Hillsborough school board hopefuls agree on key issues but spar on others
Four candidates offered an early look at this year’s Hillsborough County School Board races on Friday, telling an audience at a Tampa Tiger Bay Club forum that they mostly agree on crucial issues affecting public schools.
They concurred that African American history must be taught. Teachers must be paid adequately, they said. And culture war issues are detracting from the important work of teaching children how to read.
But school board member Nadia Combs and challenger Julie Magill, a real estate broker, differed on key points. Magill said the school board has incited culture wars. Combs said it has not.
Combs also defended the district’s system of choosing and evaluating library books, while Magill said there is “straight-up pornography” in the schools. Magill also said she was horrified to see a 17-year-old female student at the table when the book committee reviewed a sexually explicit item.
The other participants, however, said students need to be involved in decisions that affect them.
School board member Jessica Vaughn and her challenger, retired educator Angela Fullwood, saw eye to eye on many points. Among them: whether the district was correct to close West Tampa’s Just Elementary School last summer because of low enrollment and poor student performance.
Vaughn told the audience at the Cuban Club in Ybor City that she voted against the closing because community organizations had offered to get involved and improve the school. “I believe in leaning into our communities and listening to them and hearing what they want from us as educators,” she said.
Fullwood, whose 35-year career included work with high-poverty schools such as Just, said the district should have hired an effective principal and provided extra services, including professional development for teachers and a parent outreach program, to turn the school around. “We should never get to a point where we have to vote to close a school,” she said.
Combs defended her vote to close Just, which she described as “probably one of the hardest votes for me.” Half of the school’s classes were being taught by substitute teachers in its final year, she said. And Just was one of many schools with such low enrollment that it was creating a drain on the district budget.
“We cannot afford to continue to provide a quality education when there’s a school of 200 students and it was built for 600,” she said.
Both Vaughn and Combs are on a list of school board incumbents Gov. Ron DeSantis has pledged to oppose because of positions they have taken on his education agenda. That agenda includes a hard line against critical race theory and “woke” ideology, meaning lessons that would cause students to feel culpable for systemic injustices.
In response to an audience question, three of the four candidates said they would have trouble defining critical race theory. Fullwood suggested it was “a political, made-up term.”
Magill, however, said critical race theory is real. “It was not a good thing,” she said. “I’m glad we banned it and I hope we never see it again.”
While the four candidates handled questions with relative ease, the group was conspicuously small, with three candidates missing. The three included District 1 candidate Layla Collins, who is running against Combs and Magill. She has raised far more money so far than any of the others, at $67,741.
“It’s important to show up,” Combs said at the end of the event. “And it’s sad that some people did not show up for today.”
District 3 candidate Bonnie Lambert, a career educator who is running against Vaughn and Fullwood, had indicated she would take part in the forum. But she left word that she could not attend because of an illness. Lambert has raised $25,788, the most in that race so far.
