LITTLE ROCK — Newcomers Gloria Lawrence and Tom Stuthard easily won election Tuesday to the Pulaski County Special School Board, unseating incumbents Charlie Wood and Danny Gililland and shifting the balance of power in support of the teachers’ union.
The complete but unofficial results, with all precincts reporting, were: ZONE 4 Lawrence ....................1,080 Wood ............................. 364 ZONE 5 Stuthard ..........................515 Gililland .........................367
The Pulaski County Election Commission will meet at 4 p.m. Oct. 1 to certify the totals.
Both Lawrence, 56, a retired district teacher and grandmother, and Stuthard, 55, retired from the military and now a maintenance mechanic for the U.S. Postal Service, were endorsed by the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers.
The association has spent the past 10 months fighting a 4-3 majority of the School Board to retain collective-bargaining rights for the Pulaski County Special School District’s more than 1,200 teachers.
As a result of Tuesday’s election, the board is expected to be 5-2 in favor of continuing to recognize the teachers association.
“People are looking for a change, and that is what we are going to bring to this county,” said Lawrence, who received 74.79 percent of the 1,444 voters in the Sherwood area.
Stuthard, whose wife Sharon is a math teacher at Sylvan Hills High School, received 58.39 percent of the vote in the zone that encompasses north Pulaski County.
“The people spoke, and now we can move on and get the children’s issues addressed,” Stuthard said. “We can put them on top. Be in it for the kids.
“We’ve got to look at the [district’s] finances,” Stuthard said about the tasks now at hand. “We have a little trimming to do. We have too many people in administrative positions. We need to fix up the facilities and we need to give PACT and PASS their recognition back.”
PACT is the teachers association. PASS is the Pulaski Association of Support Staff that represents bus drivers, secretaries, aides, custodians, maintenance workers and other noncertified employees in the 17,000-student district.
Both Wood, an engineer for Entergy Corp., and Gililland, owner of six Popeye’s restaurants, were part of the four-member board majority that ardently supported severing all district ties with the teacher and support-staff unions and replacing union negotiated employee contracts with contracts based solely on School Board-approved policies.
The two incumbents warned in their campaigns that their defeats would result in a union-controlled School Board.
Wood said that his prediction is likely to come to fruition.
“It’s not my decision. It’s the voters’ decision,” he said, noting the high voter turnout in the zone election.
Gililland said late Tuesday that parents want to control schools but they just aren’t as organized and well-funded as the teacher organization.
“It’s hard for the average citizen to compete against that,” said Gililland, who said he is now going to begin working for changes in some state laws regarding school district operations.
One of the laws he will target is one that separates school board elections from the November general elections.
“These special elections are too easy to manipulate when you have a thousand voters come out instead of the mass of population,” he said.
“I’m not going away.”
Wood and Gililland were joined in their opposition to the associations by School Board President Tim Clark and board member Mildred Tatum.
“Congratulations to the unions for a job well done,” Clark said Tuesday night after the polls closed.
Lawrence, in her campaign, said she had the time, interest and knowledge to serve on the board. She objected to the district’s spending of more than $700,000 this year on legal fees, the large size of the new Maumelle High School and the harsh tone the School Board takes toward people who attend the board’s meetings.
She also objected to the race being characterized as a referendum on the union. While she said teachers are entitled to representation by an organization, her focus would be on serving district patrons, providing teachers with necessary classroom supplies and spending district money wisely.
“I want peace in this district,” she said.
Stuthard said in his campaign that his emphasis would be to ensure that students have necessary supplies and study in buildings that are in good repair. He said he would be a strong advocate for holding employees accountable for being present and doing their jobs.
He said district students were being overlooked as the result of battles between the district and association members and he wanted to return the focus to students and be a force for positive change.
Wood, 60, cited as one of his reasons for wanting to end relations with the union an accrued leave provision in the contract that enabled 105 teachers to take off at least 30 days - six weeks - last school year for reasons not limited to illness or emergencies.
Gililland, 52, said he objected to an association that works to protect the jobs of all teachers even those that he said association leaders acknowledge are not good teachers.
Both Wood and Gililland served one four-year term. Both received campaign contributions from the Pulaski County Administration Action Network, an organization of principals and other administrators within the 17,000-student district.
Unlike their opponents, both supported the concept of providing merit pay to outstanding teachers.
The candidates shared the ballot Tuesday with the Pulaski County Special district’s current 40.7-mill property-tax rate. The district proposed no change in the tax rate.
The complete but unofficial results: For. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1,183 Against . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1,185
Article 14, Section 3 of the Arkansas Constitution requires school districts to put their tax rates on the ballot annually.
If no change is proposed, voters are asked to vote on the current rate. In that case, no matter what voters decide, the school district’s millage rate will remain at the levels last approved by voters.
Although the vote tally doesn’t change the tax rate this year, votes on tax rates are sometimes viewed as a gauge of public support or dissatisfaction with a school system.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/22/2010