STATE COLLEGE AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT

Five candidates, four seats

Three challengers, two incumbents compete for school board positions

Ed Mahon

There will be one odd candidate out in the upcoming State College Area school board election. Three challengers and two incumbents are competing for four seats with four-year terms. Here’s a look at who they are, what they’ve raised and where they stand on the issues.

Fishbaine

View larger

WHO' S RUNNING

Challengers Penni Fishbaine, Jim Leous and Brian Kaleita and incumbents David Hutchinson and Gowen Roper are competing for the four-year spots.

Kaleita is on the Republican ballot, Roper and Leous are on the Democratic ballot, and Fishbaine and Hutchinson won enough votes in the primary to appear on both.

Incumbent Jim Pawelczyk, appointed in March 2008, is unopposed in his bid to complete the remaining two years of his term.

TAXES

The clearest division between the candidates emerges in how they talk about spending.

Kaleita has leveled the sharpest criticism at previous boards, saying they’ve raised taxes 4 percent on average over the past 20 years, spent too much on administrative positions and increased the number of district employees while enrollment declined.

“This school district has been wasting taxpayer money for many years,” Kaleita said.

CREATIONISM

During the Oct. 3 League of Women Voters forum, the candidates were asked about teaching creationism — the belief that the universe was created by some higher being.

Only Kaleita believed the topic had a place in science class, alongside evolution, saying “neither side has been proved to be correct.”

Others disagreed. “I think it’s very important now, in an age where science and technology are crucial to our children’s future, that we teach the best science that we can,” Roper said.

Three challengers and two incumbents are competing for four seats with four-year terms. Here’s a look at who they are, what they’ve raised and where they stand on the issues.

WHAT THEY'VE SPENT

Fishbaine’s campaign spent $1,470.88 in the primary, mostly on mailing materials, and her campaign had $954.82 available for the general election as of Oct. 19, according to campaign finance reports.

Leous’ committee raised $615.13, spent $85.58 for the May primary, and had $314.56 available as of Oct. 19. Kaleita, Hutchinson and Roper all pledged to spend less than $250.

FUTURE OF HIGH SCHOOL

All the candidates agree on what was the most contentious issue in the 2007 election, and say the high school should remain as two separate buildings on Westerly Parkway.

MATH CURRICULUM

Leous, Roper and Hutchinson all said the district was on the right path with its K-6 math curriculum. Fishbaine and Kaleita said they would have voted against adopting the second edition of “Investigations in Number, Data and Space” along with the compromise action plan.

More than 700 people signed a petition calling for removal of the program, saying it focused too much on conceptual understanding and not enough on practicing algorithms.

SWAP DEAL

Kaleita and Fishbaine have been more critical than Leous of the previous board for entering the district into a qualified interest rate management agreement with the Royal Bank of Canada. The cost to terminate the deal this month has been above $7 million.

“I probably wouldn’t have done it at the time,” said Leous, but he noted that “hindsight is 20/20.”