City School Board members unopposed

The three Charlottesville School Board members up for re-election this year are the only residents seeking the positions, making them virtual shoo-ins on Nov. 3 for the board’s three open seats.

Board Chair-man Ned Michie and members Leah Puryear and Juandiego Wade are the three incumbents up for re-election this year and are running a joint campaign. Michie was first appointed to the board in 2004, and all three were elected in 2006 after the city switched to an elected board.

School Board elections are non-partisan. To run, candidates must have filed a candidacy declaration and collect 125 signatures of registered Charlottesville voters to appear on the ballot, the same procedure required for all independent candidates.

Michie, Puryear and Wade all ran non-partisan campaigns leading up to their 2006 victories, but they all have a history of involvement in the city’s Democratic Party.

The current board faces one of the biggest challenges the school division has seen in recent years — the question of whether a school should be closed and the entire division’s school setup reconfigured. The three board members have said their collective experience would be beneficial in making the division more cost-efficient, closing the achievement gap and dealing with declining revenues.

The School Board’s four other members — Colette Blount, Kathleen Galvin, Llezelle Dugger and Alvin Edwards — were elected in 2007, though Edwards was also appointed to the board in 2005. Their seats will be up for election in 2011.