How Sarasota youth helped flip a conservative school board

At 17 years old, Booker High School senior Jodany Del Rosario-Arcadia is too young to vote. 

That didn’t stop her from knocking on doors in the hot sun for months before the August school board election in Sarasota County.

Students like Del Rosario-Arcadia figured prominently in the campaigns for the three liberal-leaning candidates in the nonpartisan race — Megan Tennimon, Jimmy Glover and Beth Mayberry.

Tennimon and Mayberry swept to victory, winning by more than 10 percentage points each. Glover, who ran in a three-way race, won the largest share of votes and will face Heidi Brandt, who has the backing of the Republican Party, in November. 

The results flipped control of the school board, which has for years been at the center of explosive fights over LGBTQ+ inclusion and national political topics, from a narrow conservative majority to four out of five seats held by liberals. If Glover wins, all five seats will be held by progressive-leaning officials.

The election outcomes also highlighted the growing influence of young people in choosing their schools’ leadership.

“I made a joke to my friends earlier … I wish the election was not this year because it’s like the most important year of my high school experience,” said Del Rosario-Arcadia. She balanced “ACT prep, SAT prep, having to find the money to pay for my grad cap and gown” with political work.

“It’s just a lot. I think the word I always use is ‘stressful,’” said Del Rosario-Arcadia. “But it’s also fun.”

Student organizers packed school board meetings, knocked on doors, called voters, and when the results trickled in on Aug. 18, they stayed up late glued to the news and celebrating with the campaigns.

“This win shows that when young people commit to a cause and join in civic duty, they can accomplish anything,” Tennimon said on election night. 

In interviews with Suncoast Searchlight, rank-and-file activists, leaders of local progressive groups and high school students described a sustained surge of interest in school board policies among younger community members that translated into on-the-ground campaigning before the August election. 

“It [was] a get-out-the-vote machine,” said Sebastian Martinez, the president of Sarasota Next Gen Democrats, who said younger canvassers are often more comfortable knocking doors for longer hours in the hot sun. 

“It becomes more fun the more you do it, and the more friends you bring — because then you’re just walking around a neighborhood with your friend, listening to music, and then you knock on a door and talk to voters.”

The results — driven in part by organizers like Del Rosario-Arcadia and Martinez — were a stunning reversal for a school board that had become nationally synonymous with conservative backlash to LGBTQ+ inclusion and the Black Lives Matter movement. 

“Who’s doing the organizing now?”

In 2025, Martinez launched Next Gen Dems, a Democratic club focused on mobilizing younger voters and organizers. This year, the group poured resources into the August school board elections, raising money to recruit paid canvassers earning $60 for a three-hour shift rather than relying on volunteers. 

Martinez’s path to political organizing began years earlier, when he was a student at Booker High School.

He attended his first Sarasota County School Board meeting in 2020. The now-22-year-old remembers being in criminal justice and psychology classes where there weren’t enough textbooks, “and it would delay how long it would take us to finish a section.” 

Troubled by the lack of classroom resources, he began tuning into school board meetings — where he said he hoped to get a better sense of how policies were handled by the board. 

Instead, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged that year, board meetings were dominated by debates over public health measures like mask requirements in schools. Then that September, conflict broke out at the school board over a video about the Black Lives Matter movement in education materials used by the district. 

Students shared clips of the contentious school board meetings in group chats and on social media, sometimes coordinating to attend meetings together. 

When Republicans introduced the “Parental Rights in Education” legislation in 2022 — nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — students staged walkouts around the state in protest.

Martinez, who had begun his freshman year at Penn State University in fall 2021, switched his major from engineering to political science. 

“We were learning what organizers did 40, 50, 60 years ago in response to different pieces of legislation and different things going on during that time period,” Martinez said. “But the thing I kept asking myself is, who’s doing (the) organizing now?”

He withdrew from his classes and moved back to Sarasota in spring 2022 after completing his freshman year, with hopes of contributing to the progressive grassroots movement in his hometown, a hotbed for right-wing politics.  

But political organizing felt like an abstract reality. 

Growing up, Martinez said his dad worked in construction and his mom cleaned houses. Neither was politically connected.

With a ticket from a group focused on public education, he attended Kennedy King, the local Democratic Party’s annual fundraising gala. 

“At the time, I was a debilitatingly anxious person — like, I couldn’t make eye contact,” Martinez said. While driving to the event, he said he coached himself to pretend he was a confident political activist.

“I could be whoever I want,” he remembered telling himself.

Three years later, he founded Next Gen Dems.

The group sent out canvassers starting in June, and ramped up from two days of door-knocking a week to four in July, urging voters to support candidates who campaigned against years of school board meetings dominated by culture-war fights, backlash to LGBTQ+ inclusion and controversial policies, like a measure reaffirming the district’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and another policy penalizing student protests. 

He said paying canvassers was key to their success.

“If we’re this party of working-class people and we’re supporting working-class people, then I feel like we have to pay working people,” Martinez said. 

SEE Alliance spurred multigenerational coalition

After Martinez left Penn State, Zander Moricz, a 2022 Pine View High School graduate, took leave from Harvard University and returned to Sarasota to focus on school board organizing. 

Moricz had helped found Social Equity through Education (SEE) Alliance as a school club in 2019. After returning home, he registered the group as a nonprofit organization and began expanding its work. 

The group now brings in roughly $1 million in revenue annually and coordinates regular calls and meetings that draw dozens of students to strategize ahead of school board meetings. 

Because the group has “a lot of queer, trans and nonbinary students” on campuses leading their work, Moricz said, “it became really personal, urgent, emotional.” 

Carol Lerner, who retired to Sarasota from a career in education and co-founded the local pro-public education group Support Our Schools, said she believed SEE Alliance helped lay the groundwork to flip the school board this year. 

Lerner and a small group of retired women approached SEE Alliance to offer their support, joining their organizing meetings for the past year. 

The women “started, like, doing things that either were for SEE directly, or complemented what SEE was doing, or filling in some of the gaps,” Lerner said. 

Meeting at The Fountain, a restaurant in downtown Sarasota, they jokingly called themselves “the Fountaineers.” One member of the group initiated a project to send out 7,000 handwritten postcards urging voters to pay attention to the school board election and vote for Mayberry, Tennimon and Glover. 

Lerner put together a voter guide, which she and other Fountaineers distributed at community events. 

SEE Alliance’s website now describes the group as “youth-led” — but also “multigenerational.” 

Students say they will keep monitoring school board

Del Rosario-Arcadia said controversial policies passed this year by the school board’s conservative majority likely helped drive student interest in the election. 

When School Board Chair Bridget Ziegler announced in January she would introduce a measure to reaffirm the district’s cooperation with ICE, students mobilized quickly in opposition. 

At one meeting of the Booker High School Democrats — which Del Rosario-Arcadia described as historically sleepy and quiet — students packed the room, wanting to know how to speak at the next school board meeting to voice their dismay. 

“I’m a daughter of immigrants, and I was even scared,” said Del Rosario-Arcadia. “Immigration itself was just broadcasted everywhere at that specific time. Like Renée Good’s murder had just happened.” 

Students and community members flooded the school board meeting, but the resolution passed anyway. When Tennimon and Mayberry won in August, she said the moment was emotional.

“A lot of people don’t know the behind the scenes. We were outside every day in the heat, when it was raining … every day, canvassing and phone banking,” Del Rosario-Arcadia said. On election night, she said, “It was kind of like, ‘I can finally breathe, take in a deep breath, have some stress relieved.’” 

But Del Rosario-Arcadia said she will continue to closely watch the school board.

“It’s important to follow through, not just be like, ‘Oh, OK, we won. Like that’s it, we’re done,’” she said. “Because there’s still so much to be done.”

Alice Herman is an investigative/watchdog reporter for Suncoast Searchlight. Email her at alice@suncoastsearchlight.org.