Andrew Blumenfeld ’13 has won the second and final seat on the La Canada Unified School District governing board, according to updated election results posted Friday afternoon.
The unofficial tally on Nov. 8 had Blumenfeld in second place ahead of incumbent Jeanne Broberg by a dozen votes, but the count remained close with votes still coming in, and Broberg took the lead by only two votes going into Friday’s count. The numbers from Friday’s count, which had Blumenfeld leading with 1,835 votes to Broberg’s 1,825, are the last results, which will be certified Monday. Blumenfeld recieved the second-highest number of total votes, behind another incumbent, Ellen Multari, who received 2,190 votes.
According to Blumenfeld, any citizen is entitled to ask for a recount within five days. As such, Broberg’s campaign will have a chance to challenge the results if it is willing to pay for a recount, which would cost at least $3,936 per day.
“[Recounts] are very expensive,” Blumenfeld said. “I think that, at the end of the day, if you’re able to raise the money and willing to put in the energy, you might say why not, but all the research I did suggested to me they’re not likely to change the results.”
While this election appeared drawn-out because of the closeness of the race, it has followed a standard election process with the snap tally on Nov. 8 including only ballots cast that day at a polling place that were not provisional and all absentee ballots received before Monday of that week.
Over the course of the next week and a half, results showed Broberg holding a narrow lead with counts from absentee and provisional ballots — but the final update on Friday has most likely made Blumenfeld the youngest school board member in the history of La Canada Unified School District.
Blumenfeld said his supporters “feel like it’s been a roller coaster for them, but it seems like everyone is happy to have gone on the roller coaster if this is the outcome.”
Blumenfeld ran his campaign with the idea of increasing accountability for all members of the education system — from the teachers to the principals to the school board members — and improving teaching quality with more frequent and rigorous evaluations of teachers.
“I was a student in that district, and I saw the pretty uneven quality of education from classroom to classroom because there was not a whole lot of quality control by the management,” Blumenfeld said. “Evaluations wouldn’t happen for years and years and years and, when they did happen, teachers would only get perfect evaluations.”
Blumenfeld has demonstrated his commitment to education reform on campus as one of the founding members of Students for Education Reform, and SFER president Emily Myerson ’12 said that Blumenfeld “has always been a great leader and a huge role model for everyone on SFER.”
She added that Blumenfeld’s experience with the district makes him an ideal candidate since he had firsthand experience with the school system and will do what he knows is best for the students.
While Blumenfeld will have to juggle the commitments of being a school board member in California with his academic commitments at the University, he said his campaign work has shown him that this is possible.
“I’m going to continue to do what I’ve been doing for this whole campaign, where I’ve traveled between the district and campus several times, and I will continue to travel back and forth,” he said. “It’s all been working to pretty great effect this semester which I think was a pretty good test. Now I’ve had a few months to prove to myself and to the people of La Canada that it’s possible.”
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