The three candidates running for two positions on the Bedford Board of Education addressed voters took part in a candidate forum held on Thursday, October 17, at Bedford High School.
For about 90 minutes, incumbent candidates Joseph V. Mestnik and Barbara Patterson, of Oakwood, and challenger Eva Boyington, of Bedford Heights, made opening and closing statements and answered questions.
The candidate forum followed the system used by the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland, which served as the main sponsor of the forum. Attendees wrote questions on index cards provided by volunteers; pages took the questions to a table of screeners who consolidated and organized questions, and the screeners then passed the questions to a moderator. The moderator, Susan Murnane, a past president of the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland, then put the questions to the candidates.
The audience showed appreciation for this opportunity to learn about the candidates. At one point in the evening, a misunderstanding about the ending time led to an announcement that the next question would be the last; when Murnane corrected that to say that there would be another 30 minutes of questions, she received applause from the audience, which kept up a steady stream of questions throughout the evening. Asked at the end whether they believed this type of forum would be useful in future elections, the audience responded again with applause.
Now in its hundredth year, the League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan organization supporting citizenship activities. With the League as principal sponsor, the event was co-sponsored by the Bedford Council of PTAs, the Friends of the Southeast Library, and the HHL Chapter of the American Association of University Women.
Election Day is November 5, and mail voting has already begun.
