Slate Of Sanity. Steve Williamson and Karen McClelland welcome three highly qualified candidates for the Mingus Union High School Board in Arizona’s Verde Valley: Joe Wegwert, James Ariola, and incumbent Carol Anne Teague.
Wegwert is a professor in the department of education at Northern Arizona University who also has more than 20 years of experience teaching Middle School and High School social studies. Ariola is a restaurant owner and former civil engineer who directed an office of 300 people. Teague has been on the school board for six years. In addition to her duties as a current member, Teague is a real estate agent in Sedona and the Verde Valley.
The three candidates have chosen to call themselves the “Slate of Sanity” because of the agenda of some board members and candidates who seem more concerned about bathrooms and book bans than about the students’ education.
“I sit there at this moment behind the table…We have a five-person school board, and I am completely outvoted and outnumbered. We have political activists on our school board. We have religious activists on our school board. And they seem determined to not promote, or nurture, or encourage anyone who is not white, Christian, and straight,” says Teague.”
While Ariola, Teague and Wegwert are focused on improving education, their opponents represent more of the hateful political and religious agenda that has spread nationwide.
“It’s a clear choice,” says Teague. “We have the three of us who want to nurture all of the kids no matter what color, what religion, what gender, or what sexual orientation they are. Or we have people who want to turn Mingus into a church school.”