Running for School Board with Monica Taylor
My name is Monica Taylor and I ran for School Board director in Upper Darby Pennsylvania and won!
Upper Darby is a large school district located on the western border of Philadelphia. We are the eighth largest school district in Pennsylvania. There are nine total members of the school board and five seats were up for election this year.
The sheer size of the district made the race a challenge for a first time candidate like myself. In my school district there are around 85,000 constituents (to give some perspective the typical Pennsylvania state representative seat is 75,00 constituents). My win number that I aimed for was 8,000 votes and I won with about 8,300.
I ran with a great slate of candidates since there were five open seats on the board. This made the workload a little more manageable and we were able to combine our fundraising efforts to pay for group literature, mailers, and events. As a first time candidate, I think this was a great way to ease into the role. One of my slate mates was an incumbent, so she was a great resource.
As for challenges, there were two things for me. First, the primary was a challenge. Even though we only had five candidates running for five seats, in our state we have a closed primary (voters can only vote for candidates in their party) and for School Board you are allowed to cross file so you can run in both the Democratic and Republican primary. So essentially there was a contested primary because all of the Republican candidates cross filed onto the Democratic ticket. We had to get the word out to our super D’s who the actual Democratic candidates were, which made the primary more difficult than I had anticipated.
My second challenge was understanding how to balance my time between fundraising, knocking doors, and attending the various events that are required/asked of you as a candidate.
Run for Something was a great help to my campaign the candidate resources were amazing, from finding trainings in my area to understanding how and when to use vendors. Whenever I had a question the site was my first stop.
All in all, this was a great experience. There were a lot of people that helped me get a win. They knocked doors, donated, phone banked, worked the polls, and VOTED! I am very grateful to have this opportunity to represent them and help make a difference in the Upper Darby School district.
