One Little Book

A school board race here in Miami may be decided by the book.

The genesis of the District 6 race for the Miami-Dade School Board -- one that involves two candidates, tens of thousands of likely voters and nearly $100,000 in campaign contributions -- is a 32-page children's book.

The book, Vamos a Cuba, has consumed the school system for months and looked, at one point, as if it could consume the political career of incumbent board member Agustín Barrera.

Barrera outraged a number of small but vocal hard-line Cuban exile groups in April when he voted against a bill that would have aborted the district's appeals process and immediately removed the controversial book from school libraries.

In June, attorney Manny Anon was introduced at a news conference in Little Havana as the man who could unseat Barrera in the nonpartisan race.

A few days later, the appeals process reached the board, and Barrera cast a deciding vote for the book's removal. By that time, however, Anon had broadened his target to include Superintendent Rudy Crew, whom Barrera has supported firmly.

"It started with the book issue, but it morphed into bigger issues of anti-Rudy Crew," said Anon, a former Miami assistant city attorney who now works for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. "The Hispanics don't trust Rudy Crew."

But Anon -- who returned to Miami this spring after a year as a military lawyer in Afghanistan as part of his Army reserve duty -- has been disappointed by sparse support from the heavily Hispanic electorate of the Coral Gables-South Miami district.

He has raised only $4,000 and loaned himself another $10,000 to compete with Barrera's $80,000 bankroll. The neighborhood's prominent politicians have done little for Anon's cause, and he fears the most passionate exiles have been consumed by the turmoil over Fidel Castro's transfer of power in Cuba.

"It's going slow," Anon said this week over breakfast at Versailles. "They never really promised me money, and I understand that. A lot of these people are poor."

Without the righteous indignation, however, Anon has done little to contrast himself with Barrera. They both support the state's class-size amendment, both oppose asking voters for a new school-construction tax now, and both would consider asking for such a tax in a few years.

There's some polling going on in this race -- I got called last week. I assume that it was from the Barrera campaign since it looks like Mr. Anon hasn't raised enough money for bus fare. I let the poller know in no uncertain terms that not only would anyone who was in favor of banning the book not get my vote, but I would actively campaign against such a candidate.

Whether or not Vamos a Cuba is an issue in the campaign indicates how easily the voters -- and therefore the candidates -- are easily distracted by noise rather than substance. It's not like we don't have more important things to deal with in our schools, but chanting street demonstrations by people who have no sense of irony (many who are against the book are Cuban exiles who came here seeking freedom of speech) makes for better coverage on the local news than the inside baseball of class-size reduction and millage assessments.

As a side note, the biographies of both candidates indicate that neither of them have any experience whatsoever in education, either as teachers or administrators; one is an architect and the other is a lawyer. In fact, Barrera won his election in 2002 running against Anita Sandler, a thirty-plus year veteran teacher and administrator and once Teacher of the Year. Call me crazy, but I think it might not be a bad idea for some members of the school board to have some familiarity with the day-to-day life in the public schools other than the years they might have spent as a student.