Byrd, Castor Dentel win reelection to Orange school board

Three-way race to replace Kat Gordon narrows, moves to general election

Two incumbents won reelection to the Orange County School Board on Tuesday but a third faces a runoff in November after leading her three-way race but failing to secure more than 50% of the vote.

The race to replace Kat Gordon, a 20-year veteran of the school board who did not seek re-election this year, also goes to the general election because that threeway contest also ended with no candidate winning the needed 50% plus one vote. The top two finishers, high school teacher Vicki-Elaine Felder and state representative Bruce Antone, will continue their campaigns for Gordon’s seat.

Board members Melissa Byrd and Karen Castor Dentel both were returned to office in a crowded election field that had eleven candidates vying for four seats on the school board.

“We did it !!!! ” Byrd wrote on Facebook after the votes were posted. “I do not take that lightly and will continue to fight for our kids everyday!”

Board member Pam Gould, who was also seeking re-election, will face challenger Prince Brown in November.

The winners are to serve four-year terms and will earn about $45,000 a year.

Castor Dentel, elected two years ago to finish out the term of a board member who stepped down, won easily over challenger Jonathan Hacker. A former elementary school teacher who also served two years in the Florida House, Castor Dentel won 72% of the vote to Hacker’s 28% to win the district 6 seat. The district stretches from Pine Hills to Dover Shores and includes College Park, Maitland and Thornton Park.

Hacker, who works in the hospitality industry, is a former methamphetamine addict who has an arrest record and worked in the adult film industry but said a faith-based recovery program helped him find God and come clean.

He raised little money — about $4,500 compared to Castor Dentel’s $33,500 — but attack ads supporting his candidacy were paid for by Florida’s leading charter school companies. Castor Dentel has voted against some charter school contracts, unsure about their teacher qualifications or unhappy that taxpayer money could pay for privately owned buildings.

The attacks were “a very big distraction in the middle of the very important work” the board had to do to devise reopening plans for the county’s public schools, Castor Dentel said.

But she said voters seemed swayed more by her reputation in the community where she has lived and worked than by the views of groups “that don’t have ties here,” she added.

Happy with her win, Castor Dentel said she’ll continue to do what she thinks is best for public education. “I want to continue dig in and ask tough questions,” she said. In the district 4 race, Gould, CEO of Shepherd’s Hope, won 48.5% of the vote in her bid for a third term on the board. Brown, a public health advisor with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, won 31.7% of the vote. Dayna Gaut, a former teacher and paramedic, won 19.8% and is now out of the running.

The district is home to fast-growing Horizon West and other southwestern Orange communities, an area where the challenges of rapid residential growth and the demands of new schools were key issues.

In the race for district 5, which runs south from Pine Hills to Tangelo Park, three candidates were seeking to replace Gordon, who has been on the board since 2000.

Felder, a longtime educator who now teaches at Edgewater High School, won 40.1% of the vote and Antone, who has served in the Florida House since 2012, won 31.6%. Michael Scott, coordinator for Orlando’s My Brother’s Keeper program, won 28.4% and is now out of the race.

In the district 7 race, Byrd, in office since 2018, won 56.6% percent of the vote, defeating two challengers, Ericka Bell and Jeannetta Maxena. The district includes Apopka and most of Ocoee and Winter Garden.

Bell, a small business owner, won 25.3% of the vote and and Maxena, a teacher, won 18.1%. Byrd is a former teacher who touted the work she’d done to change a school dress code she and others said unfairly targeted girls and to get on the drawing board plans for a new Apopka area school.