Dawn McCray wasn’t planning to run for Franklin County School Board again.
She had her sights set on a board of supervisors seat — the next natural step for her as someone with a business background, she thought.
McCray ended up withdrawing from the supervisor race due to scheduling constraints that developed after she was already on the ballot. No one had filed to run for her Boone District school board seat in the meantime. And people were asking her to stay on the board, she said.
Now, she’s a school board candidate again, this time as a write-in.
She said heightened partisanship in politics is the likely reason no one put their name on the ballot.
“I think people have backed away from wanting to serve because of the ugliness,” she said.
“My husband thinks I’m crazy,” she added.
The Franklin County School Board isn’t the only school board to see a race without candidates on the ballot this year.
Statewide, there are at least seven others: two in Greene County, and one each in Appomattox, Bland, Lunenburg, Page and Wythe counties.
Candidates in some of those counties have mounted write-in campaigns after not meeting the petition or paperwork requirements. Registrars in some counties noted that, due to the small population size, they often see write-in winners for school board seats and in other local races.
School board members are the largest group of elected officials in the nation, due to the sheer number of school districts. But nearly half of school board races go uncontested, with just one candidate on the ballot, according to research published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
In Virginia, 52% of school board elections were uncontested in 2024, according to data compiled by Karin Kitchens, a political science professor at Virginia Tech. A school board election is considered “uncontested” in Kitchens’ data when there is one or no candidates running for a seat that is up for election.
The rate of uncontested elections could be attributable to the fact that Virginia did not begin electing its school board members until 1992, Kitchens said. The roll-out of those elections across the commonwealth has been slow, with about a dozen school boards that still appoint their members. Nationwide, appointed school boards are extremely rare.
David Richards, a political science professor at the University of Lynchburg, said the number of local school board elections without candidates is troubling.
“Democracy demands participation,” he said. “If people are going to start tuning out to the extent that nobody runs for office, then democracy is in trouble because someone will take advantage of that.”
Could a lack of engagement be tied to small populations?
In Wythe County, one of the three school board seats up for election this year doesn’t have any candidates.
“Nobody filed to run,” said county registrar Lennon Counts. “Before I came in, in 2019, we usually always had candidates that ran.”
In recent years, people have gravitated toward running as write-in candidates for open seats, Counts said.
Write-in candidates must file documents, like campaign finance forms, with the registrar if they win, he said.
But candidates who appear on the ballot are required to file campaign finance reports multiple times during the election year. This year, the Virginia Department of Elections required six different finance reports between April and October, before the election, and two more after the election for any candidates who appear on the ballot. They may also need to file a campaign finance report each time they receive a contribution of $500 or more.
If someone wins a seat by write-in but doesn’t want the position, they can turn it down. If that happens, the seat goes to the person who had the next most write-in votes.
“If they refuse to take office, there’s really nothing you can do on that end,” Counts said. In the past two school board races that lacked an official candidate for an open seat, the write-in winners accepted the seats.
Greene County has two open school board seats with no candidates on the ballot.
Registrar Jennifer Lewis-Fowler said one person attempted to get on the ballot for the open seat in the Stanardsville District but didn’t get the required 125 signatures.
Lewis-Fowler said write-in candidates need to reside in the district they win and must have lived in the county for at least a year.
The situation is similar in Lunenburg, a county with a population just under 12,000: there are no candidates on the ballot for the school board race for the Beaver Creek District.
“I grew up in this area and it seems to be a smaller locality and most, if not all, of our school board contests end up being incumbents getting reelected or write-in[s],” said registrar Alissa Baldwin. “It tends to be a struggle sometimes to find candidates who are willing to step forward.”
One person, Sarai Gustaf, had filed paperwork to run for the open school board seat, but she fell short of the signature requirement. Gustaf had instead planned to run a write-in campaign, Baldwin said.
In Alleghany Highlands, a 2024 write-in winner was no stranger to elected office
By day, Jay Woodson is a director at the Smurfit Westrock packaging company in Covington. By night, he’s an Alleghany Highlands School Board member, a position he won as a write-in candidate in 2024.
That write-in bid was due to a misunderstanding, he said.
That year was the first time a school board seat was up for election. Alleghany County and Covington school divisions each had appointed school board members, but the divisions merged to become Alleghany Highlands Public Schools in 2022.
The new school board has four members from Alleghany County and three from Covington. As appointed members’ terms expire gradually, those seats are shifting to elected positions.
Woodson picked up the paperwork to get on the ballot, and he collected the 50 signatures he thought he needed. Later, he learned he actually had to have 125 signatures because the seat represented all of Covington, instead of just one of the five voting districts that are used for city council races.
He didn’t have time to seek out those additional signatures. No one else had gotten on the ballot.
“Everyone kind of knew I was making the effort,” he said. “It’s a small town, everyone knows me and knew that I had served on the school board previously and been elected to city council years ago.”
If he hadn’t campaigned as a write-in candidate, he thinks someone else would have stepped up to do so, he said.
Woodson had initially decided to run after he was asked by several constituents to do so, including the member whose seat he won after she opted not to run for reelection.
At the end of the 2025 election cycle, the board will have four elected and three appointed members.
Woodson spent eight years on the city school board in the early 2000s, including four years as chairman. He was appointed again a year prior to the merger of the Alleghany and Covington school divisions when the city asked him to serve again.
His motivation for serving on the board back then was to consolidate the district and “look at ways to give the kids as much as we can, both from the facilities perspective, and also from an educational opportunity perspective, as efficiently as we can for the taxpayers,” he said.
He prefers the method of electing school board members because the appointment process can be swayed by who you know, he said. But anyone can run for office. “If someone has passion about improving the education for our kids, I’m all in for that,” he said.
Now that the merger has taken place, Woodson is advocating for more local control instead of school boards leaning on organizations like the Virginia School Boards Association, which drafts policies for most school divisions across the state on items ranging from class sizes and textbook adoption to construction project procurement.
He believes that a lack of local control has contributed to a decline in interest in serving on school boards and that local boards should have more power to do what’s best for their own communities.
Woodson pushed the Alleghany Highlands School Board to form a policy committee to review and “rewrite the [policies] that we don’t agree with.” The board voted unanimously to establish that committee in June 2025.
‘People don’t see the value in it when people are so polarized’
In Franklin County, McCray contends it’s the current polarization and volatility of politics that have led to the decline in interest, which she has seen firsthand.
In 2023, the board unanimously voted on a new policy for reviewing new school library books and handling book complaints. The new policy limited complaints about library books to people with a direct connection to a school and put books with mature themes in a specific section of the school library that parents could choose to limit their children’s access to.
She dealt with name-calling and heckling, and said she has been called a pedophile because she voted for the book policy change.
“People see that play out in the public forum and don’t want any part of that,” she said.
McCray wasn’t physically threatened, but the outcry was unnerving, she said.
That kind of behavior from the public can discourage people from taking part in civic service.
“People might feel like, ‘Well if I run for school board then I might get in trouble socially and get people mad at me for whatever position I happen to take,’” Richards, the University of Lynchburg professor, said. “People don’t see the value in it when people are so polarized.”
McCray said it’s a shame that people do not want to run for school board.
The work isn’t easy. She said learning about division finances and policy issues during her first term was like “drinking from a fire hose.”
But still, she says, “It’s a wonderful civic duty. I’ve loved serving on the board.”
A lack of civic engagement leads to uncertainty for superintendents
Franklin County schools Superintendent Kevin Siers said the political temperature rose during the pandemic and has never come down. Public education has been in the “political crosshairs,” from pandemic reopening plans to transgender student policies to book bans.
“Those types of things just wear on people,” he said. Trust within communities has broken down. Anger and resentment have flourished. “It’s understandable why so many are hesitant to run for school board,” he said.
School boards hold the power to hire and fire superintendents; in fact, it’s the only position they control in a school division.
When there’s no one on the ballot for school board seats, it amps up the uncertainty for superintendents. There’s always some anxiety around school board elections, he said, because the superintendent may need to start fresh to build relationships with board members.
Siers moved to Franklin County from Pulaski County Public Schools in the summer of 2023.
In 2019, all five school board candidates in Pulaski County ran unopposed in their districts. In 2023, the four incumbents who ran again were all defeated by their GOP-backed challengers.
In Virginia, school board candidates run as independents, though many seek support from local political parties.
“It usually results in bringing people on who have good intentions and who want to do what’s best for kids,” he said. “But you always have to start from scratch in building those relationships and building the trust.”
Siers said everyone suffers when people aren’t willing to run for local office. When there’s an uncontested race or only a write-in candidate, “there’s really not a debate or discussion about issues getting into these elections.”
More candidates in school board elections means more nuanced discussions and debate, he said, about policy, ideas and issues that could better serve the school district.