Every year around this time, our Editorial Board is in the throes of interviewing candidates for boards of education across the Lower Hudson Valley. In my 22 years here, I have never seen such interest in school races. Some facts:

• There are a total of 53 school districts in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam with school board seats that are filled by voters at the polls on a given Tuesday in mid-May. (This year, it’s May 19.) Generally each year, of those 53, less than half are contested—meaning that there are more people interested in serving than there are seats to fill in a given district. This year, there are 31 contested races. That’s 31, far more than half.
• We, meaning our Editorial Board, invite all the candidates who are running in those contested races to interviews. We have less than three weeks to do that: The “campaign’’ from the time would-be candidates file their petitions with district clerks until school election day is four weeks; for city candidates, it’s shorter—three weeks, since under the law, they have a later filing date. In less than a month, we interview, evaluate, endorse and make room for non-endorsed candidates to reply with letters to the editor on The Journal News Opinion page and this Web site.
• Typically, we try to get in touch with about 100 candidates. This year, we reached out to all candidates, just about 200. We asked them to contact us and are giving each one a chance to post on our site a profile of themselves and their views. The results can be found at www.lohud.com/schoolelections
• On our Web site, we also streamed live our candidate interviews. Voters can still watch them, and make their own judgments about who would best represent them, by going to www.lohud.com/editorialspotlight. Click the “On Demand’’ box that will appear under the large screen. A menu will come up listing the various school districts.
• In the meantime, our Editorial Board does our homework and makes recommendations to voters in endorsements that started running on our pages and on line this past Wednesday. We can tell interest is high given the numerous “hits” on those Web items, letters to the editor and phone calls to our offices.

  
  

  Why the interest? I could go into hours of explanation, but here are the basics: School budgets are the only municipal ones on which voters directly decide. Property taxes comprise most of the revenue in those budgets. And property taxes here are high, high, high. So are expectations for the public schools, which generally deliver. Yet there is a grim recession hanging over all of us like the grim reaper. And tensions are growing between two newly defined groups of “haves’ and “have-nots’’—the “haves’’ are public employees who have pretty good health and pension benefits that the “have-nots,’’ those in the private sector, feel have turned to dust, along with their futures.

  So the interest in who will be elected May 19 to be among the policy-makers for local school districts in the years ahead is hot and heavy. Will incumbents be tossed out? Or will voters want experienced people at the helm? Will proposed budgets for the coming school year—most of which actually have very low increases—be defeated? Will pro-teacher, pro-union candidates get elected over angry tax-cutters—or vice versa? Or will there be a mix?

  We’ll know May 20.