20 Minutes with Thomas Cooke, Park City School board candidate
On Thursday, I had the chance to speak with Thomas Cooke and Andrew Caplan, who are competing for Park City School Board District #2. If you are in District #2, you can either vote for either candidate. If you don’t know if you are in District #2, here is a map.
This is the discussion with Thomas. He is running as a write-in candidate – which long time readers will know that I have a fondness for. Thomas covers topics from how his Planning Commission time will help him on the school board to him raising questions about transparency.
Most of the questions were sourced from Park Rag readers. Thank you! I tried to keep the discussion close to twenty minutes (although this one went 32 minutes), so I was only able to get to a handful of the 50 questions people had. Please know that the Zoom Gods did not favor Thomas and me on Thursday morning. Some of the video is a little choppy (another downside of living in a COVID world), but the audio is great, so you won’t miss a thing.
Please note, I debated whether to enable comments on this and Andrew’s discussion. Politics is nasty in general. Likewise, we are starting to get people personally attacking others on the Park Rag. That’s not what I want here.
So, please add to the conversation and the discussion. Please praise and attack ideas and not people. It’s hard to run for public office and we don’t need to frighten the best people away from upcoming elections. As usual, I will moderate the comments to make sure they add to the discussion and deal with ideas and not people.
We’re all in this together. On to write in candidate Thomas Cooke…
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1 Comment
Thomas Cooke is a more sincere, authentic candidate for the school board. You can’t change the stripes on a tiger. Andrew can appear much different in an interview than he does in person or in a letter. Andrew’s tone has been more threatening and less interested in consideration during his tenure. You can’t change someone’s aggressive and defensive tendencies. Maintaining status quo and continuity is not for the greater good in this case. Without changing this guard, we will witness more of the same exclusive decision-making overriding stakeholders.
Thomas Cooke, on the flip side, has the personality of a leader who has already earned a great deal of respect in our community among parents, teachers, and students. He will come up to speed quickly and be able to apply his skills to effect a more functional, caring, listening, inclusive Park City School District. He won’t let the world walk all over him, but will be able to differential facts from PR and fiction. We need that! We need Thomas Cooke.
Please, District 2 voters, write his name on the ballot for PCSD School Board.
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