Flip the Board!
After the April 10 school board meeting, three parents, Lisa Olson, Nathalie Adams, and Steven Brown, approached Kenny Preston in the parking lot. They were appalled by the scorched-earth campaign the superintendent and school board had waged against a teenage student journalist, and as they talked, they all reached the same conclusion: they needed to run a slate of candidates in the upcoming school board elections to flip the board and oust Runcie.
The first time Kenny brought this idea to Andy, Andy wasn’t sold. But two weeks later, at a barbecue at Joe Valko’s house, Kenny pitched it again. Andy said, “Okay, kid. Less talking, more doing.”
There were about a dozen other Parkland parents at the barbecue, and within minutes everyone started to strategize. Maybe Joe’s wife could run. Maybe Kim Krawczyk could run. Kenny wanted April Schentrup to run. But April told Kenny she was nervous about retaliation from the district. (Kenny had a hard time believing that the district would retaliate against an elementary school principal and a grieving mother, but this was before he learned that the district had docked her pay.)
They approached other parents of victims, and Ryan Petty and Lori Alhadeff expressed interest in running. Within a week, Andy, Kenny, Ryan, and Lori met to form plans for a slate of candidates with a clear message: safety, accountability, and new leadership.
They’d need at least a 5-4 majority on the board to get anything done. The election was in four months, on August 28, so they had no time to waste. There were only two board members willing to criticize the superintendent: Nora Rupert and Robin Bartleman. They needed at least three more. Jim Silvernale, who worked for the teachers union, had a well-funded campaign to oust incumbent Ann Murray and appeared critical of Runcie. Lori could run in the district representing Parkland against incumbent Abby Freedman (who ended up dropping out shortly after Lori announced). Ryan could run for the countywide at-large seat against incumbent Donna Korn. But who could run in District 6 against incumbent Laurie Rich Levinson?
Kim was open to running. But she had recently moved to neighboring Palm Beach County, so she would need to establish a residence in Broward to run. Andy thought about Richard Mendelson, who had sent him a Facebook message saying that he taught Andy’s son Huck and wanted to do anything he could to help. Mendelson had taught at MSD for thirteen years and was now a professor of institutional and organizational psychology at Keiser University. As an overweight, bearded, bald guy, he didn’t look like the most electable school board candidate. But when Andy met with Rich, it became clear that no one would work harder. It would be a battle, but there was no doubt: Rich would stop at nothing to win and make a difference.
Why Rich Ran
Aaron Feis was one of Rich’s best friends. After Aaron died on Valentine’s Day trying to take down the shooter with his bare hands, Rich knew he had to do something. Because at the darkest moment in Rich’s life, Aaron had been a beacon of hope. Rich’s son Jake was born six weeks premature in 2008, three months after his wife, Becky, had lost her job as a teacher in a charter school. Rich’s health insurer declined to add Becky and Jake to his plan, and after three weeks in the hospital Becky went home with a frail infant and nearly $300,000 in medical debt. Jake’s specialized formula alone cost $1,600, about half of Rich’s monthly income. Rich had already taken out substantial student loans to pursue his PhD, and the housing market collapse had put his home underwater. The family had no choice but to move in with Becky’s parents.
On moving day, Aaron helped Rich with the heavy lifting. After everything Rich owned was packed into a U-Haul van, he went back inside to do a final sweep. He walked upstairs, looked at the room he had thought Jake would grow up in, looked down at the hardwood floors he had installed with his own hands, and collapsed in tears.
He was moving in with his wife’s parents. He would never own a home. He would never be able to do better for his son than his parents did for him. He couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. Within two minutes, Rich heard Aaron coming up the stairs. Rich looked up at Aaron’s giant silhouette in the doorway and tried to pull himself together. Aaron stood there silently for a few moments, his eyes inscrutable behind the sunglasses he never took off. Then he extended his hand to Rich.
Rich cried out, “My life is a total failure. There’s no coming back from this.” Aaron grabbed Rich, pulled him up, gave him a tight bear hug, and whispered, “You’ve had to fight for everything your whole life. Sometimes when you fight, you get knocked down. You got knocked down hard this time. But when you’re knocked down, you have a choice: stay down or get up. You’re going to choose to get up. Because that’s what you do. So, get up.” Rich got up. He went to the bathroom to splash some water on his face, walked down the stairs and out the door, and with his head held high kept moving forward.
A few days after Aaron’s funeral, Rich sent Andy a message on Facebook to say that he wanted to do anything he could to help. When Andy met him, each sensed in the other a kindred spirit with an iron will. When Andy asked Rich to run against Laurie Rich Levinson, Rich said he was all in. All summer, he knocked on doors, wearing Aaron’s MSD hat.
Rich vs. Rich
There could hardly have been a greater contrast between two candidates in terms of background and privilege than between Rich Mendelson and Laurie Rich Levinson.
Rich Mendelson
Rich’s mom, Carol, met his dad, Steven Mendelson, in 1975 when they were both teachers at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, New York. Rich was born in 1978 and his family moved to Broward County in 1986. Carol and Steven could make ends meet, but when Rich entered middle school his parents got divorced. His mom took a second job, and Rich had to work part time to help her make the mortgage payments. As a teenager, Rich juggled school, a part-time job and effectively raising his little sister with his athletic passion, wrestling.
Rich went to college at San Francisco State, near where his extended family lived. He walked onto the wrestling team his freshman year and received a scholarship for his last three years. He still worked a part-time job on top of that to have spending money. After he graduated in 2002, he moved back to Broward County to follow in his parents’ footsteps and become a teacher at his alma mater, MSD.
Rich met his wife, Becky, in August 2006 and got married a little more than a year later. The next year, Rich enrolled in an online, part-time PhD program through Capella University in hopes of providing more financial stability and security for his family by someday finding a job that paid better than his high school teaching position. But after the crippling medical debt the family incurred with Jake’s birth in 2008, those hopes appeared to be dashed.
It took three jobs to keep his family afloat. Rich’s second job was as a graduate assistant for online courses at Capella University. After earning his PhD in 2011, he added a third job as an adjunct professor at Keiser University. He was also pursuing a part-time master’s degree through Broward’s PROPEL program, which he hoped would fast-track him into a position as an assistant principal.
Rich suffered another financial setback in 2012 when Superintendent Runcie’s teacher pay reforms took a huge bite out of his paycheck. Before Runcie’s reforms, high school teachers taught five classes. Additional classes or especially large class sizes meant larger pay. Runcie retained that workload but took the financial bonuses away. Rich took nearly a 30 percent hit to his paycheck even as he taught another forty students. Teaching was no longer economically viable for him. Rich sent out 863 job applications in 2013 and was offered a position as a full-time professor at Keiser in 2014. The salary afforded him a path to long-term solvency, and the flexible hours let him spend quality time with his wife and son. Eight years after Aaron told him to get up, Rich finally felt that he had his feet back under him.
His whole life, Rich Mendelson had to fight for everything he had.
Laurie Rich Levinson
Laurie’s mom, Nan, met her dad, David Rich, the heir to a large and successful carpet company, in college in 1960. Nan dropped out and Laurie was born in 1962. Nan became an active volunteer in Jewish philanthropy, eventually serving as president of the National Council of Jewish Women from 1996 to 1999. Then she entered politics, serving two terms in the Florida statehouse from 2000 to 2004 and as a Florida state senator from 2004 to 2012. She was among the most liberal Democratic members of the state Legislature and became minority leader in 2010. After a failed run for governor in 2014, Nan was elected to the Broward County Commission in 2016.1
Nan’s daughter Laurie describes herself as an experienced businesswoman. However, aside from a brief stint out of college at the now-defunct Abraham & Strauss department store, her business experience, as described on the Broward school district website, is largely confined to her family’s companies, which were shuttered in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Laurie Rich married Neil Levinson, a Broward school district lobbyist, and was elected to the school board in 2010 after raising $100,000, much of which came from her mother’s deep-pocketed political supporters (sugar producers, for example, don’t usually take an interest in school board races). In her 2018 campaign against Rich, she raised $73,000—more than half of which came from big-dollar donors to her mother’s county commissioner campaign. On the school board, she helped expand Broward’s debate program, became one of Superintendent Runcie’s biggest supporters, and earned a reputation in the community for being prickly and aloof.
After Mendelson and Levinson met with the Sun Sentinel editors to vie for the paper’s endorsement, the paper’s editorial board wrote:
Levinson was grumpy from the time she entered the room. Mendelson’s criticisms clearly irked her. She is unhappy with the Sun Sentinel, too.
“Every article written is negative,” she said.… Others tell us they see Levinson’s prickliness, too, including with constituents. Frankly, this choice was a tough call. But Levinson comes prepared for board meetings, is strong on facilities issues, attends meetings she doesn’t have to, and was active in public education before she ever ran for office. Mendelson is a good candidate, but would be stronger if he had been an advocate for public schools before seeking to join the board.2
Never mind that Rich had been a public school teacher at MSD. Still, Rich wasn’t surprised when he read the newspaper’s reluctant endorsement of Laurie. As the daughter of one of the most powerful Democrats in a two-to-one Democratic county, Rich figured that Laurie was perhaps literally entitled to it.
The Slate Falls Apart
Rich knew that the race would be an uphill battle. Nearly all of his friends were working-class, and he didn’t know more than a dozen people who could afford to donate a hundred dollars. Still, Rich figured he had one big thing going for him: he would be part of a united slate with a powerful message.
But at his first meeting with the other candidates on the slate, Rich felt uneasy. The meeting was run by two political consultants with whom Rich was unfamiliar, Eric Johnson and Sean Phillippi. Rich and Kenny recounted to us the following conversation.
“I don’t want to be disrespectful,” Rich said. “But I’ve introduced myself. Who are you and why are you here?”
They told him that they were political consultants who had done extensive local, state, and federal work.
Rich asked, “But how did you end up here?”
They repeated that they’d done extensive campaign work, especially in Broward.
“Who have you worked with in Broward?”
“Nan Rich.”
“Just so you know,” Rich looked around the table, “that’s the mother of my opponent.”
Sean said, “Look, if you were running against Nan Rich, I wouldn’t be here. I love her. She’s a great leader. But Laurie is not Nan. I don’t owe her loyalty.”
“Okay,” Rich said, “so you’re really going to work with me to defeat your boss’s daughter?”
They said that they would, but Rich didn’t believe them.
After the meeting, Rich told Kenny, “These guys are here to sabotage our slate.”
Kenny thought Rich was being dramatic and said, “Everyone is here to flip the board.”
“No,” Rich insisted, “they’re here to make sure we don’t. Lori is sure to win. They’ll put her victory on their résumés, take money from the PAC we set up, and work against Ryan and me. Then, when we lose, they’ll report back to Nan Rich, ‘Mission accomplished.’”
“Do you honestly think that?”
“Absolutely,” Rich nodded. “You know how much money flows through the school board. Our majority would pose a big political problem. I mean, last time anyone looked into the school board, people went to jail. They’re here to sabotage this.”
Kenny wasn’t sure whether to believe Rich, whom he suspected was prone to bluster and exaggeration. But after he filed his paperwork to run, Rich recalled, “Everybody disappeared. Lori wasn’t taking calls. Her campaign people wanted nothing to do with me.”
Then Kenny learned that, behind the scenes, the campaign consultants were trying to convince Lori and Ryan that a slate was a bad idea. Ryan recalled to us that his consultants put it to him quite plainly: “If you run as a slate against the superintendent and/or his policies, you will be branded as a racist and lose.” Lori and Ryan suspected that the consultants were correct. They were running to win, so they took the advice.
Kenny tried insisting that Ryan and Lori at least have Rich in the background when they announced their candidacy. But that didn’t happen, and when Lori and Ryan announced on May 15, the campaign consultants physically prevented Kenny from speaking to Lori before she took the microphone. The Miami Herald ran the headline, “Parents of Slain Parkland Teens Want to Work with Runcie on School Board.”3
After the announcement, Rich called Kenny. “I told you so,” Rich said. “I don’t know why you’re helping Lori. She’s going to win, and I need all the help I can get. I need you to help me convince Andy to throw everything he has behind me. I can’t raise any money myself. And he has the power to mobilize who knows how many volunteers.”
“All right,” Kenny said. “I’ll talk to Andy again. But I can do more for you from Lori’s campaign because I can help make sure that they distribute the PAC money to you.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Kenny. I’ll never see one cent of that PAC money. That’s how the consultants are paying themselves. They’ll marginalize you until they find an excuse to cut you out entirely.”
Kenny figured Rich was being too cynical. Lori had asked him to be her campaign manager! But two weeks later, Kenny coauthored an op-ed for the Daily Wire with Kyle Kashuv, an MSD student, arguing that Runcie should resign.4 The morning after it was published, Kenny awoke to texts from the consultants and Lori. When Kenny called Lori, she told him that because of that op-ed, they had decided that he shouldn’t be associated with her campaign. He told her he thought he was on her campaign because he was critical of Runcie, but Lori insisted that they needed to part ways.
Kenny realized Rich was right. Getting a school board majority would depend on Rich, and he was going to have the hardest race. Rich and Kenny implored Andy to devote as much time and energy as he could to Rich’s campaign. Andy didn’t give them a firm answer at first, but after meeting with Ty Thompson about Andrew Medina, he called Rich to say, “I’m all yours. We have to hold these people accountable.”
The BTU Endorsement
With Andy’s support, Rich could run a real campaign. But Rich knew that in school board elections, with low turnout and teachers often the only voters paying attention, the teachers union president is often the kingmaker. Rich set up a meeting with BTU President Anna Fusco. When Rich showed up for the meeting, he chatted amicably with BTU Vice President Terry Preuss while they waited for Fusco.
When Fusco walked in, the tone completely changed. Rich recalled to us that she immediately became hostile, accusing him of leaving public education for a for-profit university and wanting to arm teachers.
Although the conversation started hostilely, it ended cordially. Rich explained to Fusco that he only left public education because of what had happened to his salary under Runcie, that his online university was a nonprofit, and that he didn’t want to just arm teachers. He told her that in his opinion, the choice should be clear: if she liked the status quo, she should stick with Laurie, but if she wanted someone who would stand up for teachers, he was her guy.
By the end of the conversation, Fusco brought up Rich’s friend Aaron and said that the BTU wanted to honor him by providing funding to have his name engraved on a memorial in Kansas for educators who had lost their lives at school. Rich put Fusco in touch with Aaron’s little brother Ray Feis, and Fusco made good on her word.
Kenny told Rich he was crazy if he thought he was going to get Fusco’s endorsement. But Rich was confident. The way he saw it, Fusco was practically obligated to endorse him because he had been MSD’s union representative. Rich explained:
The way unions work, the core of their ideals and belief structure is: You don’t cross union lines. Ever. My opponent was never a teacher. She was in business, which unions are supposed to stand up against. But actually, she wasn’t ever really in business. She inherited her business. She inherited her political career. She lives at the privileged nexus between business and government. When unions talk about how the system is rigged, they’re basically talking about people like Laurie Rich Levinson.
But Rich was wrong. When the union announced its endorsements in mid-July, the Sun Sentinel ran the headline, “Teachers Union Not Endorsing Any Candidate with Ties to Stoneman Douglas.”5 The BTU had endorsed Levinson, Ryan Petty’s opponent Donna Korn, and no one for the district that represented Parkland. It ended up pouring in more than $150,000 to defend Runcie’s majority.6
Ray Feis texted Fusco, “I know you’re a good person, but it’s extremely disheartening to see how far Nan Rich’s reach is.”
Fusco replied, “This is not about Nan. Trust me, she’s gone after me too.”
Door-Knocking
Losing the endorsement was a setback, but they knew it would be a tough battle from the start. In a two-to-one Democratic county, any voter walking to the polls with a Democratic or a teachers union endorsement sheet would vote Levinson by default. The school board race was technically nonpartisan, but Andy and Rich were registered Republicans—an instant disqualifier to many Broward voters. They had to play like they were starting 40 percent down.
What’s more, they knew that they could never raise as much money as their opponent. In addition to Nan Rich’s and Anna Fusco’s financial backing, Levinson and Runcie also had the full backing of the Broward business community. Keith Koenig, the CEO of City Furniture and chairman of the Broward Workshop, a consortium of business leaders (many of whom have lucrative contracts with the school district), declared, “The business community has confidence in Bob Runcie 100 percent.”7,8 The good news for Rich was that elections ultimately come down to votes, and historically very few people vote in school board elections, especially those held during the primaries. In 2014, Laurie Rich Levinson was reelected with 8,738 votes to her opponent’s 3,962. Rich figured if they could get 12,000 votes he would be guaranteed to win. While Rich couldn’t afford professional consultants, many people were telling him the same thing: the most persuasive thing in politics is a face-to-face appeal.
Nearly every evening for two months, Rich, Andy, Hunter, and Kenny knocked on doors. If this were a movie, now would be the time for a montage with the Rocky theme song playing in the background (because, corny as it may sound, Rich and Andy listened to it whenever they drove around together).
Rain or shine, didn’t matter. Rich recalled, “Sometimes it was like Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan at the top of the rigging in the monsoon level of rain. We’d be running out of the truck and putting out yard signs and scrambling back. There were nights my wife and I were out in the car until eleven p.m. or midnight planting yard signs in people’s houses. We didn’t even know who they were. They’d just requested them through Facebook or Twitter.”
A core group of about a dozen volunteers showed up at most public events Rich attended and knocked on doors at least a couple of times a week. A few dozen more came out at least once a week for door-knocking. Andy’s wife, Julie, helped organize all the volunteers. Nearly two hundred people did something for Rich’s campaign, be it knocking on a door, holding a sign, making phone calls, or handing out flyers.
The message was simple and powerful. The leaflet that Team Mendelson handed out to voters had a picture of Rich on one side along with what he stood for: Safety, Accountability, and Fair Teacher Pay. On the other side was a picture of Andy and Meadow. Rich’s volunteers would explain that the school district had not only abdicated any responsibility but had misled the families in the wake of the tragedy. What’s more (as you’ll read in the next chapter), the district still could not get its act together on school safety. Each volunteer closed the conversation by asking if Rich could count on their support—almost everyone said yes.
On a weekend day, twenty volunteers could knock on fifty doors each in just a few hours. On their biggest days, Team Mendelson could hit nearly a thousand doors, only counting a door “knocked” if they made direct contact with a voter. And at the end of each week, Rich uploaded a Facebook video to give an update on the running tally.
All told, Team Mendelson knocked on over thirty thousand doors and left flyers at forty thousand where no one was home. They handed out fifteen thousand flyers at public events and reached eight thousand voters by the phone. They knew they couldn’t count on every “yes” they received to translate into a vote. But they figured that if even a quarter did, the election would be a landslide.
Strangers Became Family
One day in July, Andy turned to Rich and asked, “How do you know all of these people?”
“I mean, they’re your friends, right?” Rich asked.
“I don’t know any of these people,” Andy replied.
“I don’t know them either,” Rich said.
“Well,” Andy said, “who the fuck are they, then?”
“It was unbelievable,” Andy later reflected. “Family and friends came and then left. But total strangers came and they never left. They became like another family. Like cousins and sisters and brothers.”
Kenny gave his entire summer to Andy and the campaign. At one point, they did a podcast interview together for TheBlaze. After the interview was over, the hosts forgot to immediately turn off the recording. “That interview was so weird,” one host said.
“Yeah, it really was. But why?” the other asked.
“Because I figured that the kid was just a volunteer. But the way they talked, I know they’re not, but it sounded to me like father and son.”
Part of why Kenny dedicated himself to Andy that summer was the righteousness of the cause. But most of it was just Andy.
For Kenny, the most powerful moment of the whole campaign came in early August, after an especially long day of door-knocking with about twenty volunteers working their way through several apartment complexes. As Kenny and Andy were walking back to Andy’s truck to drive to a new site, Kenny was so tired that he wanted to call it a day.
Kenny turned to Andy and said, “Why not take a few days off? You’re out in the sun five hours a day campaigning. We have enough volunteers that you can afford to take some time to yourself.”
Andy stopped in his tracks. He started to tear up. And then, more slowly and haltingly than Kenny had ever heard him speak before, Andy said, “This is how a father honors his daughter. I am going to do this every single day. This is the only thing I can do.”
1 Nancy Smith, “Democrat Nan Rich’s Enduring, Families-First Rise in Florida Politics,” Sunshine State News, November 26, 2013, http://sunshinestatenews.com/story/democrat-nan-richs-enduring-families-first-rise-florida-politics.
2 Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, “Put Laurie Rich Levinson, Who Supports the Schools Superintendent, Back on the School Board,” Sun Sentinel, August 7, 2018, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-op-editorial-laurie-rich-levinson-broward-school-board-20180807-story.html.
3 Martin Vassolo and Colleen Wright, “Parents of Slain Parkland Teens Want to Work with Runcie on School Board,” Miami Herald, May 15, 2018, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article211119744.html.
4 Kyle Kashuv and Kenneth Preston, “Broward Superintendent Runcie: A Strong Case for His Dismissal,” Daily Wire, May 31, 2018, https://www.dailywire.com/news/31318/kashuv-preston-broward-superintendent-runcie-kyle-kashuv.
5 Scott Travis, “Teachers Union Not Endorsing Any Candidate with Ties to Stoneman Douglas,” Sun Sentinel, July 12, 2018, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/education/fl-reg-btu-endorsements-parkland-20180711-story.html.
6 Tom Lauder, “Broward Teachers Union gave $155k to Shadowy Group Tied to SEIU and Voter Registration Fraud,” Red Broward, November 5, 2018, https://redbroward.com/2018/11/05/btupac/.
7 Reflecting on Runcie’s strong political support from Keith Koenig, Broward education gadfly Buddy Nevins wrote in his “Broward Beat” blog two weeks before the school board election: “There is also an ugly subtext to this support for Runcie. The superintendent is black. The lily-white businessmen would never publicly attack a black superintendent. They don’t want to be labeled racist. Runcie’s weak liberal bosses on the School Board are cowed by him for the same reason. They fear they will be labeled bigoted if they fire him.”
8 Buddy Nevins, “Broward Politics: Fight over Schools’ Future Part of County’s Changing Demographics,” BrowardBeat.com, August 15, 2018, https://www.browardbeat.com/broward-politics-fight-over-schools-future-part-of-countys-changing-demographics/; Brittany Wallman, Megan O’Matz, and Paula McMahon, “Hide, Spin, Deny, Threaten: How the School District Tried to Mask the Failures that Led to the Parkland Shooting,” November 30, 2018, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/parkland/florida-school-shooting/fl-florida-school-shooting-district-secrecy-20181112-story.html.