ELEVEN candidates have filed in the San Bernardino City Unified School District race.  There are three seats open with one incumbent deciding not to run for re-election.

The big news is that ONLY THREE candidates submitted statements that will be included in the voter materials: incumbents Danny Tillman and Judi Penman and challenger Ron Coats.

The cost for a candidate statement for this race, a whopping $3,375!  When I ran for the same seat two years ago, I believe the cost was just over $2,000.  This is an exorbitant cost bourne by candidates.

The cost of candidate statements is a huge advantage to an incumbent, especially in races like school board elections.  The main special interest group for a school board election are the teachers and employees unions.  Consequently, challengers have a huge hill to climb just to get to the starting line.

In races such as these where there is much difficulty in raising money from private individuals, something should be done to lessen the burden on candidates.  I find it pretty aggravating to see pages and pages of election materials printed in English and Spanish just so that a relatively few non-english reading voters aren't "disenfranchised" while substantive candidate statements are discouraged from publication due to their outlandish cost, even though they are much more widely read than the Spanish sections of the phamplets.

I am not interested in getting into an illegal immigration debate or english-only debate.  Empirically, I would think that even supporters of putting voting materials in Spanish can admit that the return on investment with respect to creating an informed and educated electorate is ridiculously low compared to candidate statements.

Below are the candidate statements for the SBCUSD candidates: