In spite of a well-publicized campaign against the current members of the Washington, D.C., school board, two incumbents defeated challengers in a race that drew a relatively high voter turnout.
Of the winning incumbents, Barbara Lett Simmons, an at-large candidate, received 16.9 percent of the vote in a field of 18 candidates. R. Calvin Lockridge, a former school-board president, received 39.1 percent of the vote to defeat six other candidates in his ward.
Two other incumbents were defeated in the election, which attracted some 30 percent of the city’s registered voters. One of the ousted members, Frank Shaffer-Corona, gained national attention last year after he made $1,200-worth of telephone calls to Iran--at6taxpayers’ expense--in a personal effort to free the American hostages. As a result, he was formally censured by his fellow board members, and he received only 2.2 percent of the vote in last week’s race.
The winning challengers included the Rev. David H. Eaton, Wanda Washburn, and R. David Hall, the founder of the D.C. Street Academy, an alternative school for dropouts.
The current board members standing for re-election had been targeted for defeat by the D.C. Committee for a Better School Board, a group co-founded by Vincent E. Reed, the popular former superintendent of the city’s schools. Mr. Reed is currently the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education.
