This story was produced in partnership with nonpartisan news organizations and universities across the state working to provide information about the 2026 elections.

Nearly 40% of all Florida school board qualified candidates are running unopposed this election cycle, automatically electing 83 candidates across the state. The names of uncontested candidates will not make it to the ballot in August nor in November according to Florida Law, leaving many constituents without the opportunity to cast their vote for school board members. 

Of those running unopposed, 72 candidates are incumbents.  

While incumbents running in uncontested races is more common among smaller public school districts, some elections, like Miami-Dade’s school board races, have garnered little competition in over half of the seats up for election this year compared to other major districts in Broward, Hillsborough and Duval counties.

Experts and educators point to a number of reasons why constituents do not want to run in school board member races: lack of support, financing a campaign, low pay and volunteering one’s time. 

“It does mean that as a voter you have fewer choices. It means that for the school board members serving in office, they feel different types of pressures,” Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy Jon Valant said.

“They might not feel as much as much pressure to deliver performance wise if they don’t think they’re going to be challenged.”

In the years since the culture war and school board conflict-ridden era of the COVID-19 pandemic, sitting on a school board has become less enticing. School board members have had to divert their attention away from the needs of students, faculty and families to book bans and legislature-mandated curriculum changes.

“It’s a thankless job, and you have to make some very difficult decisions that affect your relatives, the people you go to church with, your neighbors. The contentious nature of public office these days, not just in the school board, but in city council [and] state legislature. It’s very, very partisan,” Florida School Boards Association CEO Andrea Messina said.

Although being a school board member is a non-partisan role by law, that does not prohibit politics from intruding into races and the work school boards carry out. Governor Ron DeSantis led the shift of state-level officials endorsing local school board candidates. Many of the DeSantis-backed candidates won their seats in the 2022 election.

However, by 2024, those same candidates lost their seats as public school districts across Florida grappled with the reality of school closures, millions of public dollars funneled into the universal school voucher program and financial downturn.

“We have issues with student mental health and chronic absenteeism, declining test scores, and growing gaps in opportunity and outcomes by group. We have a long list of actual problems, and when we spend our time fighting over who uses which bathroom, it’s time and it’s resources that could have been used to get at what are really the core problems,” Valant said.

For those living in smaller public school districts, their alternatives are meager. This election year, 10 school districts, all serving anywhere from 2,000 to 17,000 students, have uncontested candidates running for all available seats.

“We are very concerned about small school districts because many of our longest serving school board members are from the small rural districts. So when term limits take effect and they end up not being able to run again, our hope is that other people in those communities are going to step up,” Andrea Messina said.

Trinity Webster-Bass covers education for The Florida Trib. You can reach her at trinity.webster-bass@floridatrib.org.