Bellwater School Board Chair Melissa Overby announced Monday she will seek re-election, framing her campaign around the board's rejection of a school-closure plan earlier this year.
Bellwater School Board Chair Melissa Overby announced Monday she will seek re-election, pointing to the board’s rejection of a controversial school-closure plan earlier this year as evidence she has protected neighborhoods that “have already lost enough.”
Overby, who has chaired the board for the past four years, has clashed repeatedly with Superintendent Yvonne Carrick over budget priorities, most recently when the board voted 5-2 against Carrick’s proposal to close Elmwood Elementary and Kettridge Middle School to address a $6.8 million shortfall.
Framing a record around a fight, not a fix
“I ran for this seat because I believe the board’s job is to ask whether a spreadsheet decision actually helps kids, not just whether it balances a budget,” Overby said at a campaign kickoff event at Ledger & Leaf Books on Vale Avenue. “Voting no on those closures was one of the harder things I’ve done on this board, and I’d do it again tomorrow.”
Overby’s critics, including some parents and at least one likely challenger, argue that rejecting the closure plan without offering an alternative path to closing the shortfall amounts to leadership by opposition rather than governance. Thomas Halvorsen, a Riverside Heights parent considering a run for Overby’s seat, said he respected the board’s concern for Lowertown and Cedar Hollow families but believed voters deserved a chair with a clearer plan for the district’s finances.
“Voting no felt good, and I understand why,” Halvorsen said. “But the shortfall is still there. Somebody on that board needs to be the one explaining what happens next, and right now that’s Superintendent Carrick, not the chair who blocked her plan.”
Budget fight still unresolved
Overby acknowledged the district still faces the $6.8 million gap the rejected closures were meant to address, but said she believed the board and the administration could find savings through attrition, renegotiated vendor contracts, and a renewed push for supplemental city funding rather than shuttering buildings in already-struggling neighborhoods. She said she has proposed a standing committee to develop long-term enrollment projections so the board is not repeatedly confronted with crisis-driven closure proposals, even as her ongoing budget clash with Superintendent Carrick continues.
I’m not running on having solved this budget problem, because I haven’t, and neither has anyone else on this board yet. I’m running on the idea that the solution shouldn’t start with closing the two buildings that serve the families with the least room to absorb another loss.
Melissa Overby, Chair, Bellwater School Board
Superintendent Carrick, who has continued to search for alternative ways to close the shortfall since the board’s vote, declined to comment directly on Overby’s campaign but said in a statement that she looked forward to continuing to work with whoever holds the chair’s seat “to find a sustainable path forward for the district’s finances.”
Overby’s re-election bid comes as the board prepares to weigh a revised budget-balancing plan from Carrick in the coming weeks, one that is expected to include some combination of staff attrition, program consolidation, and a request for additional funding from the city council. Council Member Gary Petrowski, whose Cedar Hollow district includes Elmwood, said he had already fielded questions from constituents about whether the city might be asked to step in with supplemental funding.
The school board election is still months away, but Overby said she wanted to announce early given the ongoing budget fight, arguing that voters deserved as much time as possible to weigh in on how the district should resolve it. She said she expects the race to center almost entirely on the district’s finances and the aftermath of the closure vote.
Overby has represented the board’s at-large seat since first winning election four years ago, defeating an incumbent who had backed an earlier round of school consolidations. She said she saw echoes of that earlier fight in the current budget debate, though she argued the current shortfall was driven more by structural funding formulas than by any single decision the district had made.
Halvorsen said he had not yet formally filed to run and was still weighing whether to enter the race, but confirmed he had begun talking with parents in Riverside Heights and Cedar Hollow about a potential campaign. He said his central pitch, if he runs, would be a commitment to present a fully costed budget plan before asking voters to judge any single spending decision in isolation.
Osei said the teachers’ union had not yet decided whether to endorse in the race but noted that Overby’s vote against the closures had been well received among its membership. “Whoever runs against her is going to have to explain why they would have voted differently,” Osei said. “That’s not a small thing to run against.”