School board meetings in the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District might look a bit different in the future.
Preliminary vote totals for the Nov. 8 election indicate that the fresh faces of Jim Cogan, Adelita Hiteshew, and Sondra Williams might become a fixture on the district’s board.
In the trustee area 1, Jim Cogan took the lead with 48 percent of the vote, while the remainder of votes were split between conservative candidates incumbent Chris Arend with 27 percent and Peter Byrne with 24 percent of the votes.
“I was not expecting to win because the Republican Party central committee did not endorse me and decided to endorse Peter Byrne, who ran, rumor has it, at the urging of our former board trustee Chris Bausch who presumably has a great deal of animosity towards me,” Arend said.
Bausch endorsed Byrne alongside Laurene McCoy and Frank Triggs in a commentary he sent to the Paso Robles Daily News and New Times.
“All three have self-funded their campaigns and will not be influenced by outside donations. Unless a majority of school board trustees fight against it, the woke agenda will continue to prevail and destroy our Paso Robles schools,” Bausch wrote.
In recent months, the school board has been inundated with outrage from teachers, parents, and students after the board passed resolutions that targeted LGBTQ youth and required parent permission slips to join clubs.
“I think that voters are tired of the division and discord and political agenda that they see at the national level infecting our local school board,” Cogan said. “They just want to elect people who care about our students and are focused on working together to improve our school district.”
Arend, who was board president for the past four years, chalks up the board’s past disputes with the public to a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the departure of former superintendent Chris Williams, a grand jury investigation, and the pandemic.
“After the George Floyd killing in Milwaukee, all the racial issues came home to roost and we had to deal with those too. They came at us in our school district, and we dealt with them,” Arend said. “I think everything is now well resolved. And I don’t think that the voters paid that much attention to the old political things that were done, which weren’t that exciting, I don’t think.”
Incumbent Triggs is also on the losing end of his battle to keep his board seat in trustee area 4, with 35 percent of early vote counts to Williams’ almost 43 percent.
McCoy—who is running for the at-large district and is trailing behind her opponent, Hiteshew—couldn’t be reached for comment before press time, but the candidate voiced her optimism during a Facebook livestream on Wednesday morning.
“I’m very anxious to know the results just so I can live my life, you know? But, you never know what’s going to happen, a 178-voting difference as of right now could change a lot of things either way, so keep praying,” McCoy said.
In early vote totals McCoy and Hiteshew were neck and neck, with Hiteshew holding the lead at 38 percent of the votes and McCoy with 36 percent. Hiteshew said that while she’s hopeful, she’s trying to be realistic as more votes had yet to be counted.
“I have never seen the town mobilize in the way it has for this election, and it is in response to all of these things that’s making a lot of the community feel unwanted. It’s a really yucky feeling that’s being put out in the community. People are tired of that,” Hiteshew said. “People have real problems in Paso Robles and in our school district—financial problems, learning loss problems, people want to know that they’re being led to focus on those issues instead of being put down.” Δ
This article appears in Nov 10-20, 2022.