What’s next for school board and sheriff ’s office?

THE two biggest local elections Tuesday saw Paula Lewis win the chairmanship of the Oklahoma City school board and P.D. Taylor keep alive his hopes of becoming Oklahoma County sheriff. Now, what’s next for both?

Lewis won 53 percent of the vote to defeat former Integris CEO Stan Hupfeld, despite Hupfeld’s sizable advantage in fundraising. Lewis had spent the previous year on the school board as the District 4 representative; now she’ll lead the eight-member board as it works to improve the district and its schools.

We believe the district should embrace the possibility of expanding school choice opportunities. Hupfeld, who helped begin a charter school that bears his name, was more open to that approach than Lewis, who has been cooler to charters.

We also believe Superintendent Aurora Lora needs the strong backing of the board in most cases as she deals with myriad issues including a budget shortfall. Thus it was disappointing to see Lewis (and Hupfeld) immediately reject Lora’s recent proposal to close some underused schools in an effort to save money, an idea that appears headed to the shelf after expected outcry from parents and others.

Lewis, who calls herself a progressive, has said she wants to improve suspension rates in the district, and increase wraparound services that help address the poverty and social issues the district’s students face. Those are worthwhile goals. Here’s hoping her progressive bent doesn’t translate into a board reluctance to consider changes that might disappoint the teachers’ union but would ultimately help students.

In the sheriff’s race, Taylor spent the month-long campaign deflecting assertions that a vote for him in the four-man Republican primary would simply be a vote for more of what the county saw under former Sheriff John Whetsel, who retired March 1 after 20 years in office. A state audit subsequently revealed $3 million worth of items were missing from inventory lists. Taylor was Whetsel’s undersheriff for nearly 14 years.

Taylor insists that Whetsel acted unilaterally most of the time and rejected counsel from others in the office, including him. On the day after Whetsel resigned, Taylor said he was reinstating the warrants team, he ordered patrol deputies to focus on the county’s unincorporated areas, and he implemented an overtime program to increase oversight of jail inmates. The latter two addressed concerns related to Whetsel — that his deputies wrote too many tickets in areas where local police or troopers already patrol, and that he neglected the jail.

Taylor says several other institutional changes have been made, and more are planned between now and September when he faces Democrat Mike Hanson and independent Ed Grimes in a special general election to replace Whetsel. To win that election, Taylor will need to show voters it really is a new day in the sheriff’s office, and not more of the same.

To that end, Taylor would do well to actively and publicly support a local task force’s efforts to reform the county’s criminal justice system. The public is tiring of the status quo on corrections, which has led to the severely overcrowded and dysfunctional jail. Taylor has been given a chance to prove that he is, too.