Sweet Home has two incumbent candidates filed for the May 21 School Board election with a third incumbent running as a write-in candidate, and no candidates filed for the Fire and Ambulance District, with three incumbents running as write-in candidates.
The Sweet Home School District has five positions open: Liberty, Foster, Cascadia, Crawfordsville and Sweet Home.
Incumbent Jenny Daniels filed for the Liberty seat. The election is for a two-year term. The board appointed her to fill a vacancy mid-term.
The other positions are for four-year terms.
Incumbent Mike Reynolds has filed to retain the Sweet Home position.
Incumbent Debra Kay Brown is seeking the Cascadia seat as a write-in candidate. Those who wish to vote for her should include her middle name to differentiate her from other Debra Browns who live in the area.
The Foster and Crawfordsville positions have no candidates filed. If the clerk’s office is unable to declare a winner, then the board may appoint a qualified applicant to fill the seat.
“I’m a big believer in education,” said Brown, whose husband, Steve Brown, spent his career in education. “I’ve received the benefit of a good education. I just kind of want to give back. It’s a good way to contribute.”
Going forward, Brown wants to continue emphasizing things like the high school’s employability score, a rating based on attendance and behavior demonstrating good work ethics that students can take to employers. She would like to see the graduation rate improve, and she wants to offer more career and technical education programming, more vocational training, “where we can to help kids. College isn’t for everybody, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a good living.”
Daniels is finishing a term left vacant by Ben Emmert when he moved out of the area. She had not intended to run for the office again, but she applied to fill the position when Emmert left, and she plans to finish that term.
“I am anxious to see through the new additions at the junior high,” Daniels said. She was involved in the process from the start.
“I am happy how things are going,” Daniels said. “I thought the School District was in a good place at the time (her previous term ended).”
At this point, she would like to maintain the direction the district is headed.
“I like doing what I’m doing,” Reynolds said. “I might as well keep running. I like how things are going for the district. I want to see it through for another term.”
Going forward, he would like to see more CTE programs, which have expanded in the past year, Reynolds said. He recently heard news reports about how young graduates do not know how to manage a checkbook. He would like to provide some basic financial management training to students.
He also would like to see test scores continue improving, he said. They’ve been going up, “but we’ve got room to grow.”
Thanks to a clerical error, SHFAD President Dawn Mitchell said, incumbents for Positions 1, 2 and 3 had not filed for office.
She said that anyone who wishes to vote for them should write in Tim Geil for Position 1, J. Charlene Adams for Position 2 and Larry Gene Johnson for Position 3.
Mitchell said the names should be spelled out that way, uniformly, to ensure they can be identified from among other residents, noting that Linn County has multiple Larry Johnsons.
That became an issue when Brown previously ran a write-in campaign for the School Board. Linn County was unable to declare her the winner because other Debra Browns live in the area.
No candidate has filed for Sweet Home Cemetery District Position 3.
Ballots may be dropped at City Hall, 1140 12th Ave., or Sweet Home Police Department, 1950 Main St., until 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 21.