalled reaction and well-articulated responses to the aforementioned trainwrecks that one would expect from an engaged board member. The question in this race seems quite simple. If you’re happy with the return on your considerable investment in public education in Manatee County, as well as the performance of the district administration and its oversight from the board, Messenger is promising more of the same.

If you’re outraged by the seemingly endless onslaught of embarrassing scandals, Mendel shares your anger and is itching for a chance to serve on the board in order to do something about it. Given the tremendous challenges the district will face this school year, as COVID-19 continues to ravage the community, the effectiveness of our school board will be of vital concern.