They don’t advertise it in their publicly facing campaign materials, but both Dina Ferchmin and Robin Clark have personal grievances with CCS.
To be fair, that's kind of a historically traditional reason that people run for school board. Someone encounters something that they dislike and then runs to make things better. But the nature of Dina Ferchmin’s grievance is cause for significant alarm, and Robin Clark’s grievance is weird in that she actually claims the school handled the issue she encountered nearly perfectly.
Dina Ferchmin’s Grievance
As mentioned on the page about Dina Ferchmin’s efforts to push her values into Carmel High School, she used to be intimately involved with an anti-abortion club. In 2016, that club threatened to sue the school system.
At issue was the removal of a large anti-abortion display. CHS had a policy that student clubs could put up approved signs in the cafeteria. To avoid clubs trying to one up each other by putting up enormous displays or papering the walls with tons of smaller ones, the policy was that a club could put up 10 ‘large posters’ or 15 smaller signs. Here’s a copy of the sign policy from the time.
The club made 10 signs that met the criteria for large posters, got them each individually approved and then glued them all together and put up their display that was 10x larger than what was supposed to be allowed. Here’s what that looked like.
Honestly, I can’t fault the kids for this. I went to a small, evangelical high school and we lived to find and exploit loopholes in the rules. I think it goes hand-in-hand with being a teenager in general, but especially for those with very legalistic, hyper-religious upbringings, which I’m sure are more common than typical within an anti-abortion club.
That said, if a group of us were trying to skirt the rules in such a way and we had a ‘club mom’ overseeing what we were doing, they would’ve shot that down in a heartbeat. Dina Ferchmin seems to have taken a different approach.
CHS took the sign down. There are differing accounts of the reasons given, but the enormous collage of signs clearly violated the intent, and possibly the letter, of the rules. Then, rather than take the loss and move on to finding another loophole to exploit, the club retained counsel and threatened to sue. Again, this seems wild to me. When I was a kid, parents didn’t generally run to the defense of kids who were finding creative ways to spit in the face of authority. I suppose we would’ve thought it was pretty cool to have someone like Dina Ferchmin on our side at that age.
There’s not a lot of great reporting on what happened next. The club’s legal representation claimed its members were brought into a meeting with the school and asked to sign an agreement not to sue. I'd classify that as an exaggeration at best, given that the form was made public, only asked for officers' signatures and didn't mention anything about suing.
Eventually the school tried to duck the whole thing by letting the anti-abortion club remake the sign and hang it up for two weeks. At which point they were promptly sued by the ACLU on behalf of a new pro-choice club that wanted to put up the same type of enormous display for two weeks.
Again, I can’t blame the kids for any of this, but Dina Ferchmin’s grievance with CCS and proximity to threatening to sue the district is another pretty strong reason she has no business being on the school board.
Robin Clark’s Grievance
Robin Clark’s past grievance with the school is a lot less, well, everything?
In the fall of 2022, her high-school student was in a class where the teacher sent out a Google Form asking students a variety of questions to get to know them better. Included in the questions were 1) what the student would like to be called, 2) if it was ok to call them that in communications with their parents and 3) for a personal email address.
I feel like it’s fairly obvious that number three, whatever the intent, was a bad idea and shouldn’t have been asked.
The other two seem fine. While physically abusive parents are a small minority, they’re out there. And kids have been beat for stupider reasons than going by a nickname, middle name, etc. And yes, I recognize that given Robin Clark’s apparent anti-LGBTQ views, her mind probably jumped straight to trans kids, though it didn’t initially occur to me when I heard her share this story.
Incensed at what her child had been asked, she started contacting the teacher, principal, school board and superintendent. The principal and superintendent met with her, had the teacher change the form and let the rest of CCS teachers know not to ask for student’s personal information in that way.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. And Robin Clark is still talking about it to people she wants to vote for her, sounding aggrieved, and calling her communication with the principal and superintendent a parent’s “heroic efforts.” It’s a weird thing to dwell on for two years and, at least to me, is not indicative of the temperament required to serve people you may thoroughly disagree with, which is something pretty much anyone working in a school needs.
If not Carmel Excellence, then who?
If you're proud to live in one of the top school districts in the state...
If you appreciate and support our teachers...
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I hope you'll join me in opposing Carmel Excellence and voting for Jon Shapiro and Kris Wheeler.
Disclaimer:
As mentioned on the homepage, this site contains both facts and my opinions on those facts. I believe the difference is quite obvious, but if you question which category any particular statement falls into, please reach out via the Contact page and I will be glad to clarify.
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