After numerous unanswered calls from the public for a town hall with members of Brevard’s school board, a small but driven group of residents took matters into their own hands: On Dec. 8, they gathered to discuss issues faced by students, parents and teachers and to craft a plan for getting voters out during the 2026 election cycle.
About 50 people came together at the Cocoa-Rockledge Garden Club in Rockledge to share concerns and to hear from Zander Moricz, executive director of SEE Alliance, a Florida-based nonprofit with the goal of helping educate young people and organize communities for “school board accountability and political strategy,” according to the organization’s website.
“I am so excited for the year ahead, because as we start to roll out our real organizing, put real boots on the ground and put real messages into the airwaves, I think that Brevard is going to see this community movement,” Moricz said.
Throughout the evening, issues were raised that have caused concern throughout the state and locally: the cost of school vouchers, the expansion to Schools of Hope that allows certain charter schools to co-locate with public schools and a lack of transparency from Brevard’s school board.
Most of these things, Moricz said, aren’t unique to Brevard, but are part of a national effort to shut down public schools in favor of private education.
“They wrote it in Project 2025 that they want to privatize education and eliminate the public option,” he said. “They did not leave room for misunderstanding. They were not vague.”
And Brevard, he feels, is a “super, super bad case study for all of this.”
Cost, impacts of vouchers and Schools of Hope
The cost of vouchers and the expansion to Florida’s Schools of Hope legislation were a major topic of discussion over the course of the evening. During the 2024-2025 school year, the state’s universal school vouchers — which allow families to use public funding to pay for private schooling or homeschooling — cost the state more than $4 billion, according to Florida Policy Institute. This year, they cost nearly $5 billion, the institute reported.
As for Schools of Hope, the expanded rule — approved by the Board of Education effective Nov. 11 — allows certain state-approved charter schools to use “underused, vacant or surplus” space in a public school building. Brevard school board members have expressed numerous concerns about the cost and logistics of sharing space with other schools, though districts are only allowed to be made to proposed co-locations because of material impracticability.
With the potential closure of Cape View Elementary, Cape Canaveral’s only public elementary school, families have expressed concerns at board meetings about a charter school taking over the location. At these meetings, they’ve expressed the impacts that this may have on low-income families and on families with children with disabilities — issues others have concerns about as well.
One town hall attendee said she helps run group homes for youth in Brevard and is concerned for the 30 to 40 kids in these homes.
“I think 90% of my time, I’m advocating for the kids,” she said. “No one advocates for the kids, and it’s just hard to keep my kids in the school system … with trauma and all this other stuff.”
Preparing for ’26 board elections
Telling people about local issues and encouraging them to get out and vote in the 2026 school board elections was another big part of the evening’s discussion.
Moricz implored community members to look at the root of culture war issues and understand them as an attempt to “degrade, weaken and make our public schools unattractive.” Ultimately, he said, parents who might not know why these issues are a focus want what’s best for their kids.
“They’re working and they’re busy and they’re being lied to aggressively by a multi-billion dollar media machine through every screen on their household,” he said. “We’re not dealing with different people who have entirely different values. We’re dealing with a massive misinformation crisis.”
As a nonprofit, SEE Alliance can’t endorse a political candidate. The goal at the meeting was to give the public the tools and motivation to educate themselves and their community and work to increase voter turnout from the 2022 election, and to let them know that the nonprofit will be available throughout the election cycle to help.
In 2026, Board Chair Megan Wright and board members Gene Trent and Katye Campbell’s seats in districts 1, 2 and 5 will be up for election. Wright and Trent can run again, while Campbell is not eligible to run, as a redistricting measure approved in 2023 moved her out of District 5.
“School boards are the front lines,” Moricz said. “I want to be clear here, because we are organizing school boards more than just to impact school boards. We have to impact policy across the levels of government. … Focusing our energies in one place allows us, like a drill, to go deeper and deeper and deeper and have more of an impact and that focus’ impacts reward us at every level.”
Finch Walker is the education reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Walker at fwalker@floridatoday.com. X: @_finchwalker. Instagram: @finchwalker_.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Locals strategize at town hall ahead of ’26 Brevard school board election
Reporting by Finch Walker, Florida Today / Florida Today
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
