Crowded Field Forms for Local Races as School Board Member McCoy Says She Will Step Down
A total of seventeen candidates have filed to run for Transylvania County School Board and Commission. The Republican race for School Board looks to be especially competitive.
BREVARD — Tawny McCoy, in the final year of her third term on the Transylvania County School Board, has decided “it’s just time.”
Though a whopping nine candidates, including six Republicans, announced plans to run for the three open positions on the Board before Friday’s noon filing deadline, McCoy was not one of them.
Meanwhile, eight candidates — five Republicans and three Democrats — have filed to run for the three open seats on the Transylvania County Commission.
McCoy, a Republican, said she is proud of accomplishments such as putting laptops in the hands of students before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and navigating the necessarily “adversarial” relationship between the Board and the Transylvania County Commission, which is granted funding power over schools by state law.
Serving as a Board member and longtime chair has been a “honor” and “privilege,” she said. She was gratified by the strong majority of voters who in 2018 supported the $68 million bond referendum aimed at refurbishing schools, and she believes that, after years of delay, the Board and Commission are on a path to complete needed upgrades.
“I think we’re in a better place,” she said.
At 61, she’s not ready for the life of a retiree, and will continue in her primary job as a deputy clerk of superior court, she said, but is prepared to leave the task of board membership to a newcomer.
“I’m not upset. I’m not angry. No problems,” she said. “It’s just time to be done and for others to serve.”
That’s not true of the school Board primary’s lone incumbent, Kimsey Jackson, who after his election in 2020 was identified by a doctoral candidate at North Carolina State University as the state’s oldest school board member, he said, and who will turn 90 before next November’s election.
He praised McCoy for both keeping a level head and standing firm in its standoff with the Commission over the spending of the voter-approved upgrades.
“Without a doubt, I and the board will miss her. I think she has been very effective. I think she’s been very good,” said Jackson, who recently replaced McCoy as Chair.
He also pointed out that McCoy has nearly a year remaining in her current term.
“I look forward to having her on the Board and getting help from her,” he said.
But Jackson, a Transylvania native who went on to a long career as an engineer and manager at a large power company in Florida, said he still has skills and experience to offer, leading to his decision to file for reelection on Thursday afternoon.
“I would like to continue making progress on a number of little problems we have, like the bond issue and getting the schools fixed,” he said, adding that he looks forward to working with Schools Superintendent Lisa Fletcher, hired by the Board earlier this spring after the retirement of her long-time predecessor, Jeff McDaris.
“Age does enter into it,” Jackson acknowledged, but “I don’t have any major health problems and everybody says that I’m apparently mentally sharp . . . so I decided that I would go ahead and run and see if I could get elected another time.”
He will have lots of competition in what is shaping up as the most hotly contested of the local March 5 primary races.
The Republican candidates include Ruth Harris, the former chair of the county’s Republican Party, who holds a master’s degrees in both educational psychology and engineering management.
While working in her first career, as a school psychologist, she adopted a child who suffered from spina bifida and, during her subsequent 25-year career with Boeing Co., she adopted a second son who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He was homeschooled for several years, she said, before graduating from Brevard High School and Clemson University.
She approves of the hiring of Fletcher, she said, a decision contentious enough that it helped convince the Board’s then-lone Democrat, Ron Kiviniemi, to resign from his post. His appointed replacement, Bryan O’Neill, has filed to run as a Democratic candidate for Commission.
Harris also approves of recent policy amendments approved to meet the requirements of the state’s Parent’s Bill of Rights, a measure backed by the conservative national education group, Moms for Liberty.
“I’m a big fan of the current School Board,” she said.
If elected, she said, her priorities would include encouraging parental involvement in schools and improving educational achievement in a district that, like many others in the state, has seen academic performance slip in the wake of the pandemic, according to the annual report card recently released by the state Department of Public Instruction.
DPI gave all the county’s elementary and middle schools “C” grades, while Rosman and Brevard high schools received “B”s.
“I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect us to become one of the best school districts in the state,” she said.
Another candidate, Jami Reese, is the chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, according to the press release announcing her candidacy.
She emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of school masking requirements during the pandemic and, before last year’s election, the local Moms group aired a documentary that claimed to expose the teaching of pornography in some of the nation’s schools and the communist influence of the country’s largest teachers’ union.
Repeatedly describing herself in public addresses to the School Board as a “Mama Bear,” Reese is the mother of four children, two who have graduated from Rosman High, one who is a freshman there, and a fourth who is being homeschooled as a high school senior while attending Blue Ridge Community College.
A graduate of Western Carolina University, Reese worked for 17 years as a registered nurse, her release said. She now works in quality management for the treatment of “mental health, substance use, and developmental disabilities,” she wrote in a text.
She acknowledged after the film’s showing that she has seen little evidence of the worst of the trends it highlighted in Transylvania, but in her press release expressed commitment to push for increased parental involvement in schools.
This will include “unifying, educating, and empowering parents, helping to engage parents in the education process by building better relationships,” the release said, and “making every effort to ensure all students in the county receive the highest quality education in the safest environment.”
Ricky Lambert, who has also filed to run for School Board, wrote in a statement released to the Transylvania Times, that he received a bachelor’s degree from Mars Hill College (now University). Previously a police officer and court magistrate, he is now an insurance agent and, he wrote, a committed school volunteer.
He served as an assistant baseball coach at Brevard High School for 22 years and is now in his second term as president of a parent-teacher organization at Pisgah Forest Elementary School.
“At any given time, you can find me at one of many schools doing several different activities,” he said in a video posted on his campaign’s Facebook page.
In the release, he expressed concern for the “amount of wear and tear on the school buildings, which directly affects the morale of faculty and staff.”
The two other Republican candidates, Bill Sack and Greg Cochran, did not immediately return emails from NewsBeat, which could not find public statements about their candidacy. Cochran said in an earlier NewsBeat interview on a different topic, that his long career in law enforcement included serving as chief deputy of the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office.
Two candidates running for the Board, David Borman and Meg Lebeck, have filed as Democrats. Party members are also supporting Sara Green, who, because she was registered as unaffiliated, must collect signatures from 4 percent of the county’s registered voters to qualify, said Elections Supervisor Jeff Storey.
Green has taught in both public and independent schools, she said, and is the mother of three children in county schools. She also has extensive background working with educational nonprofits.
Borman is the father of two district students and has “previously taught college English for nine years and now directs communications for a nonprofit focused on international development through science.”
Lebeck is the mother of two children “who will be enrolled in TCS,” she wrote in an email, which also said she has “worked in non-profit leadership for 15 years, the majority in education and child protection.”
The Democratic candidates for County Commission include Rik Emaus, a retired doctor best known locally for helping to found the TC Strong youth mental health initiative; O’Neill, the School Board member who, before retirement, headed a home-improvement company and battery distributor in South Florida; and Joe Smith, a sales executive for a company that manufactures boom trucks and cranes.
The Republican Commission primary will feature three incumbents, Teresa McCall, Larry Chapman and longtime Chair Jason Chappell. They will be joined by Mac Banner, president of Banner and Associates LLC construction company, and Jeff Berry, both of whom filed to run late this week.
The total number of candidates for the Board and Commission is the most since Storey started working with the Board of Elections in 2012, he said.
Sam Edney, chair of the county Democratic Party, said that, including Green, “it’s the first time we’ve had a full slate of Democrats in decades.”
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