To ban books, or no? School board candidates differ in views ahead of Tuesday elections

Ask any candidate for school board in a Monroe County suburb and they will tell you: Banning books is bad.

Dig a little deeper, though, and distinctions emerge.

"I’m not a book burner, not at all," Septimus Scott, a candidate in Greece, said at a public forum. "(But) parents need to be involved in deciding what books go into our libraries and are in front of our children."

"I don't call it a book ban because they're kids," Don Markham, a candidate in East Irondequoit, said at a forum there. "Adults are adults — there’s freedom. Kids are kids. I don’t believe they have the freedom to do things."

"I don’t like the word 'ban' because I don’t think they should be in the library to begin with," Melissa Levato, a candidate in Hilton, said at the district's Meet the Candidates night. "If you are one of the parents who says you’re OK with it, then we have public libraries. ... You can always access them that way. So it’s not really a ban."

School board elections set for Tuesday

For the third year in a row, elections in several Rochester-area suburbs (to be held Tuesday) are turning on ideological differences regarding diversity, inclusion and the public nature of public education itself.

In the above districts and others, including Gates Chili, Penfield and Webster, certain candidates are running on anodyne-sounding platforms of restoring safety to schools, ensuring parental rights, transparency and mending community division.

The specifics of their campaigns, however, would in some cases upend long-established norms in public education as well as recent commitments to better serving all students. They would give parents, not educators, the final word on what materials belong in the library and classroom, and would walk back pledges to focus on diversity in favor of a renewed emphasis on patriotism and unity.

The debate is particularly charged in Hilton, where a longtime principal was convicted last year of sexually abusing more than 20 students at school, and where classes were recently disrupted due to a bomb threat regarding a LGBTQ-themed book in the library.

"If you're gay, that's fine; nobody cares," Mike Zillioux, a candidate in Hilton, said at the district's Meet the Candidates forum. "Let's focus on: a good citizen, one community, the United States of America. Let's not put people in boxes."

At the same event, Zillioux labeled some books in the school library as pornography and said he was opposed to "boys having access to private girls' space," a reference to attempts to make bathrooms accessible to transgender students.

Kristine Price, another candidate in Hilton, called those comments evidence of homophobia and transphobia.

"By making an issue out of trans people using the bathroom and banning this book — it seems to me we have some people with issues with the queer community," she said. "But instead of coming out and saying that, they nitpick these other issues that get people all riled up."

Strategic goals at issue in Greece

In the neighboring district of Greece, meanwhile, a three-person slate of candidates (Miguel Millan, Septimus Scott and Jordan Stenzel) promises to toss the district's current strategic goals related to diversity, equity and inclusion in order to "reject division and promote a culture of unity for all students and district staff." If elected, they would join two like-minded candidates on the current board to make up a majority.

The Greece Teachers Association has endorsed their three opponents, including current school board president and Republican Monroe County legislator Sean McCabe.

"If that whole ticket comes in and sweeps three seats it’ll philosophically change the direction of the district, and I don’t think that’s a good thing," McCabe said. "The narrative around (library materials) right now is a little bit frightening. ...

"It's not for me to decide it’s not appropriate to have a book with two moms or two dads — because we have students with two moms or two dads."

Millan, Scott and Stenzel did not respond to a request for comment.

Divisiveness growing in school districts

Districts across Monroe County have seen increasing challenges to library books and curriculum materials as well as protests at school board meetings. In the last three years, the mostly conservative opposition has shifted its target from COVID safety measures to diversity policies and now transgender issues but maintained the banner of parents' rights, administrative transparency and a no-frills approach to academics.

"We gotta get off the stuff with sex changes and Black Lives Matter and all this other stuff that I’ve seen goes on in the schools and I know goes on," Markham said at the East Irondequoit candidates forum. "We’ve got to get back to basics."

Markham ran for school board in 2022 as well and lost, then unsuccessfully challenged the result, saying the election had been "fixed."

During the same time frame, students at some local students have grown increasingly bold in calls for social justice, staging walkouts in Pittsford, East Irondequoit and Our Lady of Mercy High School and holding rallies across the county. And voters in the last two years have almost universally rejected candidates seeking to roll back diversity goals -- part of the reason, perhaps, that those goals are most often expressed on the campaign trail with extreme subtlety, to the point that residents seeking such candidates have a hard time identifying them.

From 2020: Rochester teen activism for social justice on the rise

Price, a candidate in Hilton and a teacher at Rochester's East High School, said she believes there is a core difference of opinion about the definition of public education itself.

"It’s almost like they only want to have certain views upheld and certain topics talked about under the guise of parental rights," she said. "I really don’t understand how people could feel that way given that schools are funded with public funds. ... If you want to control the environment of the school to that level, go to a private school."

All local school districts except Rochester will have public votes on their budgets and school boards Tuesday. For details, polling places and times, see individual district websites or newsletters.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: School board elections, budget votes in Monroe County NY: What to know