Polk County School Board: Incumbent Miller faces Sessions in runoff

A runoff election for the Polk County School Board will test the power of a conservative, anti-incumbent movement rippling through Florida.

Lisa Miller, seeking a second term in District 7, faces Jill Sessions, who has aligned her campaign with the education agenda of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Miller prevailed in the August primary, capturing 42.4% of the vote, compared to 37.5% for Sessions. A third candidate, Dell Quary, took 21.1%, denying Miller the majority she needed to avoid a runoff with Sessions.

District 7 covers North Lakeland, Auburndale and Polk City. While candidates must live in the district, the nonpartisan election is open to all Polk County voters.

Previously: Polk County School Board District 7 race: Lisa Miller faces 2 challengers, in bid for 2nd term

Related: Partisan-tinged Polk County School Board elections yield mixed outcome, with runoff coming

Miller, 45, is campaigning on her record of involvement with Polk County Public Schools, first as a parent and an advocate for children with special needs and since 2018 as a member of the School Board. She calls Sessions an “outsider” candidate being promoted by political groups focused on a national agenda.

Sessions, 57, is running on the promise of giving parents a greater role in determining what happens in schools.

Polk County Public Schools, which operates more than 150 schools with over 110,000 students, ranks among the 30 largest districts in the nation, according to its published figures. The district manages a budget of $2.35 billion and employs 13,500. The student population is nearly 60% Latino or Black and 35.5% white.

Varying backgrounds

Miller, a married mother of two, is a Polk County native and a 1994 graduate of Winter Haven High School. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Florida and a master’s in public administration from Barry University.

A longtime resident of North Lakeland, Miller is a broker/owner of MillShire Realty with her husband, Bob. Their teenaged son, Michael, was born with a significant developmental delay, and Miller was an advocate for children with disabilities before joining the School Board.

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“I'm the only candidate in this race who's been inside of Polk County public schools,” Miller said. “The other person has never been in our schools. I have. I work full time as a school board member. So I'm involved in our schools and understand the needs of programming and the needs of the staff and students, which is an advantage when you're trying to spend a $2 billion budget, that you understand what you're spending the dollars on.”

Sessions, a Tampa native, lived in Hillsborough County until moving to Lakeland about three years ago. She said was raised by a single mother who worked two jobs to support her and three siblings. Sessions said a work-study program she entered in high school yielded a job after graduation with Tampa Electric, her employer for the next 28 years.

TECO offered a tuition reimbursement program that allowed Sessions to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Florida and a master’s of business administration from the University of Tampa. Citing that personal history, she said she would promote increased work-study programs and vocational training if she joins the School Board.

Sessions, a mother of three adults, serves as director of solid waste for Plant City. She said she has worked as an adjunct professor of economics since 2015 for Southern New Hampshire University.

Session touts her experience in working with budgets as large as $3 billion — at TECO, as a manager of audits and contracts for the city of Tampa and since 2015 in her current role — as a qualification for joining the School Board.

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“With my strong background in budgeting, I want to have an audit done of the budget process and have a starting point for new School Board members coming in,” Sessions said. “They definitely would have a baseline of, ‘OK, what did this place look like when we came in and in what condition did we leave it?’ That's truly the measure of someone's success on a board, I believe.”

Miller said that education budgets are unique because state directives leave little opportunity for discretionary spending. She said it takes a comprehensive understanding of the district’s finances to manage the budget.

Teacher shortages, pay issues

Both candidates said they would address the shortage of teachers and staff — a nationwide problem also affecting Polk County — and pay compression among teachers. The Florida Legislature set starting salaries at $47,000, but many experienced teachers don’t make much more than that.

“So that will be something I'll use my economics background to hopefully work with people in Tallahassee to improve,” Sessions said.

Miller said the district has decreased its teacher vacancy rate and improved retention through programs such as one that provided financial support for paraprofessionals who want to become teachers. She said the School Board’s legislative priorities for next year include urging lawmakers to allocate funds specifically to provide raises for veteran teachers.

Miller, who volunteered in Polk County schools for 15 years before being elected, says that Sessions is unfamiliar with the district’s schools, having only moved into her district in May.

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Sessions said her demanding, full-time jobs have made it impossible for her to volunteer at schools during her career. She pledged to resign from her current job if she is elected.

Sessions said she has visited all areas of Polk County during the campaign and has met with many political and faith-based groups.

“So I've got a broad spectrum of what the public is looking for in the school system and from their board representation,” she said.

Sessions, whose three children graduated from public schools in Hillsborough County, criticized Miller for having her children attend private schools. Miller said her son attended public schools for years before moving to a private school on a Family Empowerment Scholarship (formerly known as Gardiner Scholarships), a state program for students with special needs.

Miller said her daughter attends a private school, an indication of the board member’s belief in school choice. She said a niece who lived in her home attended Kathleen High School.

Both candidates described themselves as “collaborators.”

“As a parent advocate for a decade, I always worked to connect parents to schools,” Miller said. “And progress was made when it was done in a collaborative manner, with transparency. And we work to do that here. The people speaking for parents is the issue I take. Ms. Sessions is not a parent of anybody in our school system. Saying parents aren't represented — you're not talking to the parents.”

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When asked why she chose to run against Miller, Sessions responded: “Well, I'll tell you this: There are people in the community who want someone on the board who's more collaborative, and that's my style. We work with a very diverse workforce here (in Plant City), and I always have. … And it's a goal of mine to sit down and find common ground with people and listen to what people are saying. I don't have to agree with everybody, but I do need to treat them with respect and civility.”

Critics of the current School Board note that the district received an overall C grade last year from the Florida Department of Education, after receiving B grades in the two years before the COVID-19 pandemic. Grades are based on a formula that includes student scores on standardized tests, college and career acceleration and graduation rates.

Miller said the disruptions of the pandemic, which included a state-mandated shift to remote learning in 2020, have to be considered when looking at the state evaluations. She pointed to an increase in Polk County schools receiving A or B grades and a decrease in those rated as D or F schools.

Signing DeSantis' pledge

Sessions was one of four School Board candidates endorsed in the primary election by the Polk County Republican Party and promoted by County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative group that has led protests against the board over such issues as mask mandates and library books. Miller emphasizes her status as a voter registered with no party affiliation.

Sessions joined three other local candidates in signing a pledge promoted by DeSantis, who has taken a more active role in county school board races than any other governor in modern state history. The 10 items on the “DeSantis Education Agenda” include the phrase “educate, don’t indoctrinate” and pledges to reject “lockdowns” and to keep Critical Race Theory and “woke gender ideology” out of schools.

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Critical Race Theory is a college-level exploration of how racism and discrimination have influenced American law, society and politics. Neither Polk County nor any other school district in Florida includes the theory in its curriculum.

DeSantis endorsed more than 20 school board candidates statewide for August races, including Rick Nolte in Polk County, though not Sessions. (Nolte ousted incumbent Sarah Fortney.)

Sessions’ campaign signs carry the phrase, “Protecting Polk Families.” Asked why she chose that phrase, she mentioned the district’s handling of challenges to library books that some parents consider offensive or even pornographic.

CCDF led an effort starting last year to have 16 books restricted in school libraries. The titles included acclaimed novels by Toni Morrison and Khaled Hosseini, along with such LGBTQ-themed books as “Two Boys Kissing” and “I Am Jazz.”

The district established two committees to read and evaluate the books, with each including teachers, district staff members, parents, students and representatives from outside groups, including CCDF. Both panels eventually voted to keep all the titles in school libraries.

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Polk County School Superintendent Frederick Heid in July presented an outline for an “opt-in” policy, which would require parents to give permission for their children to read the challenged books. Instead, the district implemented an “opt-out” policy, allowing parents to specify books they didn’t want available to their children.

Since then, CCDF has filed reports with law-enforcement agencies over the books, though none has taken action against Heid or the district.

Sessions said the district’s policy took control away from parents.

“After the decision was made — the announcement was made — at a school board meeting, that it would be opt-in, the change was made behind the scenes, and my opponent was one of the ones who pressured the superintendent to change it,” Sessions said.

'Divisive rhetoric'

Miller disputed that description of events. She said the district never announced plans to enact an opt-in system but merely discussed doing that, among other options, during public meetings.

“The majority of the board had concerns with how the opt-in policy would limit parent choice and be difficult — because there are so few of those books in our district, implementation would be difficult,” Miller said. “So we opted for an extended parent choice of opting out of any book they don't want their child to have access to.”

Miller said that claims of indoctrination in schools are part of a statewide campaign to insert divisive national issues into local elections. She ascribed much of the blame to CCDF and said Sessions is aligned with the group, calling her “an outsider with no knowledge of our district wanting to come in with divisive rhetoric about things that do not happen here.”

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Miller added: “We do not teach CRT. We do not indoctrinate children. … Her sign says ‘Protecting Polk Families’ — protecting them from what, the teachers? Who are you protecting them from?”

As for the pledge to avoid “indoctrination” of students, Sessions said, “My view is — if the shoe fits, wear it, and if it doesn't, don't. So if a teacher is not indoctrinating students, they have nothing to worry about. And from what I hear from talking to students, parents and teachers, predominantly that is not happening in Polk County schools, and that's good.”

Sessions said her campaign theme goes beyond the issue of library books.

“I think ‘Protecting Polk Families’ also includes a quality education — again, low literacy or poor literacy is one of the biggest determining factors in someone's income level,” she said. “And the graduates of Polk County Schools are far below — 15% — at being at reading level or the ability to do math. So we need to protect them from a low-quality education or substandard education.”

Controversial consultant

Miller criticized Sessions for using campaign consultant James Dunn Jr. of Texas. Dunn, who also worked on the campaign of Terry Clark, a loser to incumbent Kay Fields in the August election, pleaded guilty in 2008 to submitting fraudulent claims against the federal government.

Dunn was then the owner and operator of a Texas company that received a $300,000 contract from a Texas agency to provide vocational rehabilitation training to people with mental and physical disabilities but failed to do so, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He was sentenced to 33 months in prison.

More recently, Texas courts found two companies headed by Dunn to be in breach of a contact to provide services to a Houston church. Last December, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s order for the two companies to return about $21,000 in payments to the church.

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Sessions paid Dunn $7,500 in June, according to her campaign's financial reports. She said Dunn served as a consultant and not as her campaign manager and is no longer involved with her campaign.

Miller said she suspects that Dunn is responsible for text messages sent in late June to local voters that falsely claimed she and her husband were facing a criminal investigation. Local law-enforcement agencies and the State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit have said the couple are not being investigated.

Sessions denied any connection to the text messages and said she didn’t know who had created and sent them.

Clark, who employed Dunn as a campaign manager, sent supporters an email on July 8 saying Dunn had arranged for more than 20,000 text messages to be sent to voters, though he didn’t specify what the content was.

A spokesman for State Attorney Brian Haas has neither confirmed nor denied that the office is investigating the text messages that targeted Miller.

Getting outside support

Two political-action committees have paid for media spots promoting Sessions or attacking Miller. Before the Aug. 23 primary election, a video ran on the YouTube channel of The American Principles Project, a PAC based in Virginia that promotes Republican and conservative candidates.

The ad included footage of a drag queen reading to children — not recorded in Polk County — and warned that the board’s incumbent candidates were “sexualizing our children” and promoting “trans ideology.”

A Tampa-based PAC, Educators and Parents for School Excellence, recently ran a commercial on local cable channels excoriating Miller and urging votes for Sessions. The ad showed a photo of Sessions with Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, seeming to imply that he supported her candidacy. Judd has not endorsed either candidate.

The commercial also claimed that Miller "lets big unions takes hundreds from teachers’ paychecks." Teachers in Polk County only pay union dues voluntarily. As of Wednesday, Educators and Parents for School Excellence had no donors from Polk. Its contributors included the Florida Medical Association, Friends of Tampa General Hospital and Mosaic Global Sales.

As of Wednesday, Miller had received nearly $71,000 in campaign contributions, compared to about $31,000 for Sessions. Miller has given her own campaign $5,000, while Sessions has given $1,400 to her campaign.

Miller’s contributors include retired circuit judge Bob Doyel, Polk Education Association President Stephanie Yocum, the PEA’s Political Action Committee, Lakeland Mayor Bill Mutz, Auburndale Mayor Dorothea Taylor Bogert, former Florida Senator Paula Dockery, the political committee of the Lakeland Area Chamber of Commerce and Polk County Commissioners Martha Santiago and Rick Wilson.

Sessions’ financial backers include former Lakeland Mayor Howard Wiggs, Polk County Republican Party State Committeewoman Amilee Stuckey and the Winter Haven 9-12 Project.

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Incumbent Miller faces Sessions in Polk County School Board runoff