School Board Showdown at Manatee Tiger Bay

Experience emerges as the key dividing line in the School Board District 1 and 3 races.

Welcome to The Manatee Muse: By Liv Coleman

Have you been wondering when we would finally get a liberal voice in this region for public affairs commentary? I started a Substack to do just that for Southwest Florida politics, and no better time to start than with the Manatee Tiger Bay school board debate.

Manatee School Board District 1

Of the two Manatee School Board races up this year, District 1 should be the more competitive race with three school board candidates ready to get to work on Day One. To my surprise, all three candidates endorsed renewal of the millage rate that supports teacher salaries. The candidates offered differences more on experience and biography than on policy, so that’s what you’ll see in this writeup.

Heather Felton introduced herself as having a broad range of experience based in decades of living in Manatee County and getting to know the Manatee County public school system as a teacher and parent of two recent graduates. She moved to the area to take a job as a journalist for the Bradenton Herald, which is how she met her now-husband, a Manatee Sheriff’s lieutenant with years of service to the community. Felton’s oldest son just graduated from college and moved back to the area. Her youngest is starting at Manatee Technical College in a program in culinary arts.

After a number of years of service in ministry and religious education, Felton joined the Manatee public school system and taught in a Title 1 school. She said she wants to help all kids, as well as all parents, who sometimes have trouble navigating the school system, as she said knows from experience. Felton has been attending Manatee School Board and budget meetings regularly to familiarize herself with the processes and said she plans to quit her current job and devote herself to the school board full-time, “24-7” if elected.

Mark Stanoch offered his experience in business administration to the school board. Stanoch is retired from a career working for technology companies including IBM and Dell and is running for School Board because he “wants to give back.” He stressed his management expertise and interest in fiscal stewardship over the Manatee County School District. Stanoch is also a grandparent of two children in the Manatee County public school system. He was critical of the current school board’s direction and expressed dissatisfaction with the reading test scores in the school district. Despite his longstanding affiliation with the local far-right Manatee Patriots group, he largely eschewed culture war rhetoric, emphasizing his business perspective to running the schools instead.

The thing that gave me a bit of pause hearing Stanoch talk was that, for all his experience with technology and business administration, I wondered if he was over-generalizing how it could transfer to leadership of a democratically-elected school board. In particular, school boards need to comply with state laws in so many areas, including on budgeting, and are accountable to a diverse range of stakeholders with competing needs and perspectives. School board management involves not just aligning goals with others on the board, but also bringing the public along by listening and communicating with them.

The only thing in his comments that really raised my eyebrows, though, was his interest in using predictive analytics to improve school safety in response to an audience question. Private businesses often use personal data for product development and marketing, in sometimes quiet but troubling ways, given the lack of legal oversight in this area. But when it comes to children and the public schools, how student data is used needs to be a top concern. The Pasco County School District, for example, recently reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice over a predictive policing program that disproportionately and unfairly targeted students with disabilities.

I doubt Stanoch, if he learned about this issue in more depth, would push the district in this direction. But it was an example, in my mind, of how it’s easy for seasoned professionals to lean too much into what they already know and assume that it will transfer to new domains — in his case with the use of technology — rather than focus on listening and learning. That said, he did say he would need to learn more about the MCSD budgeting process before making definitive statements about the right way to move forward, in response to a question about outcomes-based versus zero-based budgeting. His response to this question showed both an understanding of the issue at stake as well as a refreshing reluctance to weigh in.

Alex Garner introduced himself as a 4th-generation Manatee County resident heavily involved in the community, particularly with the Kiwanis Club service organization. Garner’s family owned and operated the Star Fish Company in Cortez Village. He graduated from Manatee High School, SCF, and the University of South Florida, with a degree in business administration. He went into the private business sector after graduating. When the pandemic happened, his wife was a classroom teacher and he saw the dire need for substitute teachers, so he jumped in to help. He claims to have taught in just about every school in the county and at every level from elementary to high school. After that experience, he became a full-time teacher, which is primarily, as I understand, teaching business classes at Palmetto High School. He said it would be difficult to quit teaching, but he would do so if elected to the school board. He also mentioned his wife is expecting a baby girl due in September who he plans to send to Manatee public schools one day.

Comparison: While all three candidates agreed on the need to renew the millage, the two issues that came up where some policy differences emerged were on cell phones and book bans. Felton said she thought cell phones have a place, but do not belong every place. She said that working at a Title 1 school, they sometimes didn’t have enough technology in the classroom for everyone to access information needed in a timely way, so it could be helpful for people to look things up on their cell phones. She said we need to adapt to a world with technology, but also made clear that in many cases cell phones shouldn’t be around, lest students be tempted to shirk their schoolwork. Stanoch and Garner were more skeptical about the presence and use of cell phones, and Garner described different policies he had seen at different schools he had worked in.

In response to new laws from the Florida Legislature signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, the Manatee County School District implemented harsh book bans that involved teachers covering up their bookshelves and removing many books from classrooms and libraries. Garner and Stanoch expressed full support for the DeSantis process, while Felton, who publicly quit her job teaching literature partly in protest over the book banning process, said that beleaguered teachers need a lot more support in the classroom and that the process had gone too far, while acknowledging that not every book belongs in every classroom, library, or school.

Interestingly, Garner appears to be wary of going too far himself on this issue, judging by literature his team left at tables in the dining hall. An eagle eye at my table noticed that if you peeled away an adhesive strip at the bottom of the rack card, that you could see he had tried to cover up a line on the card that read “Make sure pornographic and age-inappropriate materials are banned from school libraries.” Maybe he’s worried about being portrayed as a book-banning culture warrior — well, he signaled alignment with the DeSantis agenda, so he’s going to be walking a very fine line there if he wants to go down another path.

The Manatee Muse’s Choice: Heather Felton has the most encompassing depth and breadth of experience relevant to the School Board as a teacher, parent, and community citizen already doing the work of showing up to the meetings to try to master the policy and budgeting process. We also need someone who will trust teachers and librarians to make the right decisions about books, while allowing for the challenge process that has always existed. You can count on Heather Felton to do that.

Manatee School Board District 3

I’m only going to do a brief write-up here because the contrast in experience between former school board member and Manatee schoolteacher Charlie Kennedy was so great compared to his two opponents. He was also the only one who voiced support for the millage renewal to support teacher and staff salaries and the only one in this race who expressed any concern about book bans or the seepage of overtly religious content into the schools.

Charlie Kennedy introduced himself as a former board member who applauded the trajectory of the school district since it almost got in trouble with the state back in 2012 and turned itself around into a “B” district with better finances, partly under his watch. He has also returned to classroom teaching now after two terms as a school board member and service as a school board chair, including under the politically contentious COVID years. Although Kennedy eschewed the label “politician,” saying he’s just a teacher like so many others up here, he was also the most natural politician on the stage, which is to his credit. To wit: He touted his experience and understanding of the give-and-take of making school board policy, the need to get support from other board members for priorities, and the importance of being a team player when on the losing side of a vote. He also expressed his interest and ability in fostering civil discussion. He said he aims to provide as much possible space for public comment, as long as it stays on school business, even if it is critical of him as a school board member.

Perri Ann Parkman is a yoga instructor and business owner who is married to a military veteran, as well as a more recent Manatee County resident. She has children who have attended charter and private schools, and also described the pain of losing a son to suicide after he experienced a sports injury. Her personal commitments seem to be mainly spiritual. She opened her introductory marks asking the audience to share with her a prayer she led in Jesus’s name. Parkman claimed she was called by God to run for the position, and that she saw “spiritual warfare” happening in the community, wittingly or unwittingly invoking the language commonly used by adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation movement of Christian dominionism over the “seven mountains” of society.

Yet in response to my audience question about whether she and other candidates would pledge to support the rights of parents and children of religious minorities in the public schools, Parkman affirmed that, yes, of course she would. In response to another audience question about whether candidates would be willing to compromise with fellow school board members, she also said that she would, of course, be willing to compromise, too. Some might say political candidates just use the earlier kind of “red-meat” culture-war rhetoric to get elected, but if she really believes she is called by God to the school board for a specific Christian mission to the schools, which I took to be sincere, I worry that she may find herself in many ordinary policy dilemmas which test her daily — and the community.

Jon Lynch offered himself in service to the school board as a parent in the community of two daughters, as a taxpayer, and as someone who came up through the Manatee public school system himself who went into a skilled trade rather than go to college. He found success as a diesel mechanic who now owns his own business and multiple properties in Manatee County. He became interested in the Manatee school board for the first time in 2020 during the pandemic, when he felt his parental rights were being trampled. During the pandemic his wife also started a Facebook community of 4,000 people to support teachers by helping them fund supplies for their classroom. He thinks Manatee schools need to find more money to make the salaries more competitive, so they don’t leave to go to other districts such as Sarasota. However, he wouldn’t commit support for the millage renewal, which will result in a teacher salary cut of $8,000 if they don’t pass it again, according to Heather Felton in the debate. Lynch seems inclined to follow culture-war priorities if elected as well.

The Manatee Muse’s Choice: Charlie Kennedy (the Kennedy “without brain worms,” according to his campaign signs) represents the only serious choice for this district. The other candidates bring up important issues and perspectives, but seemed disinterested or perhaps unaware of the political skills and approaches needed to interact with diverse groups of stakeholders to serve our exceptionally diverse body of Manatee school students.

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