Two are challenging Tom Edwards on August 20.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: August 14, 2024
Host: Tom Edwards is probably one of the highest-profile school board members anywhere in the United States, and he is up for re-election this Tuesday. The fact that he is openly gay, and that Gov. Ron DeSantis has called for his ouster have put him in the limelight. Edwards usually is the sole dissenting vote on an otherwise conservative school board, although he has recently been able to pull some of his colleagues to his side. Challenging him are two conservatives, Greg Wood and Thomas Andrew Babicz. Here’s a closer look at all three.
Thomas Andrew Babicz
Johannes Werner: Let’s begin with Babicz. Even though he generally shows up at candidate forums, even those he considers hostile, he did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.He highlights his upbringing in Communist Poland and his pulling-himself-up-by-the-bootstraps career in the United States that eventually made him an IT executive. He usually prefaces his stomp speech with his desire to eradicate woke and discussions of race from classrooms, and focus on reading skills instead. At a recent League of Women Voters forum, he said “We’re all equal, and we don’t need to talk about it.” Asked at the forum about teacher salaries in Florida, which rank near the bottom nationally, he said raising them would be among his priorities.
Thomas Andrew Babicz: This, this one is really very easy, especially for me, because you can see on all my campaign materials on my website — electbabicz. com. — this is one of my key points, to increase the teacher’s salary. Teachers, in my notebook, are the most important. This is the most important profession next to the nurses.
JW: Greg Wood has appeared in just one candidate forum. He agreed to be interviewed by phone, but he declined to be recorded. Asked in the interview why he is running, he highlighted his experience teaching physical education and rowing in Texas, and raising three children. “I want to make education in Sarasota the best it can be. I see some gaps, it’s not the best you can hope for.” He said the school district must improve reading scores, which are lacking not only at third-grade levels but also among graduating seniors, and work on math skills. “Students must be ready for a job, ready for the military, ready for college, ready for anything.”
Greg Wood
Asked about how he would work in a sharply divided community, he said, “We can find common ground. We can work to improve education, and I will use data to make decisions. I’m not getting into the political weeds.”
Asked about a new state law — HB 1 — that moves funding from public to private schools, he became combative. He said there is no evidence it will leave public schools to deal with the most challenged students. “Every family needs to be able to find the best choice for their children. Public schools have to be so good they want to go there.” He added that the Sarasota School District’s 1.3-billion-dollar budget is big enough. “We can figure out how to educate every kid adequately with that money.”
In contrast, Edwards sees HB 1 as problematic, because public schools are not on a level playing field.
Tom Edwards
Tom Edwards: The students that we get tend to be the students that have IEP needs. Those are our individual education plans, and those students are more expensive to educate. They require additional programs and support. So our competitors, such as homeschooling, and private schools, and charter schools for profit, they don’t offer IEP education. So the students who are the high achieving, less expensive students to educate are leaving our district, and the ones that require more support are being retained, or find us because we’re the only game in town for that reason. So there’s lots and lots and lots of challenges that have to be ironed out with school choice and HB 1.
JW: Edwards describes himself as the only moderate on the current school board. He highlights his efforts to improve vocational education.
TE: What we’ve seen is that about one third of our graduates are college bound. What happens to the other two thirds? What are we doing to make sure that they’re career ready?
JW: Asked about his biggest challenge, he talks about the atmosphere during meetings. Members of the public have called him an LGBTQ groomer. Similar remarks prompted him to walk out of the boardroom during a meeting in March.
TE: I love, love being a school board member, but I hate being in the board room because of the politics and the vitriol that is on the dais from my fellow board members.
JW: The school board election is non-partisan. All three candidates are on the ballot this Tuesday. If any of the three gets more than 50 percent of the vote, it’s final. If not, there will be a run-off between the two leading candidates on Nov. 5.
Reporting for WSLR News, this is Johannes Werner.
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.