After falling short by more than 400 votes in March, Bonnie Hauser is projected to win a second term to the Orange County Schools Board of Education.
Hauser leads fellow incumbent Jennifer Moore by nearly 1,100 votes with all 17 of the school district’s precincts reporting on Tuesday night in the runoff election between the two. The extended race — which is the first runoff election for the Orange County Schools board since 2010 — saw Hauser jump out to a 300-vote lead with 58 percent of the early vote totals that she did not relinquish.
Hauser will rejoin incumbent Carrie Doyle and board newcomer Wendy Padilla, who respectively won the top two amounts of votes between seven candidates on primary election night in March. Moore earned the third-most, but fell short of a 50 percent threshold of votes cast to be safe from a runoff challenge, which Hauser filed the day before final canvassing was completed by the county’s board of elections.
The candidates’ runoff campaigns then took a turn in April, when Moore resigned from her current seat on the school board. In a statement released a week later, the former Orange and Durham County exceptional children’s educator said she was stepping away for health reasons and effectively ending her re-election campaign. But a News & Observer report published two days after her resignation letter called Moore’s doctorate degree into question, as officials with Bellevue University told the newspaper the school did not have Moore on record as having been a student. Moore later said in a statement to the Orange County community that she did not have a Ph.D.
Had Moore won on Tuesday, she said she would not be returning to the school board, which would have set the board members up with a decision on how to approach an appointment to her vacant seat. That option is what Moore’s remaining supporters campaigned for in the final weeks of the runoff election. Now, Hauser is set to return for her second four-year term.
In a call with 97.9 The Hill on Tuesday night after her win, Hauser said it “feels like the way it’s supposed to be” compared to two months prior.
“I feel really, really good,” she said. “Tonight, I feel like our kids won, our teachers won, our community won – it just feels right.”
Despite her feeling during the election cycle that the race brought out divisions within the Orange County Schools community, Hauser said Tuesday she believes those sentiments are not reflected in the school board and its members are relatively unified. She added that she learned from her first term that “you act as a board, you don’t act as an individual” and is excited to work with her colleagues to continue supporting Danielle Jones, who became the Orange County Schools superintendent a few months ago.
“We have a superintendent who is working to build what I would call is an accountable culture that’s built around principal leadership,” said Hauser. “This is where Orange County Schools has needed to go for a very long time, and I am very happy to help however I can to make that happen.”
The runoff election results will be finalized on Friday, May 24 at the Orange County Board of Elections’ canvass meeting. Hauser, Doyle and Padilla will take their oaths of office this summer as the board transitions into the new academic year.
Featured photo via the Committee to Re-Elect Bonnie Hauser OCS.
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Easy to win when your opponent drops out. Funny she still only got 64% of the vote.
You probably voted for her lying and deceitful opponent 😀
Boo,hoo