CCUSD93 – The Cave Creek Unified School District Governing Board is made up of five members that serve four-year staggered terms.
This November, three seats, currently held by Janet Busbee, David Schaefer and Karen Tufts are up for grabs.
Of the three, only Busbee is seeking reelection.
Board President Mark Warren’s and board member Cynthia Weiss’ terms will be up in 2018.
Scott Brown, Susan Clancy, Katherine Hill, and James Rich also submitted nomination petitions to run in the Nov. 8 election.
Readers may remember when Cave Creek Vice Mayor Adam Trenk hired Attorney Tim LaSota to challenge Clancy’s signature petitions and had her removed from the ballot two years ago because she fell a valid signature or two shy of the required number.
Clancy was chair of the political action committee that successfully recalled Trenk and his three fellow slate council members.
Clancy ran against Trenk in the recall election, won and is currently serving the balance of his council term.
She is seeking reelection to council as well as election to the CCUSD93 governing board. Since neither is a paying position, there is nothing preventing her from serving in both capacities.
This time around, Schaefer, represented by LaSota, filled a successful challenge to Brown’s petitions to knock him off the ballot.
Many people wondered why Schaefer wanted Brown removed from the ballot rather than letting the voters decide.
After all, Schaefer isn’t even seeking reelection.
Brown has lived in the district since 2002 and his children attended school in the district.
Meanwhile, Brown and his wife volunteered in the district, serving as co-presidents of the PTO, room parents, field trip chaperones and more.
When his children moved up to middle and high school, Brown volunteered more at the school and district level, participating on several school and district committees and continues to do so even after his children have graduated from Cactus Shadows High School.
Brown is a founding member of the local Cave Creek Youth Football and Cheer Association, which was organized in the fall of 2002.
Last year he organized a Cactus Shadows alumni association, which, through fundraising and sponsorships has awarded its first scholarship to a Cactus Shadow graduate who is attending a local college.
In May 2015, Brown said he was asked to attend a governing board meeting under the guise of giving an update to the board about the newly formed alumni association.
Instead he was surprised with a CCUSD93 Excellence Award as an outstanding community member for the 2014/2015 school year.
Brown said he was approached almost two years ago by a current and former school board member asking if he would consider running for a seat on the board in the next election.
After consulting with his family, Brown decided to run in this election cycle.
Brown pulled a packet and collected more than the requisite number of signatures.
Why the lawsuit to boot him from the ballot? Attorneys cost money. Although Schaefer is listed as the plaintiff, it would be interesting to know who actually funded it.
A records request revealed Weiss made a records request for only Clancy’s and Brown’s signature petitions.
According to Clancy, she and Brown were collecting signatures together in Carefree when they ran into Tufts.
While district taxpayers have shown their appreciation for Clancy’s representation, term after term, at the ballot box, district administration, especially Superintendent Debbi Burdick, are not fans.
If Tufts, who is one of Burdick’s hand-picked board members, reported back that Brown was seen with Clancy, did that make Brown a pariah in Burdick’s eyes?
After all, Brown was not the only new person running for the board. Hill and Rich are new as well.
And Brown is certainly not new or unknown in the district.
So the same people that gave him an award of excellence last year now seem to consider him a pariah because he was collecting signatures with Clancy.
Schaefer, who is leaving the board, not only sued to have Brown removed from the ballot, he placed an agenda item on the agenda back in April to move governing board meeting from Tuesdays, which is when they’ve been held for decades, to Mondays beginning in July.
It passed unanimously.
While Burdick claims the move was because members of the board wanted to attend Tuesday evening district events, sources claim it was Schaefer who wanted to move the meetings so he could watch his son play baseball on Tuesday nights.
Burdick said the move was also done with the hope more people will attend the governing board meetings.
Meanwhile, at the last Cave Creek Council meeting, a citizen asked council to consider moving its meetings from Mondays to Tuesdays so it wouldn’t conflict with Monday Night Football and said perhaps then more people would attend council meetings.
It’s peculiar that Schaefer would suddenly care, during the last half year of his term, after serving countless terms on the board, on what day meetings are held. If it was that important, he could have resigned his seat.
Perhaps it’s because Cave Creek holds its council meetings on Mondays. Although they are held in different weeks than the school board meetings, special meetings could cause a conflict … for Clancy.
Does Burdick really believe people will opt to attend a school board meeting over watching Monday Night Football?
Weiss has been an advocate of every property tax increase the district has proposed, while Warren was president of the board back in 2006 when it voted to issue bonds to build the middle school it didn’t need.
