Candidate Forum | League of Women Voters

Stay warm in this snowstorm!

Earlier this week on Thursday, March 12th, 2026 I participated in the League of Women Voters (LWV) Candidate Forum.  

League of Women Voters

Before writing about the forum itself, I want to share a few thoughts about the LWV. It is remarkable that an organization born out of the political energy surrounding the 19th Amendment and women's suffrage continues, more than a century later, to provide meaningful, nonpartisan platforms where candidates can be heard.

Even today—over 100 years after its passage—the 19th Amendment’s guarantee of women’s right to vote is openly opposed by some. In that sense, the organizations and institutions that emerged from the suffrage movement must still carry forward the attention and civic energy that gave rise to them.

Institutions like the LWV form part of the scaffolding that supports a free democratic society. We should understand their history, take pride in their work, and actively strengthen and extend their reach. For my part, I am proud to have participated in the forum hosted by the LWV.

The Forum

Opening and Closing Speeches

The emailed invitation to the forum stated: “After the moderator completes a general introduction of the event, each candidate will read a prepared opening statement that may be up to three minutes long.” I prepared an opening statement and practiced it until it landed at exactly 2 minutes and 58 seconds.

Unfortunately, when I arrived, I learned that the opening statements would be limited to two minutes. I quickly underlined the most important points from my three-minute speech and tried to convey the main ideas in roughly two-thirds of the time. A similar reduction in the time allowed for closing statements required me to condense those remarks as well.

At the bottom of this blog post, you can find the full version of the remarks I had originally prepared, including both the opening and closing statements.

Questions

The content of this blog post was composed prior (on March 15th, 2026) to the publishing of the video (on March 26th, 2026).  In it, I reflect upon what I remember of the forum and of my answers.  The full video of the candidate forum is included here:

Through my writing, I would expect my reflections to be a bit clearer; speaking off the cuff in a persuasive, structured and clear manner is a skill I need to improve upon.  I like writing for the reflective and recursive editorial process that helps clarify my ideas.

Question:  What do you think about AI in the classroom?

    In answering this question, I reused a metaphor I once heard that has helped me articulate my views about AI.

    AI is like a tiger. If you can mount it and ride it, it can take you farther and faster—destroying barriers and vanquishing challengers as you direct it toward your goals. But as soon as you dismount the tiger, it will eat you.

    This metaphor straddles the techno-optimist versus doomer debate that surrounds AI today while still acknowledging the technology’s power. I appreciate it because it clarifies something important for me: this technology will have a meaningful impact on our children’s lives. In my view of what schools should do to prepare students for society, anything that will foreseeably shape their lives deserves thoughtful exploration in the classroom.

    In my verbal response, I was glad that I clearly emphasized one point: we must ensure that students are taught to think, and that AI is not used to do the thinking for them. I also mentioned that there are experiments and ongoing work to build AI literacy. In my mind, I was thinking about efforts to develop an AI literacy curriculum in Newark public schools. My main point was that we cannot be afraid of AI in our classrooms. It does a disservice to students—who will almost certainly need to use these tools as adults—if we pretend the technology does not exist. At the same time, we must be thoughtful about how it is used in school. Education is fundamentally about developing the ability to think about the world. Students should learn about the arguments and attitudes behind different perspectives on AI. They should also be guided to observe firsthand how AI can perform feats of technical magnificence, how it is prompting new ways of thinking about the human mind, and yet how it can still be surprisingly inaccurate about some of the most mundane and easily knowable things in the world:

Screen grab of a message I sent, and some friend's responses, in a personal Signal group chat.

    If you might wonder, I used AI to polish this blog post.  You can see how I used it by reading through it here.  

Question:  What is your attitude about police in the schools?

    I felt that I fumbled my words somewhat when answering this question. While I think the general gist of my view came through, I could have been clearer about my attitude toward police and how schools should collaborate with them.

    My intended message was that I am not in favor of police being present in schools during non-emergency situations. I do not believe that a routine police presence is a net positive for the learning environment we are trying to cultivate.

    Society has entrusted police with the power to use force to detain, arrest, and enforce the law. Even the most ethical police officer will cause law-abiding drivers to slow down and become more aware of traffic rules. I referred to everyone in the room as drivers who would slow down in that situation to emphasize that immediate reactions to police presence are not limited to criminals. Most people experience them.

    That kind of reaction is not something we would want to feel constantly while driving, and it is not something we should wish upon students while they are learning. An optimal learning environment fosters openness, security, and a willingness to experiment—conditions that make students vulnerable and sometimes prone to mistakes. We should not allow the ordinary mistakes of childhood to escalate into legal matters that could instead be handled by the school. Nor should we normalize the constant presence of potential force in our schools or in our society.

Question:  What do you think about truancy?

    “Well, I think we should reduce it.” My response drew a few chuckles for its bluntness. I followed by noting that the goal is obvious: students who do not make it to the classroom are unlikely to be learning.

    I also emphasized that truancy is not a tidy issue where you simply have students who attend school and others who resemble the Little Rascals playing hooky and needing a truancy officer to chase them down. The reality is usually much messier. Students who are severely truant may be missing school for many different reasons, including transportation challenges, housing instability, or employment insecurity within the household. Because of that complexity, coordination between the school, the family, and community partners is often the more humane and effective approach to addressing the problem. I wish I had also mentioned that social workers are frequently coordinating resources for families in these situations, and that their efforts deserve recognition and support.

    After the forum, a gentleman named Terry approached me and suggested that we should instill the idea of school attendance as a “civic duty” in children from a young age. His view was that if students understood attending school as a responsibility comparable to voting, the sense of weight and importance might become a meaningful motivator. He mentioned that he votes out of a sense of civic duty.

    I find the suggestion appealing. It would be positive if students were taught that coming to school is one of the ways they contribute to the betterment of society. At the same time, the idea made me curious about what consequences might follow when that duty is not fulfilled—whether by students or by parents and caretakers. That line of thinking briefly shifted our conversation toward voting reform. I noted that in the United States there is no real consequence for not voting, though other countries approach the issue differently. In places such as Australia, for example, barbecues are often set up near polling stations to encourage turnout. It is a positive incentive to participate in a civic duty and an example of lowering barriers rather than imposing penalties.

    Although the exchange was friendly and constructive, I regret steering the conversation toward whether he might support measures such as public holidays or requirements that workers be given time off to vote on election day. His idea about civic duty had prompted me to explore where that principle might lead, but in doing so I allowed the conversation to drift away from the original topic of truancy.

Entire Intended Speeches

Opening

Good evening. Thank you to the League of Women Voters for setting up this event, and creating the civic platforms for us to introduce ourselves to the community.  My name is Samuel Roth, and I'm running for School Board because I care deeply about the kids in this community — and about the kind of community we're shaping through them.

I'm not running with a single agenda or a political axe to grind. I'm running because I'm a neighbor, a dad, and a community member who listens carefully and thinks clearly.  One thought which echoes in my mind is that only about a third of Wisconsin high school graduates go on to complete a higher degree.  There's nothing wrong with that, but it means that for most of our students, their public school education is the only formal education they complete. The stakes of getting it right are real, for the individual student, for the community they call home, and for the society in which they belong.

To address those stakes, I'll be guided by four core beliefs as a board member.

First — students must feel safe. Physically, emotionally, mentally. That's not a soft priority — it's the foundation. Education just isn't as effective when it's attempted in climates of fear, hunger, or distress. Get that wrong, and nothing else works as well as it should.

Second — real literacy. Reading, writing, thinking critically. We live in a moment when facts are increasingly obscured — by people and by technology. Our kids are about to inherit that world. We owe them the tools to navigate it with confidence and discernment.

Third — mathematical literacy. Data is everywhere and accelerating. Our students need quantitative reasoning not just to get a good job, but to understand the world they live in and make sense of the forces shaping their lives.

And fourth — civic character. Schools are one of the few places that bring together the children of an entire community. That's a rare and valuable thing. It's an opportunity to cultivate dignity, neighborliness, and the recognition that our individual success is entangled with the contributions of the people around us.

Those ideals run headlong into real-world constraints at every board meeting — and the most pressing one is financial. I see that challenge as two sides of the same coin. On one side, the district, with governance and guidance from the board, work within the legal tools available to fund the services our students need. On the other, helping the public understand how the laws shaping our budget work for — or against — the goals of this community. Both sides matter, and both require honesty.

I'm an analytics professional and the father of two NJSD students. I bring the technical grounding to understand the numbers, and the personal stake to care deeply about what they mean.

If you believe, as I do, that public school is a common good worth protecting — I'd be honored to have your vote.

Thank you.

Closing

Thank you to the League of Women Voters for holding this forum, and to everyone here tonight — and those who will watch in the coming days.

I want to take a moment to recognize what this district has built. NJSD has exceeded a 90% graduation rate for nearly a decade. Our students earn exceptional recognition in athletics, civics, robotics, and the arts. These aren't statistics — they're our neighbors, our kids, our family members-- doing remarkable things.

That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because this community has consistently chosen to invest in its schools — through funding, through involvement, and through the simple but powerful act of showing up, like you did tonight.

I'm running for School Board because I want to be part of protecting and continuing that tradition. 

Make no bones about it, the challenges to that tradition are real. Financial pressures are real. But so is this: better schools correlate with better communities across nearly every dimension we care about — economic vitality, civic health, quality of life. The investment we make in public education today is the investment in the kind of community we'll all live in tomorrow.  

Today is my daughter's birthday. I'll be honest — I would have rather been home with her, eating cake. Instead I'm here, asking for your vote. And I think that says something about why I'm running: because the best gift I can give her isn't cake. It's a better, safer, and more just world than the one I inherited. That starts with our public schools.

If you believe, as I do, that our public schools are a common good worth protecting and enhancing — I would be honored to have your vote.

Thank you.