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Guilford Delegation Wants To Go Back To Nonpartisan School Board

Detail from a Guilford County sample ballot from the 2018 election. Lawmakers in the county's delegation want to return to nonpartisan elections for the school board. Image courtesy of the State Board of Elections.

A bipartisan group of state lawmakers has filed bills to make a local election non-partisan.

Six members of the Guilford County delegation - four Democrats and two Republicans - have filed bills to change the way voters pick the school board. One measure is a House bill, and there's an identical bill in the Senate.

If approved, candidates' names would appear on the ballot without party affiliation for both the primary and general elections.

That's a return to the way it was in Guilford County for years, until a bill filed by then-state Sen. Trudy Wade - a Republican - switched the elections to partisan beginning with the 2016 campaign.

The move was opposed by school board members at the time. Wade lost her re-election bid last year.

The proposed change does not impact any other counties in the state.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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