Deborah Owens-Fink is a creationist up for re-election to the Ohio school board. She is well funded but is facing opposition from three candidates. One of these is
Tom Sawyer who has been a teacher, mayor, legislator and Congressman and who would uphold strong standards for teaching science.
I am copying below the fold an email I received (through a listserv) from Randy Mitchell, a Professor of Biology at the University of Akron which describes the situation.
Although there are lots of demands on your money, a school board race shouldn't be all that expensive to win (see below). Ohio has been flirting with destroying science education for years. A good way to prevent that is to strip creationists of power on the school boards.
Dear Fellow Scientists,
[ed. and anyone else who cares if our students learn science instead of religion in science classes]
In 2003, our community pulled together in response to an attack on the
teaching of evolution in Ohio. We electronically circulated a petition
that was signed by over 6,800 scientists across our country. Many of you
also wrote passionate comments about how this 10th grade "critique of
evolution" lesson plan was just flat out bad science. We were able to
take those signatures and comments to the Ohio Board of Education and
show the moderates on the board the strength of support for the teaching
of evolution within the scientific community. Unfortunately, at the time
there were not enough moderates on the Board to overturn the lesson plan
& it narrowly passed.
The architect of that anti-science lesson plan, Deborah Owens-Fink, is
up for re-election on Nov. 7th. About one month ago, we again
electronically circulated a similar request for help to our scientific
community, this time requesting a small donation to help us to replace
Owens-Fink with a pro-science candidate (former congressman Tom Sawyer)
for the Ohio Board of Education. We assumed that if ~50% of those 6,800
people would donate $5-10, we would be in a strong position to get our
pro-science message out & counter what would likely be a well funded Owens-
Fink campaign.
Unfortunately, our community has yet to pull through for us this time.
We have only received 191 donations, & over half of these have been from
non-scientists concerned with the state of science education in our
country. Owens-Fink has raised three times as much money as we have,
with her average donor giving over $1000. She has been sending out more
mailings & buying more advertising than we have been able to afford.
We would like to ask you to reconsider helping us out. If you would
simply go to www.votetomsawyer.com and donate $10 and then pass this
message to a handfull of your colleagues (much the same as you did with
our 2003 petition), we will be able to afford the mailings we need to
get our word out in these crucial final 2 weeks of the campaign. We have
the chance to depose the single most effective promoter of Intelligent
Design in Ohio, and for a mere $10, you can help us to eliminate the
need to have to circulate the NEXT petition to once again implore the
moderates on the Ohio BOE to reject the next anti-science lesson plan
that Owens-Fink will assuredly propose if she is re-elected!
Thank you for your help,
Steve Weeks
Randy Mitchell
Peter Niewiarowski
Francisco Moore
Todd Blackledge
Rich Londraville
PS please act soon - the Election will be November 7, and we need to be
active well ahead of then.