Sept. 19, 2023

CMS Board at-large candidates Juanrique Hall, Claire Covington, Bill Fountain, Shamiye Haynes and Annette Albright addressed questions at the Forum this morning. Peggy Capehart and Omar Harris did not attend. More candidates have been invited for Sept. 26.

The contents of this video may help inform voters about their choices to fill three at-large seats on the nine-member CMS board. When a video from the Sept. 26 session is available, it will also be posted below. But in all likelihood the two banks of candidates will not be answering the same questions, and few direct comparisons will be possible. There is also no amount of footnoting that could offer voters enough information about the accuracy or context of what was said – or what was not said. So what information might a voter gain from the video to help inform impressions in the run-up to an important community-wide election?

– After listening, can you define who each person is, and why they are running? Or who one or two of them are and why they are running?

– When were candidates offering nuanced answers? When were they dodging?

– After listening, do you have a sense of what each candidate believes is behind the extraordinary, nearly 100% turnover in Board of Education membership in the last months? Do candidates offer a vision that you think will rebuild voter support for the school district’s board in the future?

–If the election were today and you had only one vote, who would get that one vote and why?

In the video below, a portion of the video image during a response by Annette Albright is covered by a still picture, when the City of Charlotte’s pan-tilt-zoom Webex video camera went panning off stage left to display the wall blocking the view of beautiful Mountain Island Lake.