Lincoln County Schools superintendent asks for board elections
Published 8:46 pm Monday, December 18, 2017
Three school board seats for Lincoln County will most likely be on the ballots for the general election in November.
Lincoln County Superintendent Mickey Myers is recommending that the seats held by District 1 member Kay Coon, District 2 member Johnny Hart and District 5 member Joanna Posey be chosen by popular vote. District 1 and 2 will be six-year terms. District 5 will serve an unexpired term. The next election for a six-year term for District 5 will be in 2022.
District 3 and 4 will see elections in 2020.
“After that, we’ll be on cycle,” board attorney Jim Keith said Monday at the monthly meeting of the Lincoln County School Board.
He said Myers spent hours at the public library researching the district’s election cycles, beginning with 1990 when districts were mandated to switch to single-member districts.
“In a nutshell, we came up with what we think the sequence ought to be based on the 1990 redistricting,” he said.
He expects the Attorney General’s office to issue a letter accepting the recommendation.
“I don’t see the AG disagreeing with what we have proposed to him because that is consistent with the 1990 redistricting,” he said. “The main thing is this board, this district and (Circuit Clerk) Dustin Bairfield will absolutely have on record that in November there will be an election. But until we get the official word, it’s not official.”
Keith last month made a pitch to appoint board members to fill vacancies until what he deemed as the correct election date occurred.
That meant that Districts 1 and 2 would be appointed until 2023, Districts 3 and 4 were to be appointed until 2025 and District 5 wouldn’t be up for election until 2021.
If Keith’s plan had remained on the table, from 2019 to 2023, a majority of the board members would be appointed by the board and not elected by the public.
The appointed members would be the ones to appoint a superintendent in 2020.
Coon, Hart and Posey are each undecided if they will run as incumbents in the next elections.
The next board meeting will be Tuesday, Jan. 16, since Martin Luther King Jr. Day will be celebrated on Jan. 15.