King George School Board Appoints Candidate to Fill Vacant Seat
Carrie Cleveland will replace Matthew Roles, who resigned last month. Board also approves regulation establishing library material review committees at each school.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Email Adele
The King George School Board on Monday unanimously appointed Carrie Cleveland to fill the James Monroe district seat left vacant by Matthew Roles, who resigned last month.
Cleveland was one of five candidates who applied to fill the vacant seat. Roles was one of several citizens to speak in support of her at Monday’s meeting.
“[When I resigned], I asked that you respect the will of the James Monroe district voters by choosing someone with values aligned with the ones I campaigned on and reflected in my tenure,” Roles said.
When he announced his resignation on September 9, Roles said that “a key commitment I made [during my campaign] was to guard students’ hearts and minds.”
“Book appeals are the most direct testament to my sincerity about that,” he said.
On Monday, Roles said that Cleveland and Alexander Strugatsky were the two candidates who best aligned with his values.
Another resident of the James Monroe district who spoke on Monday said she had voted for Roles and that hearing news of his resignation was “a gut punch.”
“I hope you honor his request to select a candidate that most closely reflects what the Monroe district wanted, which is a conservative candidate,” the resident said. “If you select somebody who is a polar opposite of Mr. Roles, that sends a really bad message, and I don’t think it’s what’s best for our kids. I really want to get that conservative vote back up there.”
The Board appointed Cleveland following a closed session, and she will take her seat at next month’s School Board meeting.
Cleveland has served on the county’s Citizens Budget Advisory Board and the Service Authority Board and told the School Board last week that she believes the role of the school system is to teach “traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic without opinions and influence on either side.”
Also on Monday, the Board approved a new regulation providing for the creation of Library Materials Review Committees at each school.
According to the new regulation, IIA-R, leadership at each of the division’s schools “is responsible for establishing a committee annually to review library book purchases that garner negative community feedback, specifically with respect to sexually explicit content.”
The committees will be responsible for reviewing books proposed for purchase for school libraries that receive complaints from the community through a new process established this year.
Each committee will be made up of one school administrator, one school counselor, one School Board member, one library media specialist, three teachers, and one parent of a currently enrolled student at the school where the book is proposed for purchase.
School Board member Ed Frank is serving as the Board’s representative on a committee that has already been established to review To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han, a book proposed for purchase for the King George Middle School library.
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