The Jacksonville Policy Education Group hosted a School Board candidate forum June 23. | Megan Mallicoat, Jacksonville Today
Published on July 14, 2026 at 12:07 pm
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By November, the Duval County School Board will feature three new faces.
Elections for board members’ four-year terms are staggered, and three seats are up for election this year. No incumbents are running — creating the possibility of another ideological shift for a board that has operated for two years with a strong conservative majority.
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Though school board seats in Florida are nonpartisan in name, they’ve become increasingly political in practice in recent years, making the biennial slate of school board candidates a high-stakes game.
The previous two election cycles, in 2022 and 2024, changed the ideological makeup of school boards across the state — and especially in Jacksonville. Duval County is one of Florida’s best examples of how a post-COVID strategic focus from Republicans on small, local elections has yielded big results.
Today, Duval’s School Board has a clear conservative majority: 5-2, even without counting District 3 rep Cindy Pearson, a registered Republican who lost the backing of her party when she ran for reelection in 2024. But the seats that are up for reelection belong to two of the board’s most staunchly conservative influencers and its lone Democrat — so the outcome of the election could change the tone of the board that’s responsible for making policy decisions for one of the state’s largest school districts.
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Whether Duval’s new members will shift the board’s political persuasions as it votes on everything from school closures to challenged books remains to be seen. District 6’s Charlotte Joyce, the current board chair, and District 4’s Darryl Willie are both term-limited, and Vice Chair April Carney, who has represented District 2 since 2022, opted not to run for reelection.
In 2024, the Duval GOP endorsed a candidate in each of the four School Board elections. Party leaders at the time told Jacksonville Today that they’d made a strategic decision to treat the nonpartisan School Board races as they would any other partisan election. This year, Duval GOP Chair Charles Barr tells Jacksonville Today they’re going to “wait and see who wins the primary.”
One Republican-registered candidate is running in the District 2 race, and three are running in District 6. No Republicans are running in District 4.
“It’s very important to have some good School Board candidates,” Barr says. “Almost the entire School Board is our candidates, and they do a really great job.”
The Duval Dems did not return Jacksonville Today’s request for comment before this story’s deadline. In the last election, they did not officially endorse candidates but did publish a list of their preferred picks.
First look
Many of Florida’s school districts had trouble attracting candidates to run for open seats. In Miami-Dade, for example, three of four incumbents will run unopposed. That’s not the case in Jacksonville, though. Twelve candidates qualified: three in District 2, four in District 4 and five in District 6.
‘Education is public policy’
Last month, the Jacksonville Policy Engagement Group — a relatively new civic engagement group run by a team of public policy young professionals — hosted a candidate forum.
The well-attended event drew dozens of people to Brentwood for a few rounds of a moderated Q&A with groups of candidates and small-group breakout sessions with candidates.
Rhianna Scyster, co-founder of the organization, tells Jacksonville Today the group chose to host an event focused on School Board elections because “education is a public policy” that “overflows into every part of our local government, our state, and our nation.”
“Education impacts everybody, right?” says Scyster, who has a master’s degree in public policy from Jacksonville University. “Education is really the great equalizer, truly.”
The engagement group prepared a detailed data analysis of the three districts up for election, and then distributed a thick packet of the numbers to attendees as they arrived. It detailed each district’s enrollment, academic performance and staffing, and it compared each of the three districts to Duval Schools as a whole and to the state.
“While we understand the importance of stories, numbers also hit people a certain way,” Scyster says.
Get out the vote
The School Board’s district boundaries have changed since these districts’ last election, after civil rights groups successfully sued the city of Jacksonville for what they said was a racially gerrymandered district map.
Outgoing District 4 rep Willie was questioned in May about whether he lives within his district.
Because they are nonpartisan elections, School Board races are often decided in the primary election. All registered voters in a district are able to vote for a candidate, and if one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the vote, they win the seat. Otherwise, the two candidates with the most votes continue on to a runoff election.
This year, Primary Election Day is Aug. 18, and early voting starts Aug. 7 in Duval County. The deadline to register to vote is July 20.
