Candidate for US Senate

• Charles Schollenberger for US Senate

About

Charles Schollenberger is a communications executive and former government teacher and an award-winning journalist/editor. He has served as farm writer for the Hutchinson (Kan.) News, agribusiness writer for the Kansas City Star Co., and worked as northeast Johnson County reporter/editor for Sun Newspapers of Johnson County.

Schollenberger is a 19-year resident of Prairie Village, Kan. He has been a resident of metropolitan Kansas City for 27 years.

Charles grew up in northeast Ohio where he was active in efforts to lower the voting age to 18, which were realized with the passage of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 1971. He has been a registered Democrat since first becoming of voting age at 19 in 1971.

Schollenberger earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, in 1974, and went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri, in 1979.

He interned in the Washington, D.C., office of the late Rep. John F. Seiberling (D-Ohio) after helping Congressman Seiberling win an upset victory over a 20-year Republican incumbent in 1970. Rep. Seiberling was an environmentalist and opponent of the Vietnam war. He served as a member of the House Judiciary Committee that impeached President Nixon.

Schollenberger also served as issues director for Sen. John H. Glenn Jr.’s (D-Ohio) first successful race for the U.S. Senate in 1973. Schollenberger served as managing editor of the Stow Citizen, a large weekly newspaper in Stow, Ohio, before attending graduate school in 1978.

Schollenberger moved to Kansas City to join the business desk of the Kansas City Times (the morning newspaper of the Kansas City Star) in April 1982 after serving as farm writer for the Hutchinson (Kan.) News in 1981 and 1982.

“As a professionally trained journalist, I want to make constituent communications a top priority,” Schollenberger says. “I’m running to better represent the people of Kansas in the U.S. Senate. You can’t do that by staying in Washington, D.C., all the time,” he says.

“Our recent U.S. Senators have spent way too much time in the Beltway around Washington, and not enough time in cities and the Wheat Belt of Kansas.”

“We hardly ever see our U.S. Senators in this state until around election time. This comes from complacency in the Republicans holding these two Senate seats for 70 years, the longest record in U.S. history.”

In Kansas Charles has worked in the Democratic campaigns of Bert Cantwell for Kansas Attorney General and for Rep. Dennis Moore. He has lectured in the University of Kansas marketing communications graduate program.

Charles has been married for 19 years to his wife, Jennifer Schollenberger, formerly of Weston, Mo. Jennifer's uncle, the late Congressman William R. Hull, Jr. (D.-Mo.), represented Missouri's 6th Congressional District in Washington from 1955 to 1973. Charles’s great-grandfather, David C. Kennon, served in the Ohio Senate as a Democrat.

Schollenberger comes from a family of scientists. His grandfather, the late Charles J. Schollenberger, was a pioneering agronomist (soil chemist) for the State of Ohio. His father, the late Charles S. Schollenberger, was a noted research chemist for the B.F. Goodrich Co.

Schollenberger is currently president of his homes association in Prairie Village, Kan., and a member of the board of directors of the arboretum at the Ohio Agricultural Research & Development Center, Wooster, Ohio, a division of Ohio State University.