Race Analysis: School Board District 4

The Manatee County School Board District 4 race is one of three on this year’s ballot. However, because it is the only one that features just two candidates, it is certain to be decided on August 23 with no runoff necessary in November. The race features Chad Choate, an incumbent who is competing in his first election after being appointed to the seat by Governor DeSantis to fill a vacancy, and Navy veteran/security specialist Sean Conley.

Both candidates are Manatee County natives and graduates of its public school system and are raising families in the community. Choate graduated from Manatee High, while Conley graduated from Southeast. Both taught in public schools before moving into other careers, Choate to finance and Conley, who had been a substitute teacher, to the Navy where he also taught in various capacities.

Choate, who is closely allied with Manatee County Commission Chair Kevin Van Ostenbridge, was appointed to the seat last August after Van Ostenbridge was successful in lobbying for then District 4 board member Scott Hopes to be hired as Manatee County Administrator. Choate’s first year in the seat occurred during a relatively smooth year for the sometimes troubled district and, as such, it was unremarkable. A man of few words, it is not terribly easy to get a good read on his positions.

That said, he’s a political appointee and governors do not generally appoint people to local office after an exhaustive search of the best-qualified candidates. Rather, it is generally used as political currency and delegated to influential members of their party from that community. For his part, Choate immediately leaned into some of DeSantis’ favorite culture war issues regarding education, including mask mandates and CRT curriculum bans.

After pledging his allegiance to DeSantis’s educational agenda, Choate was one of many candidates in the state to receive an endorsement from the governor. While there is room for debate on a whole host of issues facing public schools in Florida, we believe that this should be done by the community and not coopted into the larger political agendas of much higher offices with enough resources to tilt the scales. We do not believe that students, teachers, parents, and taxpayers benefit from making classrooms battlegrounds in the political culture war.

Sean Conley has done a remarkable job of remaining non-partisan throughout his grassroots candidacy, refusing to participate in any forums or other activities that were of a partisan nature. Conley is something of a single-issue candidate, as his primary passion is a desire to use his considerable experience in assessing and improving the security of military bases in the post-9/11 era to help the district better protect students in the event of ever more frequent school shootings.

Conley says that there are many measures that can be taken at a very reasonable cost to harden schools and better train teachers and students on how to react to an active shooter. He also believes that his experience in systems management will be a benefit to a board with oversight of an enterprise as large as our district, which is the largest employer in Manatee County. We invited both candidates to be guests on The Bradenton Times Podcast. Choate did not respond, but you can listen to my conversation with Conley here.

In addition to DeSantis, Choate received an endorsement of sorts from the Manatee County Republican Party which sent out communications urging voters to turn out for three Republican candidates they identified. However, Conley also appears to be registered Republican, which, in a county where that confers a significant advantage in terms of registered voters, makes his fierce commitment to non-partisanship all the more impressive.

For voters in District 4, this race is pretty simple. If you are on board with the DeSantis wing of the party and believe that it is critically important to have ideologically aligned board members committed to a specific agenda that comes down from the top, Choate is your guy. If you do not believe that school board elections should be contested in the same way as partisan races and that the boards should be governed by regular folks from our community who want nothing more than to find pragmatic, non-ideological solutions to our many challenges in public education, Conley presents an attractive alternative.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is availablehere.