The divisive election of Tues, Apr. 6 has passed, but the controversy surrounding it certainly hasn’t subsided.

Brad Bernstein and Susan Buse were elected as members of the Clayton School District School Board, with 36.54% and 36.06%, and Bernstein returning after a three-year break from service and with Buse maintaining her position.

Bernstein is excited to be rejoining the Board and to be given the opportunity to work with the new superintendent. He plans to improve the District, while also maintaining lines of communication between the District and Clayton residents. Bernstein said that nutrition, budgetary responsibility, and meeting the educational needs of “kids in the middle” with regard to academics are priorities for him.

“I’m very honored to be elected and that they [the voters] wanted my voice and my participation in the Board of Education,” Bernstein said. “

Buse also expressed elation regarding her successful election to the School Board.

“I was obviously pleased to be able to serve on the Board again and was very happy with the passage of Proposition W and our community coming together on that,” Buse said.

Buse’s main goal as a Board member will be to continue academic excellence and manage the substantial Clayton education budget.

“The most important thing is to continue to offer a wonderful education for our community, for our students, for our families,” Buse said. “We’re very much looking forward to our new superintendent coming in and we always have the ongoing challenge of using our budget efficiently and maximizing our resources.”

In what was undoubtedly the most controversial outcome of the election, Proposition W, the $39.4 million bond issue to improve the Wydown Middle School facilities, passed with 62.85% of the vote. A four-sevenths majority of 57.15% was needed for the bond issue to pass.

Bernstein, although happy that the community came together to vote on this issue, did cite communication as an issue during the process.

“It think it showed that the Board and the District have not maintained enough communication with the public,” Bernstein said. “I think there was a faction of well-intentioned citizens who felt that they were not able to provide the input they would like in this process. The District has a great opportunity to improve on that. But, in conclusion, it’s time to move ahead with Wydown.”

Wydown principal Mary Ann Goldberg was with members of her staff when she first heard news of Prop W’s passage.

“[We felt] joy, jubilation, excitement. Just all over the place,” Goldberg said.

Without any hesitancy, Goldberg declared that she was most looking forward to the increased and improved spaces for choir, language, and other classes.

“It will be wonderful… to have appropriate learning spaces that work for kids and teachers,” Goldberg said.

Buse is also supportive of the passage of Prop W, despite some of the potential difficulties in the new building’s construction.

“Proposition W was such a result of a lot of community involvement. There was so much community-wide input from a lot of different people with a lot of different ideas that came up with a very promising result for the middle school. One of my least favorite aspects is that we have to wait for it to actually happen… We have a difficult site on which to work, it’s a small site, but the plan itself shows a lot of promise to be able to support our educational missions.”

Clayton resident and architect Michael Roth, however, believes the passage will adversely affect the District and its taxpayers.

“The idea of tearing down a relatively new school, because of a short period of design studies that didn’t yield a timely design acceptable to 16 public spirited citizens is shortsighted and wasteful in the extreme to the cost of more than $20 million,” said Roth in an open letter. “The renovation/addition concept more than fulfills the District’s physical/spatial requirements and provides a better product in virtually all comparable categories for half the cost.”

All opposing opinions aside, construction at Wydown will break ground in February 2011, hopefully to be completed in time for the 2013-2014 school year.