Incumbents hold wide leads in Anchorage School Board races

In three races for Anchorage School Board seats, board incumbents are maintaining wide leads in preliminary municipal election results.

Updated results posted Wednesday remained essentially unchanged from the first count released Tuesday night. For seat E, board incumbent Pat Higgins carried 56% of the vote against challenger Kay Schuster.

Meanwhile, for seat G, incumbent Carl Jacobs was leading with 58% of the vote against first-time candidate Chelsea Pohland.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Jacobs said after the first round of results were posted Tuesday night.

“We have a lot of votes still yet to be counted, and I look forward to seeing those,” Pohland said Tuesday.

For Seat F, with 63% of the vote, board incumbent Dora Wilson was winning her race against first-time candidate Angela Frank.

“I’m very excited with the show of support,” Wilson said Tuesday.

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By Wednesday, election officials had counted 52,661 ballots, representing just under 22% of the city’s 237,360 registered voters.

Thousands of ballots at Anchorage’s election center have not yet been counted, and more will arrive by mail over the next two weeks.

In this year’s school board races, voters were asked to choose between three incumbents who often vote with the board’s majority, and challengers who are critical of the board’s current direction.

Two of the challengers — Pohland and Schuster — had support from prominent local conservatives, and each received endorsements from Moms for Liberty, a right-leaning national nonprofit focused on “parental rights.”

“It looks like it’s going extremely good for all the incumbents, and I think that’s not surprising,” Higgins said Tuesday night.

“We ran against some pretty radical candidates in regards to politics interfering with academics, and I think the public saw that,” he said.

Schuster could not be reached for an interview Tuesday evening.