In the midst of a growing district and rising grades, three candidates are vying to be the one to continue the momentum.
District 5 covers parts of East Manatee County, including Lakewood Ranch.
While Florida has been struggling with school closures due to declining enrollment, Manatee County is building schools to accommodate rapid growth.
The Manatee County School District was just a few points away from being a grade-A school district this year, maintaining a B grade since 2017 when it rose from a C.
Camden Bedinghaus, Chantal Wilford and Jonathan Mullis are campaigning to replace Richard Tatem, the current District 5 member and vice-chair of the board, who is not running for reelection.
Bedinghaus, 23, graduated from the University of South Florida in May with a bachelor's degree in economics. He was a part of the USF Campus Council, where he said he helped decide how to allocate a multi-million-dollar budget. As someone who just went through the Manatee County school system, he said he hopes to be a voice for his generation on the school board.
“I have the most relevant experience you can have, because I was just in those classrooms that we want to improve,” Bedinghaus said. “I know the struggles.”
Bedinghaus was the only candidate in the race to qualify by petition as opposed to paying a roughly $2,000 qualification fee. That means he obtained the signatures of at least 1% of the total number of registered voters in District 5 from the last general election to get on the ballot.
He has been endorsed by Manatee Patriots, America First Party of Florida and Stand for Health Freedom. While he mostly received individual contributions, the Tea Party of Manatee County and businesses like Vision Source, contributed to his campaign.
Bedinghaus is the Turning Point USA Manatee County Headquarters director and has actively posted about his admiration of political activist Charlie Kirk on social media. Despite his outspokenness online and role as a journalist at Conservative Coastal News, he said he’s running to keep politics out of school.
“My personal beliefs, yeah, they are conservative, but my ambitions for running are inherently apolitical,” he said.
Wilford, 53, previously a substitute teacher and translator, is running again after losing in 2022. She didn’t intend to run again, but Wilford said she “felt that it was necessary to give voters another choice.”
She has a child currently in the Manatee County Schools, and said the district is doing a lot of things right. If elected, she said she wants to keep the focus on the students and teachers in the classroom.
Wilford is a League of Women Voters’ Education Issues Action Team Member and the founder of the Education Matters in Manatee County Facebook page, which has 2.7k followers. A lot of people don’t know who represents their school district or what the school board does, she said, so she made the page to increase communication.
Wilford also volunteers for the Lakewood Ranch Little Free Library Club and Nate's Honor Animal Rescue Center.
She has run her platform on recruiting and retaining teachers, increasing communication and student achievement.
“I have no political aspirations beyond the school board,” Wilford said. “I’m not a politically inclined person in that way, but I’m very education focused.”
She has been endorsed by The Bradenton Times and Equality Florida Action PAC.
Mullis, 49, is the owner and CEO of Physical Therapy Doctors of Florida in Bradenton. He’s been in Manatee County for the past nine years after living in Boston for two decades.
Mullis is the president of the Bradenton Kiwanis Club and a board member of the Manatee Tiger Bay Club. He said his experience as a small business owner has prepared him for the school board – from managing budgets, to hiring, firing, policies and procedures.
Between his business experience along with having one child currently in the school system and one who recently graduated, Mullis said he feels he’s “the most qualified and most experienced candidate in my race.”
If elected, Mullis said he wants to expand career and technical education, and opportunities for students to dual-enroll.
Mullis leads in campaign contributions with almost $28,000 raised, over Bedinghaus’ $5,800, which comes in second. Mullis has received campaign contributions from Knowledge is Power PAC and thousands from registered businesses like Ford Drywall & Stucco, Inc. He received $150 from Manatee County Commissioner Tal Siddique and $500 from the county’s Chief of Finance, Neil Unruh.
Wilford has the least amount of campaign contributions, with nearly $4,000 raised. The funds are made up of individual contributions of $300 or less.
Literacy
Though all of District 5 schools were ranked A or B for 2025-2026 school year, all three candidates recognize literacy rates as an issue.
Reading is foundational, Bedinghaus said, and if a child is struggling to read, they will struggle in all subjects. Improving what he calls a “literacy crisis” is one of his biggest priorities – if elected, Bedinghaus said he would declare a reading emergency on his first day.
He intends to pave a way for early intervention programs through applying for federal and state grants. Bedinghaus said he wants to cut programs the district is paying for that doesn’t serve at least 80% of students, and redirect those funds as incentivized bonuses for teachers based on the progress of the students they’re teaching.
Early learning initiatives are important to increasing the county’s reading scores, Wilford said, and she said the county needs to continue the initiatives in place.
But Wilford said teachers need more leeway to choose what programs work best for their students. Programs like peer reading can be very successful, she said, but others like silent, sustained reading might work better for different students.
“I think it’s really up to teachers to offer a variety,” she said, “so that they can engage the students that they have in their classroom and see what works best for those.”
Mullis said he wants to start a volunteer program where community members can help mentor children each week to help them catch up. While he said the district’s current early intervention initiatives are good, there are still older kids “that aren’t quite there yet that we need to get caught up as well.”
Having this mentorship program can both help students catch up in reading and also help in developing a plan for after high school graduation, he said. Guidance counselors are often overworked, he said, and community mentors can be a way to offer students more support.
“I don’t know that we can afford to hire a whole bunch more college and career teachers, but one of the things I really want to work on is getting the community more involved in the school system,” Mullis said.
Getting to an A district
To get the Manatee County School District to the A it’s been aiming for, Bedinghaus said he has a three-step plan; prioritize reading, writing and arithmetic; increase accountability and transparency in the district through a parent portal; and give students the opportunity to attain “real world skills,” he said.
Though state law mandates 9th graders take financial literacy as a graduation requirement, Bedinghaus said Manatee County can exceed it through “a state-of-the-art financial literacy program” he wants to spearhead.
A transparency portal would show parents lesson plans for their children, how instructional time is allocated, and what supplemental programs are being used through a dashboard parents can access on their phones, he said.
To Wilford, the district needs to prioritize increasing communication with the public about grading scales, so they know “what goes into those grades, and that it’s so much more than the output.”
“We’ve been close for years,” she said, “but every time they just raise the bar a little bit more.”
The Manatee County School District has been doing a lot to improve early-learning initiatives, she said, and there has been growth district-wide for reading and math scores. The district needs to continue these initiatives, Wilford said, and not get complacent.
To get the district to an A, Mullis said the board will need to focus on the schools outside of District 5.
It’s possible for some of the lower-grade schools to make the jump needed. He pointed to Samoset Elementary School in District 2, which rose from a D to an A this year.
“We need to use that principle and what they did and kind of take it to other schools and continue to focus on the pre-K,” Mullis said. “When the kids come into kindergarten ready to go, it makes a huge difference.”
Book bans
When the school district has discretion about book concerns, Bedinghaus said it comes down to deciding what will set students up for success.
“We got to make sure we get (students) back reading, but not reading all these things that are going to make the suicide rates go up even more,” he said.
Reading materials would be one of Wilford’s top priorities. Though some books have been removed from the school system, she said, “I do want there to be a mechanism in place where parents can challenge the challenge (to books).”
That way, parents can have a way to dispute book removals and have a way to try and introduce new books, she said. Wilford said she thinks each parent should be able to decide what books in the media center the child can access – but it should not be the only way a book is accessible to a child.
“You can’t take away books and then complain that the kids aren’t reading at appropriate levels,” she said.
When it comes to books, Mullis said “we just really need to follow the rules.” The state has guidelines, he said, and “we just need to follow the policies and procedures that we have.”
This story is part of a statewide partnership of 27 nonpartisan newsrooms and universities working to help Florida voters make informed decisions in the 2026 school board elections. Learn more about the Florida Election Reporting Partnership at floridaelections.org.
For more information on candidates running in the Florida primaries check out the Florida Public Media Voter Guide.
