CHANDLER — The race to determine who’ll lead the city’s largest public education agency for the next four years turned out to be the subject of the top YourValley.net story about Chandler in 2022.
Our Q & A with the five candidates who ran for the Chandler Unified School District Governing Board ended up as the top Chandler story this year, as determined by traffic to our website.
Lindsay Love, the other incumbent whose only term expired this year, decided to not seek re-election. That meant one-term incumbent Lara Bruner and challengers Kurt Rohrs, Patti Serrano, Charlotte Golla and Marilou Estes competed for two seats, with the board’s other three seats up in 2024.
A story about results from that CUSD election was our third-most-read story of the year.
Read on to see the other top four Chandler stories of 2022.
As big-tech firms started to feel the pinch of an economy with high inflation — one that can’t necessarily support financial-tech firms with large facilities in multiple regions of the U.S. — layoffs occurred. One of Chandler’s top fin-tech firms felt that bite just as summer was about to start.
While the digital payment platform company didn’t disclose much about the layoffs, a representative confirmed the layoffs. While some employees from the facility stayed on while working from home (as most of the Price Road-corridor center’s staff has done since March 2020), PayPal gave up on using the facility this year, as its lease was up.
Later in the year, PayPal’s CEO, chief financial officer and other top brass were named in a stockholder derivative suit in Delaware. The claim is that the company misled shareholders about the growth of new active accounts.
Spurred, perhaps, by contentious and important statewide and federal races, turnout was high in the 2020 Chandler Unified School District Governing Board election. There were also many contentious issues with CUSD that led to more than 113,000 district voters, or about 69% of all CUSD registered voters, voting in the Nov. 8 board election.
Kurt Rohrs and Patti Serrano got the most votes in the Nov. 8 election to claim the two spots up for grabs on the board, with incumbent Lara Bruner finishing in a distant fourth place, behind challenger Charlotte Golla.
Serrano said becoming the only Latina in the Valley serving on a school board gives a needed voice to several underrepresented student and family demographics within CUSD. She mentioned teacher pay, student achievement and board members not be intimidated.
Rohrs is focused on a completely different set of issues, including ending what he calls Child Sexualization Education, or CSE, along with more district focus on life skills such as personal finance and basic job skills.
Workers had been on the job since Fall 2021 along I-10 in the Chandler/Tempe area, working to widen eastbound I-10 on the outside and paving and striping the roadway.
That work concluded Monday, Oct. 3, bringing the lane count on eastbound I-10 to five general purpose lanes, one HOV lane and an auxiliary lane between Baseline and Elliot roads.
In addition, four general purpose lanes, an HOV lane and an auxiliary lane have been added from Elliot Road to the project’s southern boundary near Chandler Boulevard, according to ADOT.
Overall, the Broadway Curve project isn’t slated to be completed until the end of 2024, though it is basically on schedule. Not all of the project involves work close to Chandler’s borders, but many of the lane or complete roadway closures affect traffic along freeways and surface streets in the Chandler area — especially overnight and/or on weekends.
Chandler Police arrested a 19-year-old Nathaniel Anthony Vensor on Aug. 2 in the Chandler Fashion Center shooting as he was shopping at the mall a day after officials said he fired 30 rounds from an assault rifle in the center’s parking lot on the evening of Aug. 1.
The arrest was made shortly after 11 a.m. Aug. 2, at the mall when Vensor was spotted on video surveillance while he was shopping, unarmed and wearing the same baseball cap he purchased at the mall before the shooting, a report stated.
On Aug. 1, police responded to a call at 6:58 p.m. at the mall to a report of gunfire in the parking lot. There, police said, they found shell casings from an AR-15 assault rifle and determined that they were fired by a man his late teens to early 20s, with numerous tattoos.
Police also learned that an incident between Vensor and another individual led to the shooting.
Vensor was booked into the Maricopa County Jail on one count of armed robbery, one count of aggravated assault, one count of possession of a weapon by prohibited possessor and 30 counts of unlawful discharge of a firearm.
Also, police said, Vensor possessed a narcotic drug upon his arrest and was booked on one count of possession of narcotic drugs. Court records don’t show a case related to an August 2022 crime on file for Vensor, but his probation for a 2021 weapon discharge at a residence offense has been revoked.
Here are some other Chandler stories that were popular on yourvalley.net in 2022:
Jason W. Brooks is a News editor for the Daily Independent and the Chandler Independent.
He covers the Chandler area for both yourvalley.net and the monthly print edition while writing for and assisting in the production of the Daily Independent.
Brooks is a well-traveled journalist who has documented life in small American communities in nearly all U.S. time zones.
Born in Washington, D.C. and raised there and in suburban Los Angeles, he has covered community news in California, New Mexico, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska and northern Arizona.
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