LITTLE ROCK — Incumbent Little Rock School Board member Mike Daugherty and challenger Anna Swaim ended Tuesday's four-person race for the Zone 2 position on the Little Rock School Board in a dead heat and headed for an Oct. 9 runoff.
Michael Nellums and Drew Pritt came in third and fourth, respectively. With all precincts reporting, the complete but unofficial results were:
Daugherty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 808
Swaim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 806
Nellums. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .185
Pritt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Re-elected to the School Board on Tuesday was H. Baker Kurrus, president and general counsel for The Winrock Group Inc., to the Zone 4 position, representing northwest Little Rock.Kurrus was unopposed in his bid for a third term. He received a total 1,870 votes.
The votes will become official when they are certified by the Pulaski County Election Commission.
That is not expected to happen before Sept. 28 to give voters residing overseas or serving in the military the 10 days they are entitled to by law to get their ballots delivered and counted.
The outcome of the vote Tuesday leaves unanswered for another three weeks questions about whether the current factions on the board will remain intact with four black members and three white members voting frequently as blocs on school management issues, or whether different board alliances will be formed. Daugherty is black and Swaim is white.
The runoff comes as the board for the nearly 27,000-student district is about to embark on a search for a permanent superintendent. The board also must address the final stages of the 24-year-old Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit and respond to the demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that has so far put about half of the district's schools on the state's improvement list.
"If this will continue an open and honest discussion about what is best for the students of the Little Rock School District, then I am so ready for the next three weeks in the runoff election," Swaim, 38, communications director of the Arkansas Forestry Association and mother of two boys in district schools, said late Tuesday. "It will be key to identify every single voter who turned out in this election and make sure they vote in the runoff. And I still believe there is an opportunity to reach new voters who didn't participate this time."
Asked if she would appeal to supporters of candidates Nellums or Pritt to vote for her nextmonth, Swaim said she would appeal to anyone who embraces change on the Little Rock board "to join my camp."
Daugherty, 50, an employee of Arkansas Medical Research Testing and a board member for 12 years, did not return messages left on his cell phone.
At the Election Commission office, his campaign manager, J.J. Lacey, said the campaign regrets that there has to be a runoff but is delighted that Daugherty is the front-runner, even though the margin is slim.
"We'll go back to the drawing board and work diligently between now and Oct. 9 and shore up our campaign and hopefully, on Oct. 10, we'll have returned Robert 'Micheal' Daugherty to the Little Rock School Board," Lacey said.
The approach to the campaign will be to go back to the residents of the zone and present Daugherty's 12-year record of accomplishments and integrity, Lacey said.
"We hope more of the people will come out in the runoff to swell our margin," he added.
Nellums, 45, principal at Jacksonville Middle School for Boys, made his knowledge of school district operations, his interest in seeking a strong academic leader to be superintendent and the need to upgrade district facilities the platform of his campaign.
On Tuesday night, Nellums said he was going to take some time to absorb the outcome of the election.
"I'm very pleased that 185 of Little Rock's finer citizens decided that they respected an independent voice who knew a little about the school business and they believed in me enough to vote for me," Nellums said. "The 10 percent of the vote claimed by Mike Nellums kept both front-runners from going home tonight claiming they had won."
Pritt, 32, who is a political consultant and political science major at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said in an e-mail message Tuesday nightthat he was endorsing Daugherty in the runoff despite his harsh criticism of Daugherty in recent weeks for failing to attend various public forums organized for the candidates. He said he and Daugherty both disapprove of merit pay for teachers but support higher teacher salaries and collective bargaining rights for teachers. Pritt said he was eschewing the candidate "who has used monied interests and the insiders support" in reference to Swaim.
Daugherty spurned most media interviews and candidate forums in the campaign and relied on yard signs and banners, volunteers doing door-to-door canvassing for votes, and on endorsements from the Little Rock Classroom Teachers Association, the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and a group of about 25 ministers with churches or church members from the midtown zone.
As one of the four-member black majority on the Little Rock School Board that worked this summer to remove now former Superintendent Roy Brooks from his job, Daugherty was criticized for those and other board decisions by some in the media and business.
In a short address to ministers last month, Daugherty said that those who opposed his candidacy "want to turn back the clock to a time when our communities, our schools and our churches were segregated and people of different cultures and ethnic backgrounds were too ashamed or afraid to embrace each other."
Both Daugherty and Swaim raised thousands of dollars more than is typical in most Little Rock or Pulaski County area races. Daugherty reported raising about $11,000 by Aug. 31, much of which was from the Classroom Teachers Association and its individual members. His donations included $1,000 fromthe brother of interim Superintendent Linda Watson.
Swaim raised nearly $17,000 by the Sept. 8 pre-election deadline for filing campaign contributions and expenditures. Much of her itemized donations were made by top business leaders from across the city. She said those donors wanted to see a change on the board but asked nothing in return from her, trusting her to make intelligent and informed decisions. Smaller unitemized donations came from her family, friends and neighbors in Zone 2, she said.
In her campaign, Swaim has pointed to her leadership roles in church, in her community and in her children's schools, saying that she can work to resolve problems with common sense and diplomacy.
Zone 2 falls between South Woodrow Street on the east, Interstate 430 on the west, Markham Street on the north and roughly Asher Avenue on the south.
It takes in the Stifft Station, Briarwood and Broadmoor neighborhoods, as well as neighborhoods around the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Henderson Middle School and Parkview Magnet High School.
According to a Metroplan analysis of the zone from 2001, based on the 2000 U.S. census, the zone had a population of 24,243, of whom 32 percent were white, 64 percent were black and about 2 percent were Hispanic.
Front Section, Pages 1, 9 on 09/19/2007