Senate Majority Leader Curtis S. Bramble of Provo thinks Utah's political parties could make school board races more competitive. He is sponsoring legislation that would have candidates for state and local school boards go through the same selection process as candidates in partisan races.

Senate Bill 194 already has all but two senators of both parties as co-sponsors, guaranteeing it a quick trip to passage.

Bramble said the rationale is to get more people involved in the process, not to turn the school boards into partisan battlefields. Currently, state school board candidates are chosen under a governor's nominating committee process; local candidates file to run in nonpartisan races, with voters narrowing the field through primaries.

The bill, Bramble said, "will get the major political parties involved. There will be an incentive for both parties to field candidates through their own elections ... It's an incentive for participation, not partisanship driving it."

States with partisan school boards are scarce as hen's teeth. Georgia is one of the few. Oddly enough, as Bramble attempts to move Utah to a partisan structure, the Georgia legislature is considering a bill that would make its school boards nonpartisan.

Go figure.

Utah's own state school board voted 14-1 to oppose Bramble's bill, and local school district officials see it as injecting partisan politics where it has no place.

It is true that political parties have mechanisms in place for recruiting candidates for office. And we agree that getting more people involved in public education is a worthy goal. But are Utah's political parties the best vehicles for making this happenfi After all, they have a pretty poor track record for creating competitive races. In the 2006 election, there were 12 partisan races in Utah County that were uncontested, compared to seven school board races that had only one candidate on the ballot.

It's hard to see how having the parties select candidates would improve participation, especially in Utah County. Here, getting someone to run as anything other than a Republican is like recruiting a suicide bomber. At least the bomber hopes for paradise, which would be hard for Democrats, Libertarians and others to achieve under Bramble's bill. More likely, the Republican grip on the system will just get stronger.

Partisan races, as they are conducted in Utah, can actually put regular people farther away from candidates. All a candidate needs to win the party's nomination is 60 percent of the delegate vote at a political convention. Republican races have been decided all too often by convention delegates -- not by the voters -- in cases where there are no challengers from other parties.

Who's to say that ordinary voters would have voted the same as the turbo-politicos at a conventionfi

Having said that, we're not certain that a party system would be so horrible. Neither are we convinced that it would be an improvement. The gut reaction of many people (other than politicians) is that partisanship simply doesn't belong in a school system.

Is there really a Republican or Democrat stance on whether Provo School District needs to upgrade its buildings for seismic safetyfi Do Republicans and Democrats have positions on whether the Nebo School District should keep sixth-graders in elementary or middle schoolfi Do parties have positions on how the Alpine School District teaches math classesfi

Such issues are party-neutral.

The more conservative approach is to leave schools in party-neutral hands unless some clear benefit can be demonstrated for changing the order of the universe. We don't see such a clear benefit. The only certain outcome is that politicians will get more power.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A5.

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