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One candidate for the Bristol School Board believes his long experience as a board member is a good reason for voters to reelect him, while a second candidate thinks his years as a city council member and mayor make him uniquely qualified for a seat.
Frank Goodpasture III retired in 2022 from his longtime position as CEO of Goodpasture Motors. He returned to the school board in 2020, after he spent seven years as a board member during the 1990s.
Bill Hartley, Appalachian Regional Commission program manager for the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, wants to be on the school board after spending eight years as a city council member.
Goodpasture and Hartley are two of three candidates seeking two available seats on the school board in the Nov. 5 election. The third candidate, Joshua Slagle, the city of Bristol’s property maintenance and housing inspector, did not respond to requests for an interview. All are running as independents.
In addition to the seat held by Goodpasture, the board has an open seat that was vacated in June by Breanne Forbes Hubbard, who stepped down after accepting a job in Richmond. The board has five seats total.
The top two vote-getters will be elected to four-year terms.
Both Harley and Goodpasture are Bristol natives who attended city schools.
Goodpasture, a Vietnam veteran, said he wants to serve on the school board because he enjoys it and he has the time and experience needed.
“I think that educating children is the most important thing that a political subdivision can do — to create an informed citizenry and people that can get engaged and participate and become taxpayers and leaders,” said the father of five grown children and grandfather of eight. “I know that public schools in general are failing across the country, and I know that when I was on the board in the 1990s, we had an overachieving system, and that’s what I want to see now.”
Hartley said serving the community is important to him. While a council member, he served as mayor twice and vice mayor twice. In 2022, he ran for reelection and lost by 20 votes.
He believes the odor issue at the city’s landfill was the main reason he lost. Although he emphasized during his campaign that he didn’t make the decisions that led to the problems, he thinks voters were angry and wanted a change.
After Hubbard resigned her seat, Hartley said he was asked by some community members if he had ever considered running for the school board. He said he hadn’t, so he gave it some thought, talked to his wife and decided to seek the seat.
“The more I thought about it, the more I thought I have something to offer and I felt my experience would be helpful,” said Hartley, who has a master’s degree in finance and experience with school board budgets as a council member. The council controls the city’s purse strings, including the local amount that is part of the school division’s annual budget.
Hartley is the father of two children in the city school system, a son who’s a senior and a daughter in the eighth grade. He said he believes he would bring a parent’s viewpoint to the board, something he said is currently lacking.
This fall brought the long-awaited opening of Virginia Intermediate School, the first school Bristol has built in 50 years. The school, which has 700 students in second through fifth grades, was a decade in the making and resulted in the closings of three aging elementary schools.
Goodpasture and Hartley both said they are impressed with the modern facility and happy about what it offers students.
“I went through the school when it opened, and it reminded me of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’” Goodpasture said. “In the first part of the movie, it’s in black and white and when they get to Oz, it’s in full color. So, I think those children were in black and white, and now they’re in full Technicolor.”
Hartley said he believes other school buildings now need attention, including the middle school, which is 110 years old and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the high school, which was built in 1953.
Minor improvements have been made as needed over the years, but major renovations are going to be needed, Hartley said.
With the new school, Goodpasture feels that the school system now has excellent facilities. and he’d like the focus to be more on academics.
“We need to put our shoulder to the wheel on academics,” he said. “That’s what I want to emphasize.”
Both men said they remain concerned about the learning loss that occurred for some students during the COVID-19 pandemic, and both mentioned the problem of absenteeism, which got worse during COVID and remains an issue. For the 2023-24 school year, the absenteeism rate was about 28%, which is 12 percentage points higher than the state average.
“If students were in first grade when the pandemic hit and they were behind, then they’re going to be behind when they get to third grade. … They want students reading at grade level because that’s where they quit learning to read and read to learn. And that’s a great predictor for how well students will do throughout. If they’re behind at that point, it seems like they’re going to continue to struggle,” Hartley said.
He and Goodpasture also support Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s plan to limit student access to cellphones during school hours, with both saying cellphones and social media are a distraction to students.
