In 1973, concerns about the direction of the school board and the school district in general culminated in a highly racially coded election in which ads like this ran, touting Fraenkel-Conrat and Monheimer as “the only candidates to have demonstrated their intellectual capacity to solve the problems of this School District.”

While it is true that Fraenkel-Conrat and Monheimer both worked in intellectual, professional fields, with Fraenkel-Conrat a UC Berkeley scientist and Monheimer an attorney, only Monheimer had experience working on the school board, though Fraenkel-Conrat was a member of the Citizens Budget and Finance Committee of the Berkeley Public Schools.

Other candidates like Gene Roh, a juvenile probation officer determined to change the ways in which Asian, Black, and Chicano communities were expected to learn, and Irene Howard, a nurse and parent of three worried with how practices like student tracking and administrator stonewalling of parent concerns continued to persist, were largely ignored by political action groups taking out ads in the Berkeley Daily Gazette.