Analysis: Manatee School Board District 4 Race

The Manatee County School Board District 4 contest is both the most competitive and interesting race on this year’s ballot. Several very-qualified candidates with very different backgrounds will compete in the non-partisan race that will be on every Manatee County ballot. If none of the four contestants get a majority of the votes, the top two will compete in a runoff election in November.

Incumbent Scott Hopes was appointed to the seat by Governor Rick Scott in 2017, after Karen Carpenter retired before her term was up. He’s since been elected chair by his fellow members, though he's often feuded with them as well. Hopes has definitely shaken things up and ruffled some feathers in doing so. That said, it seems telling that every time someone comes in from outside of the tight cabal that is our educational community and makes blunt assessments of shortcomings in the district (think former superintendents Rick Mills and Gene Denisar), the old guard is up in arms.

Hopes, who did spend some time as a classroom teacher in the Ô80s and served on USF’s board of trustees, brings a wealth of experience in oversight of large financial enterprises from his background as a corporate executive and board member. When he arrived on the school board, he was immediately critical of the district for lacking any sort of coherent long-term strategy or transparency to taxpayers, noting that continually asking the public for more tax money wasn’t a viable pathway toward success.

Before lending his support to the referendum to increase school property taxes that narrowly passed earlier this year, Hopes insisted that the board create a financial oversight committee, made up from community stakeholders that could assess district spending and make recommendations to the board. Hopes says that the district has clearly become more accountable since he’s been on the board, that there’s greater transparency, and that the financial house is in much better order. He wants voters to give him a chance to continue the course.

Richard Murphy is perhaps the most interesting candidate in the mix. Murphy’s held pretty much every single position in public education, including classroom teacher, school board member and even superintendent, having won a single term in his native Hendry County, a small, rural district that elects its superintendent. No one who’s ever run for the board in the history of the district can claim those three experiences. That background would obviously give him an enormous advantage in understanding the vastly complex range of issues that the board takes action on.

Murphy is a data guy who approaches issues from an intellectual rather than emotional or even intuitive angle. He makes calm and measured statements and is clearly interested in lending his skills for the betterment of the district, where his grandchildren are students. He came to the race very late, however, filing on the last day of qualifying and hasn’t done much in the way of campaigning (he doesn’t even have a campaign website or Facebook page). As such, whether or not voters can learn enough about him in order to get enough votes to advance to the runoff remains to be seen.

If Murphy brings the broadest experience in education, Joe Stokes brings the most in total, with 45 years of experience in public education, including 17 years in Indiana classrooms and 12 years as a principal, vice principal and administrator here in Manatee County. For some, Stokes’ close ties in a county that has long been skeptical of outsiders will be seen as a big plus, which is evidenced by his financial support and endorsements from the teachers union and the Gulf Coast Builders Exchange.

For others, however, it will be a liability. Stokes was promoted to Director of Elementary Schools for Manatee Schools under former superintendent Tim McGonegal, who resigned in disgrace in 2012, after revealing that he’d been deliberately misleading the board and public about the district's finances by hiding a multimillion dollar shortfall that he instead presented as a giant surplus. When Rick Mills became the next permanent superintendent in 2013, he opted not to keep Stokes in a key position.

Mills told me that he thought Stokes was a nice guy who was well intentioned, but that he didn’t find him qualified for the position he was in and definitely didn’t think he could fill the position as he intended to redesign it. Mills said he told Stokes that he was free to apply, but that he felt he’d be better off applying for an assistant principal position at the middle school level, which he found him better suited for. To be fair, Mills said that he’d had similar conversations with other employees, having found the district riddled with high-level administrators who seemed to have been installed chiefly for their loyalty to McGonegal and his cronies, rather than being the best person for the job.

In the years since McGonegal’s departure there’s been a lot of activism by former principals and district administrators who were very upset by Mills’ efforts toward building a meritocracy out of what had become something of a quasi-patronage system–and many of those people have donated to Stokes’ campaign. Personally, I’ve found Stokes to be intelligent, forthright and well intentioned, but I definitely understand why those who are just as skeptical of the good old boy network that has dominated Manatee Schools are just as uncomfortable with his candidacy, as the others are with outsiders running for the seat.

Whether it's fair for Stokes to be attached to that crowd based on his career and their support of his campaign is hard to say, but it's going to tell a lot of voters everything they need to know, one way or the other. The story of the Manatee County School Board over the last decade has been one of a battle between the old guard and those who seek to reform it, and it seems clear that Stokes’ candidacy has been supported by the former and rejected by the latter. The turnout of the former, however, is likely to be large enough to get him into the runoff, even though the three other candidates each bring more to the table in this crowded and talented field.

The wildcard in the race is CPA Jim Daniel, whose wife has spent her career as a teacher in the district. Daniel is another broadly-qualified candidate who brings much-needed experience in the world of financial oversight. The school district is a billion dollar entity and the largest employer in Manatee County. To say that its budget–which includes a wide array of funding sources, each with its own restrictions–is complex, would be a massive understatement.

The fact that the board has not in recent years exercised great oversight of budgetary matters makes someone with such a background quite attractive. It seems a bit of a shame, however, that Daniel is running to unseat one of only two current board members who’ve shown any real skill and interest in that department.