Progressive slate of candidates elected to Poudre School District Board of Education

Incumbent Jessica Zamora easily won reelection and will be joined on the Poudre School District Board of Education by two other like-minded candidates who won their races Tuesday — Kevin Havelda and Conor Duffy.

Those three ran on a similar progressive slate, emphasizing the importance of student voices, mental health supports, protecting the rights of the LGBTQ+ community and repudiating an opposing slate of candidates’ push for what they claimed were increased parental rights.

Those opponents — Scott Schoenbauer, who was elected without opposition to the District A seat, former Fort Collins city councilman Kurt Kastein and Andrea Booth — were opposed to school-district policies that require school staff to call students by their preferred names and pronouns rather than their legal names and the pronouns associated with their gender at birth. They also objected to the introduction of same-sex couples in grade-school reading material and to elements of the sex-education curriculum approved by the Colorado Department of Education.

“It feels good; it’s a relief,” Zamora said. “I think our community spoke, and I think we’re going to move in the right direction, which is awesome, it feels good. … Coming in tonight, I just needed the voters to vote, and so whatever our community decided was where we were going to land.

“I’m just glad they agreed with my values.”

Zamora was watching the election returns with family and friends at Purpose Brewing and Cellars with Havelda and current PSD board members Rob Petterson, D.J. Anderson, Kristen Draper and Jim Brokish. Petterson, the board’s president, is term-limited and ineligible to run for reelection, while the terms of Draper and Brokish run through 2025. Anderson failed to file his paperwork on time to run for reelection, allowing Schoenbauer to run unopposed for the seat he failed to win in 2019, when Anderson was elected to a four-year term.

Zamora was running for reelection for the District G seat for second time in two years, having been appointed to the board to fill a vacancy less than three months before being elected in 2021 to serve the two years remaining on the previous member’s four-year term.

She easily defeated Caleb Larson, an accountant who at 24 is possibly the youngest candidate to ever run for the PSD Board of Education. Zamora, 38, received 62.8% of the vote and had nearly 15,000 more votes in unofficial results released Wednesday evening by Larimer County. Zamora teaches courses at Front Range and Laramie (Wyoming) County community colleges and online for South College, based on Georgia.

Havelda, 37, a former teacher and now lawyer, defeated Kastein in the race for the District B seat being vacated by Nate Donovan, who is term-limited and ineligible to run for reelection.

Kastein had an edge in name recognition among voters, having served two terms on the Fort Collins City Council.

“Initially, that was a concern of mine, just getting my name out there,” Havelda said. “… But if you did a line by line of what he was doing 20 years ago on City Council, that’s when I started my teaching career.

“My experience having been a teacher and having put students first for a significant part of my career, I think that resonated with people, ultimately.”

Havelda had 57.9% of the vote and a lead of 9,229 votes with all properly filled out and signed ballots in Larimer County counted. Final results will not be available until Nov. 16, after the cure period that allows voters to sign or otherwise correct ballots has concluded, county election officials said.

“We ran a really good grassroots campaign,” Kastein said by phone from a friend’s home, where he and his family gathered to watch election returns come in. “I feel good about the heart and soul people put into it, but I was hoping for a different result.

“I’m really nervous about the state of public education in the Poudre School District, in Fort Collins, and that it’s not working for everybody. I was hoping I could be a guy that could stand in the gap and help fix that.”

Duffy’s race with Booth for the District F seat being vacated by Petterson, the board's term-limited president, was the closest of the three contested races for the PSD Board of Education.

He had 54.5% of the vote with 31,429 to Booth’s 26,241.

“Things are looking in the right direction for us right now, hopefully it will hold,” said Duffy, 44, managing director of Range Analytics. “It’s good to see the numbers coming in. It seems like the slate of candidates seems to have been a winning ticket.”

Candidates must live in the geographic district they represent but are elected by all voters in the school district, which spans more than 1,800 square miles. The volunteer directors serve four-year terms.

3 incumbents reelected, 4th leading in Thompson School District

A progressive slate of candidates, including two of the three incumbents up for reelection, were reelected to seats on the Thompson School District Board of Education, while one race was unusually tight and headed for a possible recount.

Incumbents Dawn Kirk and Stu Boyd held relatively strong leads over their challengers in results available Friday morning from Larimer, Boulder and Weld counties.

A third incumbent, Nancy Rumfelt, was leading her progressive slate challenger, Briah Freeman, by 129 votes out of 42,003 cast, a margin small enough to trigger a possible automatic recount.

Recounts are automatic if the margin of victory is less than one-half of 1% of the total vote after election results are certified, Larimer County Clerk and Recorder Tina Harris said Friday.

A fourth race among two challengers vying for the District D seat being vacated by Pam Howard, who is term-limited, had Denise Chapman with a solid lead of 54.2% over Yazmin Navarro.

Howard was running on the same slate as Kirk, Boyd and Freeman.

Kirk had 53.8% of the vote in her District A race with Ryan Wilcken, and Boyd had 53.0% of the vote in his District G race with Elizabeth Kearney with more than 41,500 votes cast in each race.

Incumbent voted out in Weld RE-4 School District

Challenger Mark Leach defeated Patrick Miller, the only incumbent running in a contested race for reelection in the Weld RE-4 School District Board of Education race.

Leach had 5,786 votes to Miller’s 4,799 in the District D race for the Windsor-Severance school district, according to election results available Thursday morning from Weld County.

Leach is a U.S. Army veteran who later worked with astronauts on their physical fitness at NASA and managed a cardiology practice. He now teaches in a program run jointly by the Weld RE-6 (Greeley-Evans) School District and Aims Community College.

Jennifer Hansen held a smaller lead over Helen “Kathy” Ulrich in the District E race with 5,566 votes to Ulrich’s 5,056. Russell Smart, the board president who has held the District E seat since 2019, chose not to run for reelection.

Hansen is a longtime volunteer in the Weld RE-4 School District who has also worked in district schools as a paraprofessional and substitute teacher.

Two other candidates ran unopposed for their seats on the Weld RE-4 school board, incumbent Raymond Ruth in District A and former Weld RE-4 superintendent Karen Trusler in District B.

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Progressive candidates sweep contested PSD Board of Education races