Julia Eisen – WMAL News | November 8, 2023
School board races have increasingly become a priority for some voters in recent cycles with mounting pressures from education culture wars. While school board candidates are meant to be nonpartisan, nearly all the candidates on the ballot were endorsed by a local political party.
The most contentious battlefield of all was in Loudoun County where scandals of recent drug overdoses and sexual assault cases swept the news cycle in the weeks leading up to election night.
Democrat-backed candidates in Loudoun were able to hold onto a majority of seats on the nine-member board, with two Republican-backed candidates and an independent winning as well.
One GOP-backed candidate, Deana Griffiths, won the Ashburn District seat and knocked off incumbent Harris Mahedavi.
“We’ve had four years of chaos. We need to get out there and fix what has been happening these last four years. The bathroom issues, the fentanyl crisis. We need to get back to basics,” Griffiths said on 7News Wednesday morning.
In Fairfax County, Democrat-backed candidates had a clean sweep filling up all 12 seats of the school board.
In Prince William, five of the seven seats went to Democrat-backed candidates with two seats going red. Incumbent Democrat Babur Lateef was re-elected as school board chairman for a second term.
Spotsylvania County’s school board has faced mounting controversy from the public after heated discussions on transgender student policies and former board chair’s Kirk Twigg’s felony forgery charge.
Twigg lost his bid for re-election Tuesday night. Additionally, all four GOP-backed candidates lost their school board member races.
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