Beaufort County school board elections simplified by state lawmakers

Beaufort County voters may have quite a few more options than usual in the next school board elections in November.

An amendment ratified by the S.C. General Assembly on Tuesday makes it much easier to run for the Beaufort County Board of Education by eliminating the need for school board hopefuls to gather hundreds of signatures for their petitions.

Under the new rules, filing simply involves submitting a statement of candidacy to the Beaufort County Board of Voter Registration and Elections at least three months before the election.

The deadline to file for this year’s school board election is Aug. 15.

One board member, Laura Bush of District 9 in Bluffton, has already announced she will be leaving the school board at the end of her term in November after 13 consecutive years of service. Two people, Chris Epps and Bill Fletcher, have announced their run for the seat.

Also up for re-election are Earl Campbell of District 1 in Grays Hill; Paul Roth of District 6 in Okatie; and JoAnn Orischak of District 11 on Hilton Head Island.

Joseph Dunkle, one of the newest additions to the board, said he is hopeful the new process will bring out more candidates in the coming months, particularly in southern Beaufort County, where many residents live in gated communities that are difficult to access.

Dunkle won Port Royal’s District 4 seat in November 2014 as a write-in candidate after realizing last minute that nobody else had filed to run. He resigned from his job in law enforcement to join the school board and only spent a few days trying to gather signatures before launching a write-in campaign.

“It definitely would have been easier if I just went down (to the county) and said, ‘I want to run,’” he recalled Friday.

Several school board hopefuls have campaigned in part on platforms of election reform, including the yet-to-be addressed issue of term limits. However, Dunkle said this change was a no-brainer, considering few other political offices involve a signature petition.

“If the president of the United States can just file with their party and be a contender in the primaries, then why should a school board member have to do any more work than that?”

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 10:21 AM with the headline "Beaufort County school board elections simplified by state lawmakers."