2019 school board runoffs, municipal races today

Four Tulsa County K-12 school board seats in Tulsa, Keystone, Broken Arrow, and Union districts are on the ballot today, Tuesday, April 2, 2019, along with a seat on the Tulsa Technology Center board, and City Council or Town Trustee seats in Broken Arrow, Bixby, Catoosa, Glenpool, Jenks, Skiatook, and Sperry.

The full list of contests for the April 2, 2019, election is on the Oklahoma State Election Board website. You can check to see if you have a reason to go to the polls by going to the online voter tool, entering your name and date of birth, and see if it shows you a sample ballot for today's election. (I don't have one.) Those polling places with elections will, as usual, be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

For the first time, school board races that drew only two candidates are on the April ballot, to be decided at the same time as two-candidate runoffs for races in which no one reached a majority during the February primary election.

In the Tulsa school district, Office No. 1, which covers west of the Arkansas River, the Sand Springs Line, downtown Tulsa, and most of the neighborhoods surrounding downtown, is open after long-time incumbent and Democrat operative Gary Percefull opted not to run for re-election. Two candidates emerged from a field of eight in February:

Nicole Nixon is the mom of two children who attend TPS's Clinton Middle School, where she serves as a parent volunteer. "I don't have 10 years for Tulsa Public Schools to get its act together." Nixon is a conservative Republican who ran in last year's race for the open House 68 seat. Nixon lives west of the river in Mountain Manor neighborhood. Nixon's top concern is the current administration and board's decision to close schools on the west side; she describes the west side as being blindsided by the decision. Nixon would like to see Tulsa school budget tax dollars stay local, rather than getting spent on out-of-state consultants. Nixon is an advocate for local control of educational decisions by teachers and parents, rather than top-down control from district HQ. If elected, she would be the only self-identified conservative on the seven member Tulsa school board. I'd hope that a political perspective that has a majority in the district would have at least some representation on the board. KFAQ's Pat Campbell interviewed Nicole Nixon last Friday.

Nixon's opponent is Stacey Woolley, a registered Democrat who lives in the North Maple Ridge historic district. In one Facebook post, Woolley applauded leftist Senator Kamala Harris's call for more Federal involvement in local schools. Another post shows one of her sons in a T-shirt reading "Boys will be boys."; the photo is cropped at the bottom, but it appears to be this shirt, with the full text reading, "Boys will be boys. Good Humans!" which suggests a belief on behalf of whoever bought the shirt that there's something inherently evil in being male. How Woolley raises her own children is her business, but at a time when boys are conspicuously lagging behind girls at every level of education, when teachers bias grades in girls' favor, I'd want to be sure that our school board member celebrates boys' unique qualities, rather than regarding boys as defective girls.