“Rules must be obeyed.” ± Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA, in “The Winner Takes It All”
ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” article. It is an editorial by the editor.
In all my more than 50 years as a community journalist, I cannot recall any instance in which someone elected to office has had their seat declared vacant so quickly after the election.
Yet here we are.
The highly unusual story about former State Rep. Steven Johnson unraveled earlier this week when the Hopkins Board of Education voted to render empty the seat Johnson won on the school board in the Nov. 5 general election.
Hopkins Public Schools now is publishing a legal notice inviting applicants to make notice about their interest in the position. The deadline for applying is Jan. 8 and the current board will review candidates and make a selection later next month.
So essentially, this development transforms an elected office into an appointed one.
Johnson apparently failed to officially accept the position to which he was elected in the time frame specified by state law. I admit I didn’t even know this requirement existed. Perhaps Johnson didn’t know either.
Regardless, Johnson served in the State Legislature for six years and probably should have been aware of the legal requirements.
So is it possible, as someone has suggested, that he doesn’t want to be a member of the Hopkins school board? Or was it just an oversight?
Some may contend that Johnson is unfairly being denied a seat to which he was duly elected because of a cumbersome bureaucratic stipulation. Johnson became somewhat notorious for not playing by the rules while a state legislator who refused to wear a mask during the Covid pandemic.
Johnson is a graduate of South Christian High School and Hillsdale College, neither of which are public school systems. And he publicly has contended that public schools are “grooming” students.
It should be interesting to see if Johnson is one of the applicants for the now declared vacant seat, and if he is, what school board members will do in making its selection of a colleague.
