The campaign signs are coming down along Osprey Avenue and around Southside Elementary, and the thing they were fighting over is settled. The conservative majority that governed Florida’s most decorated school district for four years, the one that fired a superintendent, reaffirmed cooperation with ICE, penalized student walkouts and turned a school board chamber on Landings Boulevard into a national cable-news set, is finished.
—On Tuesday, Aug. 18, Sarasota County voters handed two former teachers the District 4 and District 5 seats by double-digit margins. Megan Tennimon defeated Republican-endorsed insurance agency owner Frank DiCicco with roughly 55 percent of the vote. Beth Mayberry beat conservative activist Michelle Pozzie with roughly 57 percent. In District 1, the coastal seat that covers Longboat Key, Lido, St. Armands, Bird Key and downtown Sarasota, Jimmy Glover finished first with about 44 percent but fell short of the majority needed to win outright, sending him into a Nov. 3 runoff against Heidi Brandt, who took about 32 percent. Teresa DeWitt, the Moms for Liberty-aligned candidate, was eliminated with roughly 25 percent.
—The math is brutal for the departing majority. When the new members are seated in mid-November, the five-member board flips from 3-2 conservative to at least 4-1 in favor of the moderate-to-progressive bloc anchored by sitting members Tom Edwards and Liz Barker. If Glover wins in November, the board will be 5-0. Conservatives will hold one seat at most, and that seat is now the only thing left to fight about.
Here is what happened, why it happened, and what it means for the schools that island and downtown families send their children to every morning.
—The Scoreboard: Two Blowouts and a Runoff
—Roughly 107,000 ballots were cast countywide, a turnout of about 33 percent. That is a primary electorate, older and more engaged than the crowd that will show up in November, and it still produced a rout.
—In District 4, Tennimon, a former elementary teacher and mother of three district students who is registered with no party, won by about 10 points over DiCicco, who had campaigned on budget bloat and had acknowledged during the race that he lived outside the district and would move in if elected. Tennimon’s margin was north of 10,000 votes.
—In District 5, Mayberry, who retired in 2025 after more than 13 years teaching math and science in the district, beat Pozzie by more than 13 points. Pozzie entered the summer as a Turning Point USA chapter director with a long record of speaking at board meetings and ended it having compared unmasked pandemic-era students to Jews persecuted by the Nazis, having revised her own account of a past YMCA job after archived records contradicted it, and having stopped returning interview calls. Voters noticed.
—In District 1, Glover, a 30-year United Airlines flight attendant from Newtown who chairs the board of the Star Lab school, led a three-way field from the first returns and never trailed. He thanked the more than 43,000 voters who he said “placed their trust in me tonight.” Brandt, the Southside Elementary PTO president endorsed by the Republican Party of Sarasota County, held second. DeWitt finished a distant third.
—How a Two-to-One Republican County Did This
—The result is remarkable for one reason above all others: Sarasota County is not a swing county. At the July book-closing deadline, the county had nearly 163,000 registered Republicans, fewer than 81,000 Democrats and more than 85,000 voters registered with no major party. School board races are nonpartisan and open to every one of those voters, and the winning coalition was plainly built on Republicans and independents who crossed over.
—Follow the trend line. In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis personally endorsed Bridget Ziegler and Tim Enos, his political committee paid for mail supporting them and Robyn Marinelli, and voters installed a 4-1 conservative supermajority. Within weeks that majority ousted Superintendent Brennan Asplen, who called the move “politics and nonsense.” In 2024, Liz Barker unseated Karen Rose and Tom Edwards survived a challenge, narrowing the majority to 3-2. Now Tennimon and Mayberry have made it four consecutive contested school board races won by the side running against the board’s record, and DeSantis, who built the majority, will watch it dissolve as he prepares to leave office in January.
—The money tracked the mood. Glover raised nearly $136,000, Mayberry about $79,000 and Tennimon about $55,000 through the last reporting period. Brandt raised about $66,000. DiCicco, Pozzie and DeWitt raised under $20,000 apiece.
—The candidates who won ran on the district budget, vouchers, literacy and the arts. The candidates who lost were tied, by endorsement or by their own history, to the culture-war brand. Even Brandt, the one Republican-endorsed candidate still standing, survived by explicitly separating herself from the outgoing majority, saying during the campaign that she would have voted against both the ICE cooperation resolution and the student protest penalties. In other words, the only conservative left in the race is the one who ran against the conservatives’ record.
—Political analyst Lars Hafner put it this way to 10 Tampa Bay: “It was always about culture wars.” Voters, he argued, are drifting back toward what actually happens in classrooms.
—Equality Florida Action PAC, which backed Tennimon and Mayberry, was less diplomatic, declaring that “Moms For Liberty is in free fall.” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich pushed back, saying the media writes her group’s obituary every couple of years and parents keep proving it wrong, and pointing to conservative wins elsewhere in Florida the same night.
—District 1: The Island Seat Goes to Overtime
—For our readers, the race that matters most is the one that isn’t over.
—District 1 has been Ziegler’s since Gov. Rick Scott appointed her in 2014. Its successor will be decided by the same voters who decide the governor’s race, and the arithmetic is closer than the primary margins suggest. Brandt and DeWitt together drew about 56 percent. If DeWitt’s voters simply migrate to Brandt, she wins.
—But three things complicate that assumption.
—First, the Republican vote in District 1 was not a single vote. It was a family fight. DeWitt, a former vice chair of the Sarasota Moms for Liberty chapter, carried the endorsements of U.S. Rep. Greg Steube and Sheriff Kurt Hoffman. Brandt carried the county party, state Sen. Joe Gruters and state Rep. Fiona McFarland, and campaigned as the candidate who would have said no to the ICE resolution. DeWitt’s most motivated supporters were voting for the parental-rights movement that Brandt kept at arm’s length. Whether they show up for her in November, or stay home, is the whole ballgame.
—Second, the electorate roughly doubles. The last midterm general election drew about 62 percent turnout in Sarasota County, nearly twice this month’s primary. A November electorate is younger, less partisan and less predictable, and it will be voting on a governor’s race at the top of the ticket.
—Third, Glover has more than twice Brandt’s money, the county Democratic Party’s machinery, the endorsements of Edwards and Barker, and a historic argument: he would be the first Black member ever elected to the Sarasota County School Board.
—Both candidates said they will keep campaigning straight through. Brandt told The Washington Post she is “truly praying that it’s not going to be about politics,” and told the Observer she plans to keep visiting clubs, speaking at events and attending board meetings. Glover called the year-long campaign exhausting and worth it.
—The stakes for the runoff are narrower than the stakes of Aug. 18, but they are real. The majority is set no matter who wins. What the runoff decides is whether conservatives keep a voice on the board at all, and whether the board member representing Longboat Key, Lido and downtown is a Southside PTO president or a Newtown flight attendant who has spent a year telling voters the board forgot who it works for.
—What the Winners Say Comes First
—Tennimon told supporters at Tamiami Tap that “we made history today,” and told the Observer her next weeks will go to school board governance training and visiting every school in the county to introduce herself to principals and teachers before she takes her seat. Her platform: academic achievement, teacher support, transparency, restoring income caps on the state voucher program and rejoining the Florida School Boards Association for lobbying muscle in Tallahassee.
—Mayberry told reporters her focus is fighting for school funding and expanding community outreach. She said the district’s motto, every child, every day, has to be acted on rather than recited, and she has warned repeatedly against cutting arts programs that keep families in district schools.
—Both said the era of resolutions is over. Tennimon told a national outlet that the community, regardless of party, was “tired of the culture wars, the political theater.” Mayberry described the last four years as tabloid material that the broader community never signed up for.
—What Could Be Undone
—The outgoing majority’s signature actions are now on the table, and some are more reversible than others.
—Fully reversible by board vote: the resolution reaffirming cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the penalties for students who walk out of class in protest; the code-of-conduct rewrite that stripped certain anti-discrimination language; and the decision to leave the statewide school boards association. Expect the new majority to move on at least some of these early, if only to signal the change in management.
—Not reversible by board vote: the state voucher program that district officials say pulled roughly $45 million out of Sarasota’s revenue this year, the parental-rights and library-review laws that shaped the book fights, and the state funding formula. A new majority changes the district’s tone, its priorities and who it lobbies for. It does not override Tallahassee.
—That distinction will define the next two years. The winners promised to push back forcefully against state policy. Pushing back and prevailing are different things.
—The Money Doesn’t Care Who Won
—The most sobering fact for the incoming board is that the budget it inherits was written by the board it replaced.
—The final adoption of the roughly $1.3 billion 2026-27 budget, with an operating budget about 2.2 percent smaller than last year’s, comes at a September public hearing before the outgoing majority. The 136 teaching positions cut in April, since whittled to the teens by retirements and resignations, are already gone. The Title I and exceptional-education supplements that were slashed, the $200-a-month cost now attached to the top-tier health plan, the expired $115 million in federal pandemic money: all of it lands on Tennimon’s and Mayberry’s desks as settled fact.
—Restoring supplements, protecting arts programs and reversing cuts are promises that will collide with the same ledger Superintendent Terry Connor described in March as a “financial correction, not a crisis.” The new majority has no more money than the old one.
—What it does have is the district’s crown jewel. The voter-approved one-mill property tax, which funds roughly a fifth of the operating budget, was renewed in November 2024 with 84 percent of the vote and runs through 2030. That number is the tell. The same electorate that just fired the culture wars had already voted overwhelmingly to keep paying for its schools. Sarasota voters were never divided about funding education. They were divided about what the board spent its meetings on.
—The new board also inherits Connor’s unresolved fight with Tax Collector Mike Moran, who has withheld more than $2 million in a dispute over collection fees on that same millage.
—Terry Connor’s New Bosses
—Every superintendent in Florida knows what a flipped board can mean, and Sarasota wrote the manual. The 2022 majority hired Connor in 2023 after pushing Asplen out the door.
—Connor should be far more secure than his predecessor was. Barker and Edwards, the two members who will now anchor the majority, have credited him with protecting classrooms through the cuts. Tennimon and Mayberry ran against the board’s politics, not its superintendent, and neither has called for his removal. His “correction, not crisis” framing was adopted across the dais by members who agree on almost nothing else.
—Still, he now works for a board that did not hire him, with a runoff pending and a budget the winners did not write. The superintendent installed by the conservative majority may turn out to be the most stable figure in the building. That is not the same as being untouchable.
—Three Months of Lame Duck
—Ziegler, Rose and Marinelli remain in office until the new board is seated in mid-November. That gives the outgoing majority the September budget hearing, several regular meetings and every agenda between now and then.
—It is worth remembering who is casting those votes. Rose lost her seat to Barker in 2024. She is on the board because DeSantis reappointed her in August 2025 to fill the vacancy left when Tim Enos returned to his job as the district’s police chief. The lame-duck majority, in other words, includes an appointee voters have already rejected once.
—Watch the agendas. A majority with three months left and nothing to lose can lock in policy, sign contracts and set traps. Or it can leave quietly. The first week suggests it will not be quiet.
—The Leak: The Transition’s First Shot
—The first post-election flashpoint arrived Thursday, three days after the vote, and it came from the side that just won.
—Edwards told the board that a confidential third-party investigation of teacher misconduct allegations at Riverview High School had been leaked to a Facebook group in June, in what he called a violation of state public-records law, and that it was possible another board member did it. The report, produced by the consulting firm Hultman and Joshi, examined years-old accusations involving cheating, sexual harassment and profiting from school resources, some dating to the 2019-20 school year. Under Florida law, it was confidential while the district’s inquiry remained active. It was posted June 4 in a Facebook group run by Francesco Abruzzino, complete with red underlining and a handwritten margin note referencing former board attorney Art Hardy.
—Edwards said fewer than 10 hard copies existed, five went to board members, none were digital, and members were barred from sharing them with anyone. Marinelli, the only outgoing member to respond to WUSF, said she had heard nothing about any leak, and disputed a widely shared meeting video that appears to show her glancing toward Rose and Ziegler during Edwards’ remarks; she said she was looking at the board attorney.
—Then Edwards did something that says everything about where trust stands in Sarasota’s school politics. He announced he would take the matter to the Sarasota Police Department rather than the sheriff or the district’s own police, because Sheriff Hoffman endorsed DeWitt in the just-finished election, and rather than the state, because Rose and Ziegler have connections into the governor’s office. He said he was looking for “the safest, most independent investigative team.” A city police spokeswoman said the department had not yet heard of the request and that jurisdiction might fall to school police or the sheriff anyway.
—Whatever comes of it, the message is unmistakable. Edwards spent four years in the minority. He is about to be in the majority, and he opened the transition with a public-records allegation aimed at the dais he shares. The tone of the next three months, and probably the new board’s first year, will be set by whether that turns into a criminal referral or fades into the file.
—What It Means on the Islands
—For Longboat Key, Lido and St. Armands families, the practical picture is this.
—The schools their children attend, Southside, Bay Haven, Booker and Sarasota High, will open Monday exactly as they did last Monday: A-rated, on the new 7:30 and 8:30 bell schedules, running the same bus app. The 23-year A streak was built by teachers and principals, not by board resolutions, and it does not change hands in November.
—What changes is who governs, and what the board is known for. For four years Sarasota’s school board was famous for reasons that had nothing to do with reading scores, and Realtors walking prospects through St. Armands listings learned to change the subject. A board that spends its meetings on literacy, budgets and bus routes is a quieter institution and, for a community whose property values lean on its schools, a more valuable one.
—The island seat is the last one in play. Every Longboat, Lido and Bird Key voter casts a ballot in the Glover-Brandt runoff, and in a race that could be decided by a few thousand votes countywide, the islands’ famously high turnout is not a footnote.
—And a generation of students has learned it can win. The crowd at Tamiami Tap on election night was full of high schoolers who had spent two years showing up at board meetings to oppose the ICE resolution and the code-of-conduct changes. Avery Cole, a Booker High senior who organized with the SEE Alliance, said seeing two years of work pay off felt great. Those students vote now. Some of them will be voting for the first time on Nov. 3.
—Mark the Calendar
—September: the outgoing board holds the final public hearing on the 2026-27 budget and millage.
—Oct. 5: voter registration deadline for the Nov. 3 general election.
—Nov. 3: Glover vs. Brandt for District 1, the last seat, and the last word.
—Mid-November: Tennimon and Mayberry are seated, the board elects a new chair, and Ziegler’s chairmanship ends.
—2028: the next time the majority can change, when Edwards’ and Barker’s seats come up.
—Sarasota County’s voters were asked a simple question on Aug. 18: after four years, do you want more of this? By double digits, in a county that votes Republican two to one, they said no. The only thing they left unanswered was whether the last conservative seat survives. That answer is due in 71 days.
