For the second time in eight years, voters will cast ballots to determine whether the Escambia County Public Schools superintendent will be elected or remain appointed.
Merits of either system aside, there have been concerns that such an important question is going to voters in an off-year when voter turnout and attention are traditionally low.
Bellview resident Joseph Meeham supports an elected superintendent but wishes the referendum was on the 2028 general election ballot.
“I’m sorry they’re doing it in an off-year, during the midterms. There’s a lot fewer voters. A lot of people don’t show up, and you’re not getting real input from the community,” said Meeham, a U.S. Navy veteran. “You’re only getting the diehard voters who come out every time, and there’s a lot of people who should be voting on this. I think the people in the community should vote for the school superintendent.”
The question that will be put before voters in the Aug. 18 primary is:
“Shall the superintendent of schools of Escambia County, Florida, be elected by the majority of the qualified electors of Escambia, County, Florida? Yes or No.”
If the referendum passes, Escambia County voters will elect a school district superintendent in the November 2028 general election. In 2018, voters approved moving to an appointed superintendent by just 910 votes, out of 123,926 votes cast on the question.
Florida and Alabama are the only two states that allow voters to elect superintendents. A majority of Florida’s 67 public school districts, 38, elects superintendents.
Malcolm Thomas was elected ECPS superintendent for three consecutive terms, and following his retirement in 2020, appointed superintendent Tim Smith took over the school district’s day-to-day operations. The Escambia School Board hired Smith following a nationwide search, but he was terminated in 2023.
Since that time, Keith Leonard has been ECPS superintendent. But at a February 2025 board workshop, Leonard mentioned retiring in July 2028 or June 2029.
Since changing to an appointed superintendent, ECPS has seen improvements in academic performance. For the first time, the school district earned an A grade for 2025-26 from the Florida Department of Education. Also, no schools earned a grade of D or F. Since 2010, the school district has received eight “B” grades and six “C” grades.
The appointed versus elected superintendent issue has been controversial since it was first introduced last year by Tom Harrell, the District 5 representative, during an Escambia County School Board workshop.
Harrell said while campaigning for school board, many of his constituents expressed a desire to vote for an elected superintendent.
“I represent the people of District 5 and that was one of the issues they indicated to me; they wanted to see a return back to an elected superintendent,” Harrell said. “After a number of people had asked me, I started making the promise I would make the motion, at the appropriate time, to put that on the ballot.”
Harrell described his district as very conservative and said he firmly believes in local control.
“I believe you never give up your right to vote for your local elected officials. That’s a personal belief I have. It’s my opinion you don’t give up your right for that vote, and that’s what we’re doing when we go to an appointed superintendent,” Harrell said.
Why did Escambia County switch to an appointed superintendent?
Likely, a major reason the appointed superintendent referendum passed in 2018 was because of the advocacy of a political committee that raised awareness on the issue using the motto: “Take the politics out of education.”
Its members contended that under the electoral system, a candidate only has to be the most popular, not the most qualified. The only stipulations for elected superintendent candidates are that they are at least 18 years old and live in Escambia County.
The political committee included a number of prominent community and business leaders, including current Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves and current state Rep. Michelle Salzman. Other entities that supported the switch included the Escambia County Board of County Commissioners, the Greater Pensacola Chamber, the Pensacola Young Professionals and the League of Women Voters.
Some of the benefits the political committee cited for appointing superintendents included that:
Opponents of the referendum argued that:
The current and next ECPS superintendents have a full plate of major issues. Escambia County is facing declining enrollment due to school vouchers and financial challenges because of a loss of state funding.
Why is the elected-versus-appointed issue back now?
In the lead-up to this year’s referendum, a lot of the discussion has focused less on the merits of either system and more on why the issue is back on the ballot.
Many residents question the timing of the referendum, and others wonder about the reasoning behind it.
Carol Cleaver, president of the Escambia Education Association, said the union does not have an official stance on the appointed-versus-elected superintendent issue but does have questions about the timing of the referendum.
“It does seem like the voters of Escambia County already settled this matter, and we’re not sure what the rush was to put it on a primary ballot election,” said Cleaver, who added the union is pleased with Leonard’s leadership.
“And we’re very excited to have earned an A school grade this year. I think that is a credit to the leadership of the superintendent certainly, but mostly due the hard work of the educators that are in the classroom every day.”
Kevin Adams, District 1 school board representative, said his constituents want to elect a superintendent, and so does he. Adams and Paul Fetsko supported Harrell’s resolution to place the referendum on the August 2026 primary ballot.
“When we had it on the general election, that was the year when they had all of those state amendments. It must have been a four-page ballot, but stuck in the middle of all them was the appointed vs. elected (referendum). My wife, to this very day, doesn’t know if she voted yes or she voted no because it was buried in there. I caught a lot of grief from some of my constituents. … And it barely passed,” he said about the 2018 referendum.
Board members Carissa Bergosh and David Williams voted against the resolution.
Williams, who represents District 3, feels the current appointed system is working for ECPS, and there’s no need to change it. He was also opposed to placing the referendum on the August primary ballot.
“Because, as I stated at one of the school board meetings, with the bigger turnout, you get a better picture during a general election. So after it passed, I was pushing for it to be in the general election, and that failed as well,” he said.
“I’m not opposed to appointed. I’m not opposed to elected. I can work with both of them. But right now, my stance is for appointed because we’re doing so well in the district. We’re an A district; the board and the superintendent are working well together. The senior staff is working well together. It seems like the focus is on the children and improving our county. We’re at that point, and I want to keep it at that point.”
Should school superintendent be an issue of politics?
Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves, a proponent of an appointed superintendent, feels people are trying to make the superintendent’s selection process a Republican versus Democrat issue. But Reeves said it is about truth versus. perception.
“Here’s the truth …14,000 school districts, give or take, in our United States, less than 75 out of 14,000 school districts still elect their superintendents. We are so accustomed to not doing it the best way, that we think going to appointed is abnormal,” he said. “Being in a place that only requires the superintendent to be 18 years old and live in the county is a massive outlier to the rest of the United States. That’s red states, that’s blue states – doesn’t matter. The vast majority of the states in this country have outlawed this practice.”
Reeves also touched on the “rapid transformation” and successful academic gains ECPS has made over the past several years.
“We’ve done that under an appointed superintendent that is hired by an elected school board. … I would like to understand why you would forfeit eight of the most successful improvement years in the history of our school district and revert back to the generations where we saw very little success? I have not heard a good answer for it, other than politics,” he said.
Reeves added that, as an elected mayor working with an elected city council, he is sometimes accused of being hypocritical because of his support of an appointed superintendent. But he admitted his job, as mayor, is political.
“The analogy that I give is, if someone thinks that electing a school superintendent is a smart technical decision that doesn’t require educational background, teaching background, professor background. That you only need to be 18 years old and live in Escambia County under the elected format, that’s it, the only qualification to be in charge of 30,000-some odd students. Then I guess my question would be, should the city elect its city engineer? Or should the city elect an airport director?”
Meeham, the Bellview Navy veteran, indicated that electing a superintendent helps ensure the superintendent’s values line up with the community’s values, and that includes politics.
“The problem you run into, even here in Escambia County with five board members, if you happen to have three liberals and two conservatives, you’re going to end up with a school board superintendent who is liberal. That’s why the school board shouldn’t vote for the superintendent. I think it should be the community overall. The people in the community are ones who know what they want for their kids, what they want for their schools. And they know that person they vote is going to support what they want.”
He said during his 20-plus years on active duty and 20 years in civil service, he’s lived all over the United States.
“I’ve seen school districts controlled by the school board and those controlled by the people. The ones where the school board selects (a superintendent), they always have a lot of discontent and disarray. People in the community are mad at the school board. They’re mad at the executive whose running it,” he said.
Adams argued that the push to move to the appointed system was itself political.
“They had a PAC (political action committee) with about $180,000 in there, and it was still a close one. I didn’t know that the special interest money was going to be in it like that, but it was,” he said, adding he has never voted against a referendum. “I’ve always thought, ‘Who am I to make a decision that the voters can make?’”
Malcolm Thomas, the former superintendent, says it is all about the person selected as superintendent. “It doesn’t matter how you pick ’em, it’s who you pick,” is Thomas’s opinion.
“It’s more about the individual who is there. I was an elected superintendent. I believe I could have been appointed superintendent in any other Florida district — competent enough to do the job,” said Thomas, who still does consultant work.
“I see appointed superintendents and honestly, I shake my head and think, ‘How in the world were they appointed?’ I think the same thing for elected, so it’s not about the process, it’s more about who steps up to do the job. You can be successful in both systems. Both have pros and cons. Neither one is a magic pill. If you go appointed or you go elected, it is not going to guarantee success of the district or success of the superintendent. We’ve seen that here in Escambia County.”
Mary Lett is the Youth Development Reporter for the Pensacola News Journal. She can be reached at mmabins@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia is deciding the future of schools again. Many voters may miss it
Reporting by Mary Lett, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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By Mary Lett, Pensacola News Journal | USA TODAY Network
