2 challengers take lead in Clark County School Board races

Two challengers and one incumbent were holding as front-runners Wednesday night after the release of the latest batch of preliminary election results for the three seats up for grabs on the Clark County School Board.

The election has the potential to upend the current balance of power on the panel that oversees the fifth-largest school district in the country. The seven-member board oversees more than 300 schools and about 300,000 students.

The School Board race is nonpartisan and open to all voters in their respective districts. The seats up for grabs in Tuesday’s election were:

– District D, the district with the most schools, which serves about 57,000 students at more than 70 schools across downtown and in the northeast valley.

– District F, which serves about 40,000 students at 48 schools in the southwest valley.

– District G, which serves about 41,000 students at 48 schools in the east valley and parts of Henderson.

The six candidates vying for three seats in Tuesday’s election were the top vote-getters in June’s primary election, where one district saw as many as 10 candidates competing for the seat.

Vote totals may change in the coming days as mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received before Saturday are counted. In June’s primary election, the front-runners in one race for School Board were separated at one point by a handful of votes.

District D

In District D, newcomer Brenda Zamora was leading incumbent Irene Cepeda with 57 percent of the vote to Cepeda’s 43 percent.

Zamora works for Silver State Voices, a progressive voting advocacy group. She ran on a platform of improving communication between the community and the district and hopes to be a voice for working families and parents, including those with children who use individualized education programs like her daughter.

Cepeda serves as School Board president and is a project director for Nevada State College’s education school.

She has repeatedly reiterated that her priority in seeking re-election is to re-center student outcomes at the forefront of board meetings. But she also has faced criticism from some in the community for her role in firing — then subsequently voting to rehire — Superintendent Jesus Jara last fall.

Cepeda and Zamora did not immediately return requests for comment Wednesday.

District F

In District F, former assemblywoman and challenger Irene Bustamante Adams was leading incumbent Danielle Ford with 52.8 percent of the vote to Ford’s 47.2 percent.

Bustamante Adams, who serves as deputy director of Workforce Connections, has said she is running in part to help the district work strategically with the business community and higher education institutions to improve the pipeline of talent in the region during a critical time for the economy.

She has raised the largest amount of campaign cash among the six candidates, and also has worked with Jara in his role on the board of her workforce development organization.

Bustamante Adams said she was not available for a comment Wednesday.

Ford has children in the district and runs an online marketing company. She has clashed repeatedly with Jara, and some of the other board members, over the last year.

If re-elected, Ford had said it was her No. 1 priority to find a new superintendent for the district.

Ford said Wednesday she was waiting to comment until every vote had been counted because she believed in the voting process and did not want to discount any voters.

District G

In District G, incumbent Linda Cavazos was leading challenger Greg Wieman with 54.9 percent of the vote to Wieman’s 45.1 percent.

Cavazos was a teacher at Basic High School and has lived in her district for more than 30 years. Cavazos, who now runs a private counseling practice, also served as board president last year when board members fired and then rehired Jara.

She said she is running to continue representing a district of parent-educators whose concerns she says she has become intimately familiar with during her time serving the district.

Cavazos told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she was honored and humbled to see a high level of voter turnout in her district.

The incumbent said she emphasized transparency and accountability in her conversations with voters and said she wanted to be the voice of the people on the board and bring the community into the decision-making process.

Wieman retired in Las Vegas four years ago and previously served as the superintendent of the Eureka County School District in rural Nevada.

He has said he is running to restore the reputation of a district and bring competence back to a board that has made headlines over the last year for its dysfunctional operations.

Wieman did not immediately return requests for comment Wednesday.

Contact Lorraine Longhi at 702-387-5298 or llonghi @reviewjournal.com. Follow her at @lolonghi on Twitter.