18 Years Old And Running For Office- Part two
Charlie Comfort turns in his nomination papers to Chad Vink, Business Manager for the Oskaloosa Community School
Editors Note: The views and opinions expressed in this editorial are not necessarily the views or opinions of Osky News
Oskaloosa, Iowa- As I said in part one of this story, when I decided to run for school board, I knew that I could win, but I was going to have to work hard. I made my final decision to run for School Board back in March and I quietly began to plan for a quick and tough campaign. I began to look at the filing periods and try to calculate how many weeks I would have to campaign. Filing for the School Board Election didn’t begin until July 11th and would end on August 4th at 5 PM.
I felt kind of cheated as a School Board candidate because the election was going to be on September 13th. By the time I would find out if I had any competition, I would have a month until the election. The way I saw it, there was little room for error. Everything we had planned had to be implemented at the exact time set otherwise it would be too late.
From 2007-2010, I was involved in several different political campaigns. I had several Facebook friends of people whom I had gotten to know here locally when they were working for various campaigns. I sent them messages and asked them for ideas for my campaign and I also sent them some thoughts and ideas I had for it. They sent me response and I tweaked my campaign plan to fit it to their opinions. After a few weeks of working on my plan, I had a final project. I printed it off and showed it to a couple of volunteers. We were all in agreement that it would work.
After I had this done, I took a bit of a break. I set a day for when I would begin collecting signatures. I would not start before that because, in my opinion, I thought it would be too early. I started to get my nomination papers ready and I found out how many signatures I would need to get on the ballot. I needed 50 signatures. The signatures could come from anywhere in the school district. I misunderstood the Auditor’s office when they told me this and I thought that I could only get signatures from my own ward.
In mid May before I graduated, I began collecting signatures for my campaign. I had a friend helping me too. I would go door to door and introduce myself and tell them what I was running for and how I needed to get on the ballot. I hated doing that because I knew that it was going to be a pain to get people to sign a nomination petition for someone they didn’t know. I also knew that people would say that they didn’t have any kids in the school system so they weren’t going to vote. I always got a little upset inside when someone told me that because to me, they were being very ignorant.
What most people didn’t realize was that when it comes to property taxes, they actually paid more to the school district in taxes than to the city. Even when I explained that to them, they still didn’t care. I was very nice to them, no matter what I thought of them at that time. Slowly, but surely, we started to get the number of signatures we needed. We officially passed the 50 signature mark in the beginning of June. At this same time, I also started to hear rumors that the person I was preparing to run against, was not going to run for re-election. I was totally confused as to what was going to happen, but nevertheless, I kept planning my campaign.
At that same time, I was looking for a campaign manager. I knew several people personally who had been involved in local campaigns, so I started to ask them. However, I had not expected the number of rejections I was going to get. One by one, they told me that they could not commit to be my campaign manager because of work and family constraints. I was very understanding as I knew this was going to be a problem when I went to find a manager. In mid-June, when I was expressing my frustration to another friend of mine, he said “Well have you asked me yet?” I paused because I was completely blown away from the essential offer. They told me that if I could not find anyone that they would be my campaign manager. About a week later, I asked them to be my manager and after a couple of day so thinking, they said yes.
We immediately started off by going around to various spots and taking pictures of myself for campaign literature and my campaign Facebook page. 300 pictures later, we had a couple of good ones to use. By the time we had all of this done, I was headed to Washington DC on vacation. For that one week, I kept my mind almost completely off of the up and coming campaign, and didn’t worry about it. That would be the last I had a week like that. We got back with two weeks until the first day to file. For those next two weeks, I was finalizing some more parts of my campaign.
On July 11th, I filed my nomination papers and officially became a candidate for Oskaloosa School Board.
