Two candidates remain in the run-off election for Orange County’s District 4 school board seat, each hoping to represent a fast-growing section of west Orange.
The November race pits Anne Douglas, a veteran Orange County Public Schools teacher, against Kyle Goudy, a manager at NBCUniversal GolfNow in the campaign to replace Pam Gould, who is not running for reelection. Douglas and Goudy were the top vote getters in the three-person primary in August, with Douglas receiving 32.85% of the vote and Goudy receiving 37.24%.
The two are vying to represent District 4, which includes Horizon West and Windermere.
Both candidates said they were uniquely qualified to serve on Orange County’s school board — one for their decades of teaching experience and the other for their work managing million-dollar budgets and student athletes.
Anne Douglas
Douglas, 59, who teaches reading and English for non-native speakers at Olympia High School, has been an OCPS teacher for more than 25 years. She’s been endorsed by the local teachers union, Orlando Democrat U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, Equality Florida, which is an LGBTQ+ rights group, and Moms Demand Action, a gun violence prevention group.
Her platform includes making schools safer by bolstering mental health services, reducing teacher turnover and improving professional development on reading instruction for teachers.
While on the campaign trail, Douglas said voters have told her they want to stop book bans and protect public education.
Book banning has gone too far, she said. Last year, Orange County Public Schools removed almost 700 books from district classrooms for fear they violated a new state law.
“I’m a reading teacher who has no books in the classroom, and I don’t think that’s acceptable,” she said. ” … Let the children read. Leave the books in the library.”
Douglas is opposed to making school board elections partisan and said there was no place for politics in education. Florida voters will decide in November if they want to make school board elections, which are currently nonpartisan, partisan. The Florida Legislature put the issue on the ballot as Amendment 1.
A school board’s job, Douglas said, is to provide a safe learning environment with adequate resources for students.
Part of creating that safe learning environment is bolstering the number of licensed counselors.
“We need to to make sure that our students can verbalize what they’re feeling inside, and because that anger that is bottled in needs to come out,” Douglas said.
She said teachers need to be paid more and have their workloads reduced, backing the stance of the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association, the local teachers union.
“When a mom is happy, everything is good,” Douglas said. “In the classroom, when the teacher is happy and she can impart knowledge, then everyone is happy.”
Kyle Goudy
Goudy, 34, said he’s knocked on lots of doors ahead of November’s run-off election.
In conversations with voters, Goudy said fiscal responsibility and fixing transportation problems were among the top priorities he’s heard from constituents, and those are priorities for his campaign. If the district was more fiscally responsible and “wiser” with its investments, he added, it would have more money to raise teachers salaries and hire more bus drivers.
Earlier in the campaign, Goudy said he’d have liked Gov. Ron DeSantis’ endorsement as he believes DeSantis makes policies in the best interest of students and teachers, including allocating more money for teacher pay. He was not on the list of 23 school board candidates the governor endorsed ahead of the August primary, however.
In a video on his Facebook page that has since been taken down, Goudy credited Christian nationalist and author Eric Metaxas, who has expressed anti-LGBTQ opinions, for inspiring him to run for school board, the Winter Garden news site VoxPopuli reported in July.
In a later interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Goudy said he was inspired by a part of Metaxas’ book that encouraged church-goers to get involved in their communities but also said that agreeing with one statement does not mean he endorses all of Metaxas’ opinions.
Ahead of the primary, Goudy filled out a questionnaire with iVoterGuide, a resource from a conservative non-profit that says it is “grounded in God.”
He told the guide he decided to run in part to “protect girls and women in sports and in all public places,” echoing a talking point of Florida’s Republican leaders that critics say targets transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community.
But Goudy said he wants LGBTQ+ students to feel comfortable at school and said they should be able to seek help on campuses, whether with a teacher they trust or a counselor.
“We need to foster that inclusive environment for all students,” he said.
He said he supports a gender-neutral, single-room restroom option for transgender students, and a transgender division for high school athletics, if there’s enough demand.
Goudy agreed with Douglas that partisan politics have no place on school boards, and said he’s opposed to making school board elections partisan.
“We need to be unified in addressing the challenges facing our schools, rather than dividing along partisan lines,” Goudy said.
In a video on his campaign Facebook page, Goudy said he intends to give a “big percentage” of his school board salary to two scholarships for his district’s high school students.
As of Oct. 15, Goudy raised $59,745.75, in campaign contributions, while Douglas raised $32,354.29.
Goudy’s funds come largely from candidate loans as well as several $1,000 donations from Realtors Political Advocacy Committee and the Central Florida Hotel & Lodging Association, according to campaign finance records.
Douglas’ fundraising comes largely from candidate loans and local donors, including Jennifer Anderson, who sits on the board of the Democratic pro-choice political organization Ruth’s List.
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