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Resident Mad over Alleged Lies by School Board Member

by Sharon Aron Baron February 3, 2014

by Sharon Aron Baron February 3, 2014 15 views

Freedman campaigning in 2012 at Kingspoint in Tamarac

By: Sharon Aron Baron

One Coral Springs resident and future homeowner in Parkland has been helping to lead the effort to fight what he considers crazy boundary proposals created by his school board member.

With a group of parents over 1,000 members strong, Nathaniel Klitsberg was infuriated when he read a comment made recently in the Sun Sentinel by School Board Member Abby Freedman which he believes are more lies from her.

“If you can’t trust her on the little things, how can anyone trust her on the big things?” Klitsberg writes on the Facebook group Parkland Unites for Neighborhood Schools.

Last fall, Freedman proposed bussing students from a new portion being developed in Parkland to under-enrolled schools in Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach. That plan failed in November after parents were outraged. She told the Sun Sentinel that her intent was to “inform people there was an issue. I believe I accomplished that. People realized you’re buying homes in an area that can’t accommodate more students.”

However, it wasn’t true.

Parkland Mayor Michael Udine always made it clear that Parkland had been putting money away for years in impact fees to handle extra students. They even had $2 million in funds from the developers of the newest communities for modulars, if needed.

Klitsberg said, “Abby, we all know you are a phony. Now we can show you are a liar. Your proposals were not an attempt to ‘inform’ people of anything.”

“Your weren’t “informing people” of an issue when you told people you didn’t care about what happened to children in Northwest Parkland because there weren’t voters there. You weren’t “informing people” of an issue when you went to meetings at schools and told parents that if children from Northwest Parkland got to go to “their” schools, their children would get sent to schools in other cities.”

Klitsberg mentioned in his post that there were hundreds of parents and even elected officials, that rallied against Freedman. Even former supporters of hers called her out for her behavior. He said that even her fellow colleagues on the school board warned her about her proposals. At one school board meeting School Board Member Nora Rupert told Freedman that she would never pit one community against one another in her own district, as she was doing by splitting up an area. Most agreed that boundary changes were not the job of a school board member, but rather, the demographers who were experienced in this type of work.

“I have taught my kids something that should ring true in this circumstance. A lie is impossible to maintain over the long run. When you tell the truth, you never have to remember what you’ve said -and done in the past to make sure you are consistent.”

Freedman is up for reelection in November 2014. So far she has not filed, although her campaign manager Amy Rose did confirm last Thursday, that she is running again.

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Sharon Aron Baron

Editor of Talk Media and writer for Coral Springs Talk. CST was created in 2012 to provide News, Views, and Entertainment for the residents of Coral Springs and the rest of South Florida.