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2019 School Board Elections

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In 2019, Ballotpedia covered school board elections in 190 of America's school districts. There were 547 school board seats up for grabs across 27 states. Collectively, these districts served 6,117,235 students during the 2016-2017 school year—approximately 11.7 percent of all public school students in the U.S.^[1][2]

Battleground school board races in 2019:

• Los Angeles Unified School District special election: One seat was up on a seven-member board in the nation's second-largest district by enrollment.
• Houston Independent School District elections: Four seats were up on a nine-member board in the nation's seventh-largest district.

Click here for a list of school board elections by state.

From 2014 to 2016, Ballotpedia conducted studies of school board election statistics in America's 1,000 largest school districts. We found that between 32 percent and 36 percent of elections were unopposed each year; that incumbents won between 58 percent and 62 percent of seats each year; and that between 81 percent and 83 percent of incumbents who sought re-election won each year. Click here for more of our findings.

Battleground 2019 school board elections

Houston Independent School District election

See also: Houston Independent School District, Texas, elections (2019)

Four out of nine seats on the Houston Independent School District (HISD) school board were up for election in 2019.

Races for two seats advanced to the December 14 runoff election, since no candidate in those districts received more than 50% of the vote during the November 5 general election. Katherine Blueford-Daniels defeated John Gibbs Sr. in the runoff election for District II, and Patricia Allen defeated Matthew Barnes in the runoff election for District IV. In the general election, incumbents Sergio Lira (District III) and Diana Davila (District VIII) lost their re-election bids outright to Daniela Hernandez and Judith Cruz, respectively.

On November 6, 2019, the day after the general election, Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath notified the district of his decision to appoint a board of managers to replace the elected school board. This decision came as a result of a Texas Education Agency (TEA) investigation into the board’s governance and as a result of repeatedly poor academic performance ratings at a high school in the district.^[3] Under a state-appointed board, elected board members would function as non-voting representatives until they were phased back in by the commissioner.^[4][5] Click here to read about developments occurring after the election.

HISD school board elections are officially nonpartisan. Heading into the 2019 general election, all nine HISD board members were Democrats, according to the Houston Chronicle.^[6]

As of the 2018-2019 school year, HISD was the largest school district in Texas and the seventh-largest school district in the United States, serving 209,772 students in 280 schools with a budget of $2.04 billion.^[7]

Los Angeles Unified School District special election

See also: Los Angeles Unified School District, California, elections (2019)

Former LAUSD board member Jackie Goldberg defeated former vice president of the Board of Public Works Commissioners Heather Repenning in a runoff election for the District 5 seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education in California on May 14, 2019. Goldberg's election returned the board to a majority of teachers-union-backed members, who last held a majority ahead of the 2017 elections.

School board elections in 2017 flipped the board from a 4-3 majority of members supported by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) to a 4-3 majority of members supported by the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). Ref Rodriguez—whose resignation from the District 5 seat led to the special election—was a member of the latter group. His resignation left a 3-3 split.^[8]

Both Goldberg and Repenning said they supported holding charter schools to the same standards as public schools. But they differed in the degree of emphasis they placed on charter school policy and other issues in their campaigns. LAUSD had 224 independently operated charter schools in 2017, more than any other school district in the U.S.^[9]

Goldberg was endorsed by UTLA ahead of the general election and made charter school accountability a key plank of her campaign, alongside increasing per-pupil funding and resolving budgetary conflicts between the teachers union and the district.^[10][11]

Repenning described herself as a coalition builder and emphasized her support for expanding afterschool programming, early education, and mental health and other community services at schools in her campaign.^[12][13]

CCSA did not endorse in the race. The group announced in December it would not endorse in the March 5 election, citing the "diversity, strength, and depth of the field."

LAUSD was the largest school district in California and the second-largest in the nation by enrollment in 2018.^[14] The district served 633,621 students in the 2016-2017 school year. The district's total budget for the 2018-2019 school year was $13.7 billion.^[15]

School board elections by state

Ballotpedia provides in-depth coverage of school board elections in America's largest school districts by enrollment. Our coverage includes school board member and candidate profiles, noteworthy election issues, district data, and more. We publish election results following each election. Ballotpedia also publishes The Tap, a weekly newsletter covering both recent and upcoming political news and elections.

In addition to the 200 largest school districts in the nation, Ballotpedia covers the additional school districts that overlap with the 100 largest cities by population in the United States.

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School board election statistics (2014-2016)

See also: School boards in session: 2016 in brief and School board incumbency analysis: 2016 in brief

From 2014 to 2016, Ballotpedia conducted studies of school board election statistics in America's 1,000 largest school districts, as measured by student enrollment. Details on each year's election statistics can be found in the table and chart below:

Incumbents in the 2016 school board elections saw similar success rates to those seen in the 2015 and 2014 school board elections. In 2016, 82.39 percent of incumbents who ran for re-election won additional terms. In 2015, 82.66 percent won additional terms, and in 2014, 81.31 percent won.

Incumbents who ran against challengers in 2016 had a higher contested success rate than those who ran against challengers in 2014 and 2015. In 2016, 71.09 percent of contested incumbents won re-election, while 70.88 percent of contested incumbents won re-election in both 2014 and 2015.

Details on school board election statistics by election method in 2016 can be found in the table below:

Details on school board election statistics by the partisan nature of elections in 2016 can be found in the table below:

More local election analysis

In 2019, Ballotpedia covered elections for mayor, city council, and all other city officials in the 100 largest cities by population in the United States, as well as elections for county officials whose jurisdictions overlapped with those cities.

Footnotes

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