Longtime teacher, community advocate in lead
A longtime high school teacher and a community advocate with a background in data analysis are leading the race to sit on Baltimore City’s newly expanded school board, prompting one candidate to concede Friday.
Salimah Jasani, a former special educator at Digital Harbor High School, congratulated fellow candidates Ashley E. Esposito and Kwame Kenyatta-Bey on Twitter Friday evening. Mail-in votes for Baltimore City’s first-ever race for two school board seats are still being processed, so the results remain unofficial. However, Jasani said she felt comfortable conceding based on the mail-in votes that were counted Friday.
“We will continue to fight,” she said in the statement. “As someone who has been fighting for educational equity my entire career, I know this movement is much bigger than one election. It will require all of us, in and outside of elected leadership, to fight for EVERY child in Baltimore to have opportunities to thrive.”
Jasani said she’s proud of the campaign her group ran, despite the outcome.
“It’s always disappointing when you put a lot of effort into something and it doesn’t pan out the way that you hoped,” she said in an interview Saturday. “But that doesn’t change anything about my commitment and my work moving forward.”
There are other avenues to help students, whether it be in the public or private sectors, Jasani said. She added that she is passionate about disability justice, especially where it intersects the immigrant community and still feels pulled toward it.
“I’m not sure that a board position is the way to address that gap, maybe it’s something else,” Jasani said. “But I’m looking forward to talking to more people who are passionate about it and seeing how we as a community can work to support those students and families.”
Four candidates appeared on the general election ballot for the two newly created seats. Jasani had campaigned jointly with Esposito, a prospective city school parent and advocate for the Violetville neighborhood. Esposito has captured more than 50,000 votes giving her the highest percentage at 29%. The second seat for the at-large positions on the 12-person board of education appears within reach for Kwame Kenyatta-Bey, a Patterson High School teacher who earned 27.1% of the vote.
About 22.77% of voters cast ballots for April Christina Curley, a former recruiter for Google who has taken the tech giant to court over its diversity practices. And 20.59% voted for Jasani.
Esposito and Jasani had both unsuccessfully sought appointments to the school board previously. The two nabbed the endorsement of the Baltimore Teachers Union, which backed the legislation expanding the city’s board of education to 12 seats in 2022.
The city school board currently has 10 members, all of whom were appointed by the mayor. The two new elected seats will convert the board to a hybrid model more in line with Maryland’s 23 other school boards, which have done away with totally appointed boards in recent years.
Esposito, who conducts data analysis for the Maryland Department of Human Resources, viewed her election as a longshot after she was eliminated from appointment considerations a year ago.
“A parent on paper isn’t going to be competitive against an educational expert, of course,” she said. “I don’t think they saw value to what I have to bring to the school board as a parent.”
The results so far have left Esposito “shocked.” She hopes her success is a message to other parents to run in future elections and seek out appointment.
Kenyatta-Bey said he stayed up late Tuesday to watch the results come in before heading to his job at Patterson in the morning. He declined to comment this week on his employment status with the city school system, but said he was looking forward to taking his seat on the board and representing the entire Baltimore community.
“Having been a teacher for three decades and a parent even longer, having been a student in the system, I can’t divorce myself from any [of ] my constituent base,” he said.
About 175,000 voters cast ballots in the city’s first board of education race, according to the city board of elections.