School Board candidate Malachy Sandie, a sitting trustee, recently raised eyebrows with some very partisan political rhetoric. Asked by The Coronado News to address board governance and transparency, he answered with what sounds like a recitation of national Democratic Party talking points.
The paper asked all four candidates two fair questions: what their top three priorities are, and what is “the biggest issue today in Coronado public schools.”
Sandie’s first priority was to “champion public education” against Project 2025 and a January 2025 presidential executive order (14191), which he claimed seeks to redirect taxpayer money into private and religious schools. Neither Project 2025 (a think tank proposal) nor that order has been shown to cut a dollar of CUSD’s Title I, IDEA, or Impact Aid.
Asked for the single biggest issue, he wrote that it was “difficult to narrow it down to one or two,” then listed eight, including “White Christian Nationalism,” “book banning,” “the vilification of science,” “gun violence,” and “climate change,” which he blamed on the nation having “retreated away from renewable energy and back to fossil fuels.”
Those are highly partisan answers to the question asked about the biggest issue facing Coronado schools.
The other three candidates, Peggy Duncan, Kaye Schneider, and Alexia Palacios-Peters, kept their answers inside the district: attracting and retaining the best teachers for our children, rebuilding district budget reserves, the lack of air conditioning in classrooms, technology and cell-phone policies, etc.
Sandie addressed several of those same issues. However, there’s a pattern that is a problem. A trustee’s job is policy, budget, and oversight of the superintendent. It is not a platform for espousing one’s partisan worldview.
When the question seeks to identify the biggest issue in Coronado public schools, listing eight issues (most of them hot-button political and cultural issues) and then declaring that “this week our biggest issue is climate change” tells voters that Sandie’s first filter is ideology.
Coronado voters do not elect a trustee to be partisan. They elect trustees to govern a small district and deliver academic excellence. In my opinion, candidates should leave national political ideology out of local campaigns for office.
Joyce Murphy is a Coronado resident.
