Feuding parents move battle off chess boards
By Daryl James
Tribune

Gilbert’s chess community will have a chance to shine this Saturday when schoolchildren from across the state gather at Greenfield Junior High School for grade-level championships. The state tournament will be the latest of many chess extravaganzas in Gilbert since the U.S. Chess Federation named the town “best in the nation” for chess in 1999. But all is not well with the chess superpower.

Some chess parents and coaches in the Gilbert Unified School District want nothing to do with Saturday’s event. More specifically, they want nothing to do with the event’s organizers – a group of parent volunteers concentrated at one school who took control of the community chess association in May 2005 following tense annual board elections.

Since then, the town’s chess factions have quarreled like the black and white armies on a game board.

“It’s no different than soccer or Little League or any other sport,” said Lynn Schucker, an association volunteer who helped bring Saturday’s event to Gilbert. “Politics are everywhere.”

During the Arizona Scholastic State Chess Championship last April at Gilbert High School, feuding Gilbert parents argued about everything from the display of banners to the proper place to eat snacks.

“The bickering has gone on so long,” said Jill McKeever, a Finley Farms Elementary School chess mom, former association president and chess coach at Islands Elementary School. “It’s gotten to this point now where we almost can’t talk to each other.”

CULTURE CLASH

The Gilbert rift started long before members of the Gilbert Parents Chess Association cast their ballots for new officers in May 2005.

Chess parents from Burk Elementary School have long done things differently than parents at other Gilbert schools.

“The philosophies of the organizations were always so different,” said Christy Veit, a chess mom at Canyon Rim Elementary School. “They didn’t get where we were coming from, and we didn’t get where they were coming from.”

The full article is here.
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