We ran a story today questioning the lack of candidates for a number of local races, including for all five positions up for election on the Medford School Board.

A couple of local officials suggested it may be because everyone is happy with the job the current office holders are doing. (Uh-huh, that’s it.) A more likely reason was suggested by outgoing Medford School Board member Peggy Penland, who said the unpaid position can take up more time than a part-time job and that many people just don’t have the time or don’t want to make room in their lives for it.

At the risk of sounding self-centered, I think there’s a better explanation: We (the Mail Tribune) never ran a story saying the positions would be open for election — not one story, paragraph or sentence that I could find in our archive. Now, if you’re very plugged into politics, you would know that school board positions come up for a vote in May of odd-numbered years. But most people aren’t that plugged in and have no idea. In the Medford School District, we have five candidates for five positions. Three are incumbents and one is Penland’s son. You can be pretty sure the district administration knew the vote was coming.

But this is not the school district’s issue — it’s ours. We blew it. Without overvaluing our importance, I think it’s safe to say that had we told people there were open seats to be filled, more candidates would have signed up. It happened last year, when the race for a Medford City Council position had no candidates until we ran a story. Within days, four candidates appeared.

With all that’s going on in schools these days, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these unopposed school board positions would have drawn interest if people had been told about them. But they weren’t and for that we’re sorry.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 5:57 pm and is filed under From the Editor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.