Orlando Sentinel28%
Seminole County School Board race: 6 candidates up for 3 seats 4%
By Steven Walker0%
8/4/2026, 3:00:12 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Self-Serving Bias, Optimism Bias, and False Dilemma, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 9.9% saturation with 152 hits. Analysis detected 1,337 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,542 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 9.8% and a BS Rank of 4% (29,216 of 30,190 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 96.80% of the article peer group.
Six candidates face off in a deciding August primary election for three different seats on the Seminole County School Board.
Two incumbents are running to retain their seats, and two candidates are vying to succeed board member Kelley Davis, who did not seek reelection.
While non-partisan, the local Republican and Democratic parties have endorsed slates of candidates in this cycle’s school board races.
The primary is Aug.
18.
The winners will serve four-year terms and help run a school system facing many of the same challenges as other Central Florida school districts: shrinking enrollment and a growing budget deficit.
District 1
Kristine Kraus, 68, was first elected to the Seminole School Board in 2018 and reelected in 2022.
Her experience makes her the best candidate, she said.
Kraus is a 25-year classroom volunteer, school advisory council member, a former preschool teacher, and a mother of four SCPS graduates.
Her fellow board members in the past elected her as board chair.
She’s been endorsed by the local Democratic Party and the district’s teachers union.
“It's been the honor of my life to serve the families of Seminole County, and I'm passionate about the work that we do,” Kraus said.
If reelected, she'd lobby the Florida Legislature to reform school vouchers, which take millions of dollars from public school budgets each year, and for increasing funding to school districts.
State-funded vouchers for private and homeschool education need to come with more requirements and tracking so the public can see where those dollars go.
“These are taxpayer dollars going out, and there is no accountability for how they're spent or used,” Kraus said.
Vouchers are among the key reasons school districts across the state, including Seminole, are losing students and then state funding, which has meant budget cuts.
Kraus said she’s proud to have spearheaded an energy audit that found ways to save the district millions of dollars, including temperature adjustments and moving to a four-day summer work week.
But districts need more money from Tallahassee to pay teachers a living wage.
“Our teachers essentially have a 1.4% raise.
The cost of living is somewhere between 3 and 4% and insurance costs have gone up the roof.
So they're essentially taking a pay cut to continue the work that they're doing,” Kraus said.
Antonio Pizza, 19, is a recent graduate of Hagerty High School and now attends the University of Central Florida, studying political science.
He's running because he’s “always wanted to get into politics” and said he saw “shortcomings” in the district’s leadership first-hand as a high school student.
While in high school, for example, phones were a major classroom disruption.
Seminole County Public Schools doesn’t ban phones from bell to bell, however, as neighboring Orange County Public Schools does.
Pizza said he’d pursue a policy where students would have to check-in their phones with their teacher at the start of class.
As a student, he saw teachers treated poorly by the district, but he would make teachers “last on the chopping block” while looking to save money in other areas of the budget.
Pizza said he knows he’d be young for a school board member, but he sees his youth as an advantage.
“We are currently in a new wave of learning since COVID.
Since the last five years, our school system has changed dramatically, and we need leaders who have experienced that change,” Pizza said.
Endorsed by the local Republican Party, his campaign motto is, "the pizza always delivers."
“I don't like to complain about things.
I like to make change about things.
I want to get things done,” he said.
District 2
Holton Mills, 29, is an account executive at an advertising firm in Lake Mary.
He was also the chair of the Foundation for Seminole County Public Schools.
He graduated from Lake Brantley High School in the school’s academy of finance career program, which he credits for launching his career at Addition Financial after his graduation from UCF.
Expanding the district's career and technical education and magnet programs is a pillar of Mills’ campaign.
He wants to work with local business leaders to align their needs with the district’s offerings and market those programs to help bring students back to SCPS.
“I just want all students in Seminole County to have the opportunity, like I did, to enter the workforce if they would like, but also to experience different career, technical, and vocational programs while they're in school,” Mills said.
Mills sees his financial experience as a needed perspective on the school board.
He said he can help the district “get crafty” with budget cuts to lessen the impact on students.
“Seminole County has over a billion dollar budget, and it's important to have someone that has a background in finance up on that board.
I've managed multi-million dollar budgets in my career.
I am a finance guy,” Mills said.
He would push for bigger teacher raises and help establish mentorship and leadership programs to help teachers improve their skills.
He'd also suggest so-called “stay surveys,” as opposed to exit surveys, to learn why teachers choose to keep working at SCPS.
Mills has been endorsed by local Democrats and the district’s teachers union.
Joshua Memminger, 39, is a former school resource officer and current sergeant in the Sanford Police Department.
He ran unsuccessfuly for the school board in 2022.
He’s a father of two SCPS graduates and two SCPS students.
If elected, he would be the first Black school board member in Seminole history.
His experience in schools as an SRO make him the most qualified candidate, he said.
“I've dedicated my career and my life essentially to investing in young people and investing in our community, and I think that's worth examining to bring a perspective to the table that's sorely needed,” he said.
Memminger said teachers in SCPS are not well supported by the district, and he would work to keep cuts away from the classroom.
If elected, Memminger said he would quickly ask for meetings with the superintendent and her top staff to understand her leadership philosophy and to review district policies to make sure they are focused on student learning.
He also said he wants to make sure every program and expense in the budget is evaluated and justified on a yearly basis.
“I think it will be tremendous towards building the morale within the organization and kind of changing the leadership culture from the top down,” Memminger said.
He is endorsed by the local Republican Party.
District 5
Atutumn Garick, 60, was elected in 2022 and is seeking another term.
Garick is the co-founder of a story theatre company focused on childhood literacy — an issue “near and dear” to her heart — and is the mother of three SCPS graduates.
She’s the board’s current vice-chair and has been endorsed by the district’s teacher’s union and local Democrats.
She believes “in the power of public education” and wants to continue being a “champion” of it, she said.
“It changed my life.
It shaped my three children’s lives, and it continues to be the single biggest opportunity engine we have for our kids today and for our collective future,” Garick said.
On childhood literacy, Garick said she’s proud in her first term to have nearly doubled access to reading acceleration programs in SCPS elementary schools — now in 30 of the 37 elementary schools.
Private and home school vouchers are diverting millions from SCPS’s budget every year, which hurts even more as with the district's expenses are expected to keep increasing.
“Public schools are being asked to compete with one hand tied behind their backs,” Garick said.
SCPS must press for voucher reform from Tallahassee, she said, but also aggressively market itself to families and leverage its relationships with local businesses to help fill funding gaps.
Brian Newsome, 57, is a regional sales manager at Vantage Specialty Chemicals.
His campaign website described him as “a devoted family man, husband, and father of five beautiful daughters” and said he was a former U.S.
Army intelligence officer and ordained Christian minister.
Newsome did not respond to the Orlando Sentinel’s request for an interview, but in his responses to the News Collaborative of Central Florida’s voter guide, he said he’s running for office to “give back to the citizens of the greatest country to have ever existed.”
In that questionnaire, Newsome said he wants to “create a school culture where educators feel genuinely valued every day and are treated as the experts they are, not managed as a replaceable resource.”
And to save money amid budget concerns, Newsome said he wants to trim fat at the district level — and that “leadership should lead by example with reductions in their own salaries.”
“Every administrative position should justify its direct impact on student outcomes before one teacher is touched,” he wrote.
Seminole doesn't have a referendum property tax on the ballot this year, but Newsome said he's against asking voters for additional property tax to fund public schools.
Instead, the district should make itself "so excellent that families stop leaving, as the best enrollment strategy is an excellence strategy," he said.
Newsome is endorsed by the local Republican party.
Speakers
6speakers66%attributed speech523writer words
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100%flagged-word coverageBrian Newsome
141 attributed words14% of attributed speech36% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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