Florida voters opted to maintain nonpartisan school board elections, rejecting a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have required candidates to participate in party primaries and list their affiliations on the ballot.
About 55 percent of voters supported Amendment 1, according to a count published by the Associated Press on Nov. 6. It needed 60 percent approval to pass. The state previously had partisan school board races before voters made them nonpartisan in 1998.
Florida’s amendment—approved by the state’s Republican legislature and championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who began to endorse local school board candidates in 2022—was part of a push by national conservative groups to make school board races partisan.
Their efforts come at a divisive time for education governance and as national interest groups like Moms for Liberty ramp up spending in the local races, where local teachers’ unions have typically been the primary contributors.
Supporters of making the races partisan say party identification would give voters another tool to make decisions in the typically lower-profile local races.
Opponents say issues like district budgets and facilities plans transcend party politics, and making the races partisan would only serve to ramp up divisiveness and distract from the routine work of governance.
Forty-one states have nonpartisan school board races, part of historic efforts to shield the local elections from contentious party politics.
“The interesting thing about education is that the specific policy issues have been somewhat nonpartisan or they haven’t fit cleanly within partisan divides,” said Jonathan E. Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, who studies school boards and their relationships with the public.
There have historically been intraparty divides over issues like test-based accountability and and inter-party coalitions around issues charter schools, Collins said, and big-picture national debates have often been displaced by practical local priorities.
“But that’s all been complicated by the culture wars,” he said.
State laws in Alabama, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania already require partisan school board races, according to Ballotpedia, a website that tracks election laws.
Laws in four other states—Georgia, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and South Carolina—allow for some partisan school board races. In North Carolina, state lawmakers have voted one by one to make school board elections partisan in certain districts.
Bills proposed in at least six states in recent years would have required or allowed local school board candidates to declare a party affiliation. Though it was ultimately rejected by voters, Florida’s is the only proposal that won approval from lawmakers.
