By Thane Grauel

WESTPORT — The League of Women Voters held a debate Thursday night for Board of Education candidates, who showed clear differences of opinion on several topics, including controversial books in school libraries and initiatives including equity.

The discussion was moderated by Laurel Anderson of the Greater Bridgeport League of Women Voters.

Four candidates are running for three seats on the board in the Nov. 7 election. They are: Chairwoman Lee Goldstein and board Secretary Neil Phillips, Democrats; and Republican newcomers Camilo Riano and Jamie Fitzgerald.

The first question concerned the candidates’ qualifications to serve on the board.

“Westport has been my home for the past 30-plus years,” Phillips said. “My wife Kim and I have raised our twin boys here, who are both students at Staples.”

He said he’s the principal in a law firm that focuses on trusts and estates. He was elected three times to the Representative Town Meeting and chaired its Ordinance and Education committees.

“This experience offered a great leadership opportunity where I collaborated frequently with many stakeholders in town government, the school district and the community.” Phillips said.

He was appointed to an open seat of the school board in 2018.

“Little did I know that this was going to be the start of a very tumultuous time the district due to the sudden closure of CMS two weeks into the school year,” Phillips said.

After leaving the panel, he was appointed again to fill a vacancy in 2021. He said he has been through many budget cycles and “have maintained a forward-looking approach to the issues at hand.”

Riano told the crowd he’s lived in Westport almost six years. He has an engineering degree and MBAs in economics, political science and computer engineering.

“I came to the United States from Colombia to do my MBA at Vanderbilt, and also because I really love this country,” he said. “I love the ideas that are behind its creation.”

He said when visiting Boston as a child, “I basically decided to become an American. Maybe I was an American already, my passion for freedom, for liberty, independence, all these characteristics.

“I’m a professional project manager and I have the international view, but of all that, I think the best qualification I have is I have four kids,” Riano said. “They all go the primary school Saugatuck Elementary. I have a stake on this race — the quality of the schools affects me personally and my family.”

Fitzgerald said she has lived in Westport more than eight years.

“I am a wife and a mother,” she said. “I am a professional. I have spent decades in a professional training and education sector, as well as education technology. I also have been a community advocate and built my professional life with a focus and passion on student success and on workforce development.”

She said she majored in business and marketing at Xavier University. She has served on boards at her church and a former company, she said.

“I have been active in the community, in the classrooms, teachers, PTA, as well as the sports within Westport,” Fitzgerald said.

“I’m looking to preserve the curriculum and to focus on the continued success and transparency for parents and our students to thrive to becoming adults, and as individuals who can be very successful in the world today,” she said.

Goldstein has served on the school board since 2019 and as chair since 2021.

“I come to this very traditionally through PTA leadership,” she said. “I was the PTA co-president of Coleytown Middle when we closed the school due to water infiltration. We worked tirelessly to ensure the building was renovated as new, and that the students were accommodated — albeit squished — when we merged the two middle schools.”

“Another task, now that I’m chair, is to see that while we’re dealing with issues as they arise, we’re also maintaining Westport’s stellar reputation,” Goldstein said.

“Education is my profession,” she said. “I’m a high school English teacher, my degree is from Yale and my teaching certificate from Sacred Heart.”

She said she previously served on the school board in Bedford, N.Y.

“On a personal note, I’m married, we have two wonderful daughters who are in college and are thriving graduates of Westport public schools,” Goldstein said.

Anderson asked about critical issues facing Westport’s schools.

“I think the most critical issue that the Westport system is experiencing is the decay on the quality of education,” Riano said.

“It’s very interesting to see that my opponents always say that we’re No. 1, we’re No. 1,” he said. He said Staples might be a top-rated school, but others in town are not.

“I did a little bit of research and I found out that our primary schools are not No. 1, not No. 5, not No. 10,” he said. “Actually, Saugatuck Elementary, in the rankings I was able to get from U.S. News and World Report, is 56 in the state of Connecticut. Kings Highway is 50.”

Riano also mentioned a lack of long-term vision and depth in conversation. “The leadership is not really exercising the oversight function.”

“First and foremost is the academic rigor,” said Fitzgerald. “We are seeing a demise and a shift with the equity plan, with the DEI, with the DEI discussions, with the social and emotional learning.”

“In my day, the social and emotion learning were called soft skills,” she said. “I worked my way through high school, I worked and paid 100 percent for my college, that’s where I learned my soft skills.”

Instead of DEI, she said, the focus should be on academics.

“Let’s keep the discrimination out of the classrooms,” she said. “Let’s teach history. Let’s teach civics.

Goldstein said the question dovetailed with the strategic plan. She said there are three pillars in it.

“One is about student well-being,” she said. “We as a district and a people, we cannot avert our eyes and pretend that the kids are alright. There’s a real crisis in our schools, there’s a mental health crisis.”

She said she was at a meeting of the Aspetuck Health District where it was mentioned, “Over half our kids are persistently sad and hopeless — persistent means 15 days a month. This is real and we need to deal with it in our schools.”

Regarding soft skills, Goldstein said that in her day they were called people skills.

“We are helping kids be more empathetic, more collaborative, better in groups,” she said.

“On the academic side of things, which we are always looking at, we are teaching children to identify and solve problems, to be engaged in their own learning and have it be relative to the world that they’re going to inherit.”

Phillips said students’ mental health is the top issue for him.

“This is not just a local issue, this is not a state issue or national issue, but it’s an international issue, and that’s not going away,” he said.

“I dispute any claim that the academics have suffered here, quite the opposite,” Phillips said. “You can’t have academic rigor without addressing mental health.

He said another issue is infrastructure, as highlighted by the Coleytown problems.

“Deferred maintenance is not a strategy,” he said, mentioning the 10-year capital plan.

Finally, he said, “budget is always an issue for us, and doing more with less is always what we face every budget season.”

Another question separating the candidates from the two political parties was book bans in schools, and procedures related to challenges.

Phillips discussed the process for challenging books in schools, and the timeline for a challenge to books in the Staples High School library, which eventually was withdrawn earlier this year.

“The topic itself on the books covered an LGBTQ theme, that was not brought here by the Westport schools,” he said. “That issue is out in the public for consumption, so it was really something that the schools were wrapping their heads around to address with our student body.”

Riano said this is an example of a case where people want to promote books that they say have been banned.

“The most important thing that happened in this case is that the librarians of Staples High School put a sign saying these are the books that they don’t want you to read, ask us about them and ask us why,” he said. “It becomes a political thing.”

“It becomes a way of saying everything is permitted …” Riano said. “There is a big difference between banning books and parents complaining because the books are not appropriate for the kids.”

“The materials in the school aren’t about banning books,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s about age-appropriate content, and removing explicitly disturbing passages about sex.”

“Frankly, it’s a perverted debate,” she said. “School librarians decide to stock sexually explicit books frequently far more obscene than what is necessary. Parents object to the presence of the pornographic material in the children’s school libraries, and then the American education establishment and the Board of Education, specifically the Democrats, and the media, try to tar parents who are concerned about the sexual content.”

Goldstein said the books that were challenged are in the high school library, not any other schools.

“You said pornographic, categorically there is no pornography in any of our schools,” Goldstein said. “There’s books with mature content, and that’s what people ask me about, what they do have concerns about. There’s books with content that makes us uncomfortable.”

“Young adult literature has gotten increasingly mature over the past few years,” she said. “And not just sex — violence, war, drug use. Topics that we used to think of as solely adult purview are now in young adult literature. Why? Because that’s the world our kids know, that’s the society they live in.”

“As a school system we cannot just avert our eyes and pretend that’s not true,” Goldstein said.

Thane Grauel grew up in Westport and has been a journalist in Fairfield County and beyond for 35 years. Reach him at editor@westportjournal.com. Learn more about us here.