At the beginning of the year, three Park City School District board members filed to run for reelection. As of Tuesday, when District 1 representative Anne Peters withdrew her candidacy, all three incumbents have quit their races.
The first incumbent to leave his reelection campaign behind was board President Andrew Caplan, who withdrew near the beginning of May. Later that week, board Vice President Wendy Crossland followed suit. At the time, Peters said she intended to stay in the race, but Tuesday she wouldn’t say what’s changed since then.
“My reason is personal, but essentially to focus on my business and family,” Peters said.
Her challenger for her seat, Susan Goldberg, said she didn’t blame her for ending her campaign.
“I understand she said she wanted to spend more time with her family and business,” Goldberg said. “It takes a lot out of you, so I can understand why she decided to withdraw even though I’ve never met her. It’s been a hard year, I don’t care who you are. It’s been a hard year for them especially.”
While Peters’ decision left Goldberg uncontested, she said she has no intention of doing any victory dancing yet.
“Anybody can do a write-in,” she said. “There are a lot of things going on the community about the school board, so there may be other highly motivated people who want to write themselves in. … I still feel as though I need to earn votes. I feel like people need to understand how my positions on various topics are.”
Goldberg has three grandkids enrolled in the school district and a son who’s a teacher. It was her grandkids’ experiences being discriminated against — something Goldberg doesn’t believe the district has sufficiently addressed — that made her want to run.
Though she is a retired nurse, she said that career alone does not encompass the entirety of her professional experience, and she specified that she’s not some little old lady with white hair and a white hat.
“My original training certainly is in nursing, but I’ve been a health-care system administrator for 30 years now, and I’ve worked all over the country in very large systems with many million-dollar projects,” she said. “I think I bring a lot to the position.”
Looking toward the future of the schools, there are several issues she wants to address: accountability, more transparency, restoring public trust and working toward better communication, to name a few.
“I’d like the temperature of this whole thing to go down a bit so we can really address the problems that the schools are facing and how we can move forward in a positive way,” she said.
Community members have reached out to her about the Change.org petition asking the current board not to vote on renewing Superintendent Jill Gildea’s contract and allow the next board to decide that.
“I’m delighted to see the community respond and to let people know what they want and how they feel,” she said. “I agree with them that decisions shouldn’t be made until the new board chair and the new board members come together and are able to have reasonable conversations about this. … I don’t believe Andrew Caplan should make a decision on her new contract.”
She also said she wants to better understand Gildea’s positions on current school district issues. If she’s elected and if the current board leaves the superintendent renewal process for newly elected board members to consider next year, Goldberg didn’t say how she’d vote.
She added that with a new board, she doesn’t know if Gildea would want to stay.
“I have never met the superintendent,” Goldberg said. “I have scheduled an appointment with her. It took me three weeks. … I want to spend a little time with her and understand where she’s coming from on some of these issues.”
Given the issues the district has faced in recent years under Gildea’s leadership — including a federal Office for Civil Rights investigation that found over 180 incidents of students harassing one another that the district didn’t do enough to address, illegally stored toxic dirt and a state audit that found the district hadn’t done enough for groups of students that qualify for federal assistance — Goldberg said there needs to be more accountability.
“I don’t understand how we’ve gotten into some of this mess that we’re in at the school board. I’ve always felt that these kinds of things always go back to leadership,” Goldberg said. “The leader in whatever it is in — the district, the states, the schools — is the one who sets the tone and who establishes the strategy and how they’re going to interact with people. And so some of this accountability has to fall on shoulders, and her shoulders are the obvious shoulders as I see it at this point.”
She said people are angry, and understandably so, but she hopes people can “take it down a notch” in exchange for more compassion and kindness, but that hasn’t weakened her resolve.
“I think it’s been underestimated the pain that some of these things have caused students and their families, and we’ve got to help get through this,” she said.
Through her grandkids’ experiences with discrimination and conversations she’s had with principals, she said she’s come to understand more about what’s happening in the district.
“I think (Gildea) has to be held accountable for those things,” she said.
