School board elections have been nonpartisan in Florida since 2000. That’s because voters here approved a constitutional amendment on the issue back in 1998.
But now there’s a proposal to make school board races partisan again: a constitutional amendment to reverse the one decided 25 years ago. Floridians will get to vote on Amendment 1 in November.
One reason may be that in the past four years, school board meetings have gotten a lot more polarized. And these county level government agencies are getting a lot more attention from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
Three people paying close attention to local school boards and this amendment are Tampa Bay Times education reporter Jeff Solochek, Republican political strategist Rod Thomson, who also chairs the Communications Committee with the Sarasota County Republican Party, and Damaris Allen, the executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools.
They discussed the arguments for and against partisan school board elections with Florida Matters and took questions from an audience of Tampa Bay area residents at the WUSF performance studio in Tampa.
Party politics has a big influence on school board elections already, said Solochek.
"What we're seeing is a lot of partisan electioneering without using the partisan words," he said.
Still, reverting to partisan elections would make a difference to voters, he added.
"Everybody has a chance to participate in all these elections right now, because they are nonpartisan, but if they moved to a party primary, then that dynamic changes."
Thomson said putting an 'R' or 'D' next to candidates' names gives busy voters more information.
"I think transparency is always the best policy, more information is always the best policy, the more the better. And the fact is, when you said what will change, nothing's going to change, to speak of. Because it's already been partisan," said Thomson.
Allen, who opposes the proposed amendment, said school boards need less politics, not more.
"This is going to add more money into races which is going to put it out of reach for a lot of good people that should be running for school boards, who understand the budget who have kids in public schools, who know the actual issues that parents are facing who are on the ground." said Allen.
"We don't want to make our school board elections unreachable for those people."
Listen to the full conversation using the media player above.
