Quitting race shows character
By:The Manville News
It should have been simple, but it wasn’t. A seat on the Board of Education with no one officially in the running should have been easy to fill with write-in ballots, but it wasn’t. With two separate major write-in campaign efforts afoot, there should have been a winner, but there wasn’t.
Instead of a clear and easy victory, the two candidates ended up tying. Board incumbent Janice Mathewson and former Borough Councilman Ray Star registered a total 27 votes each for a one-year seat no one formally had been seeking. And that’s where things stood until recently, when in an act of courtesy we wish typified political behavior, Ms. Mathewson bowed out of the race.
Ms. Mathewson’s action is a tremendous mark of character, and one we applaud.
When Ms. Mathewson decided earlier this year not to seek re-election, she explained her decision was based on a desire to spend more time raising her four children in the Manville schools. And although she undoubtedly could have offered much had she persisted and emerged as the victor in a tie-breaker with Mr. Star, her decision to back out is the right one and will prevent her from being in the unenviable position of balancing school board activities against her children.
The emergence of a clear victor in the one-year seat also will spare the borough two pieces of costly fallout. First, the school district will not have to foot the bill for a special run-off election — an expense it hardly needs this year with budget cuts looming over the defeated budget and new alarm systems going into the schools — but just as importantly, it will spare voters the frustration of having another protracted fight over a seat as they had in the recently settled Senga Allen-Susan Asher election.
Politics often should be easy, and given the word’s etymology, it also should be polite. Too often it is neither. The Manville News commends Ms. Mathewson for her action, which has made public service a little more of both.