Garrett Goebel and Peg Bumgardner Announce Run for District 1 School Board Seat

Decatur Metro | | 9:03 am

The race is on!

Yesterday, current Student Leadership Team chair Peg Bumgardner announced that she would run for the District 1 School Board seat coming up for reelection in the fall, currently held by John Ahmann.  Bumgardner posted a note announcing her candidacy and detailing her experience on the CSD parents message board yesterday…

Bumgardner, a resident of Decatur since 1996, is a Renfroe Middle School Leadership Team (SLT) parent member and current SLT Chair until October 2011 when her three-year term expires.

She looks forward to sharing her SLT experiences with the broader Decatur community, including why her bid for a Board of Education position is a natural step from her work on one of the city’s innovative school governance teams.

Shortly thereafter I received a note from friends of Garrett Goebel, stating that he would also run for the seat.  Here’s part of the announcement I received this morning…

Garrett has four children enrolled in City Schools of Decatur schools, ranging between kindergarten and ninth grade. He has long been known as an active and insightful voice in the CSD community. Garrett currently serves on the Fifth Avenue School Leadership Team. At Clairemont Elementary, he tutors and runs the chess club while maintaining his involvement with various committees at Decatur High School.

Garrett became known to many CSD families for his thoughtful discussion and detailed analyses of the district’s demographic data during the 2010 redistricting, and he came within 81 votes of winning a School Board seat in 2009.

I have reached about to the incumbent John Ahmann to see if he will be running for reelection.

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11 Responses to “Garrett Goebel and Peg Bumgardner Announce Run for District 1 School Board Seat”

  1. Judd says:
    August 9, 2011 at 10:16 am

    Good candidates! I don’t know Peg, but Garrett really is an amazing asset. Always thoughtful, balanced, open, a real font of information. And he’s long been attentive to precisely the issues that seem to have emerged as the big challenges confronting CSD.

    DM, I assume you’ll be working on means for us to begin asking questions of the candidates?

  2. RenfroeMom says:
    August 9, 2011 at 12:15 pm

    Please post the link to the CSD Parents message board — I assume this is a yahoo or similar group but didn’t know there was one. Really wish there was one for every school, would be so helpful!
    thanks!

    • Karass says:
      August 9, 2011 at 12:24 pm

      There is a Yahoo group called CSD Parents–it’s just an informal Yahoo group, not sponsored by a school or CSD. Not sure if that is the board being referenced above. Often school PTO/PTAs also have a listserv or Yahoo group, although I think websites are starting to replace them.

    • Tom Stubbs says:
      August 9, 2011 at 1:41 pm

      Here is the link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/csdparents/ . If you don’t have a yahoo id, I think you have to create one. Then search for the csdparents group by that name. You can then ask to join and usually you get a response approving your request in less than an hour. You have to ask to join because it used to get a lot of spam from email accounts that had nothing to do with our schools. In the space that asks why you want to join, include a sentence that says something non-generic (such as, “I have a kid at Renfroe”) so it’s easy to tell yours is a legitimate email address.

  3. Decatur Metro says:
    August 9, 2011 at 3:39 pm

    John Ahmann tells me – as he told Patch – that he’s not ready to say whether he’s running for reelection.

    Sounds like he plans to announce at tonight’s board meeting.

  4. Marty says:
    August 9, 2011 at 3:54 pm

    We should point out that the Patch is somewhat misleading. Garrett ran a great campaign and almost knocked off an incumbent and don’t interpret this as taking anything away from that. But … he did not lose by 81 votes as the article mentions. He lost by 160 votes.

    http://www.decaturga.com/index.aspx?page=352

    • Pat says:
      August 9, 2011 at 4:47 pm

      I think if 81 votes moved from Mark to Garrett is the implication… But you’re right 161 additional votes for Garrett would have made a difference too.

  5. Marty says:
    August 9, 2011 at 6:56 pm

    Just for the record, here were the results from the 2009 Dist 1 School Board race:

    Garrett Goebel 651 (44.5%)
    Marc J. Wisniewski (Incumbent) 811 (55.5%)

  6. Neighbor says:
    August 10, 2011 at 7:32 am

    John Ahmann announced on June 6, at the school board meeting, he was seeking re-election.

    Has something happened to think otherwise?

    • Karass says:
      August 10, 2011 at 8:59 am

      Decatur Patch reports that John Ahmann declined to discuss his plans at last night’s Board meeting.