Tuesday, November 15, 2005
"Board Adapts After Voters Select"
Like the dinosaurs they are, these defeated Dover board members will not evolve. They will soon be officially extinct. The warm-blooded mamals that replace them next month... Well now, that's a different story.
Getlin's story, by the way, paints an interesting portrait of the defeated Dover board and the incoming victors:
"Intelligent design isn't finished here, it isn't finished anywhere," said Alan Bonsell, an outgoing board member, as he left Monday's meeting, his last. Several hundred people, who filled a school cafeteria, applauded politely when he said the board had "worked hard" to bring Dover students "a much better future.
"The eight victors, who sat in a group, had a different message: Bernadette Reinking, a newly elected board member, said in an interview that "Dover needs to heal and put the divisions behind it, because we have to get back to our lives. We have to let the bitterness die down from this battle and focus on our students."
She added, however, that "nobody ever believed this board should have tried to impose its beliefs on people. And we're certainly not going to do that now." The new board, she said, was likely to consider teaching intelligent design in a social studies or philosophy class — but not as part of the curriculum in ninth-grade biology.
