ORLANDO, Fla. – For the first time in eight years, Orange County Public Schools is about to get a new leader — and in the only Florida county where voters, not the board itself, choose the school board chair, that choice carries unusual weight.
With longtime chair Teresa Jacobs retiring, two sitting board members are competing to run a $7 billion organization at a moment of falling enrollment, tightening budgets and rising tension over what schools should be. The seat is officially nonpartisan. The race between District 3’s Alicia Farrant and District 1’s Angie Gallo has been anything but.
The clearest divide starts with a simple question: is the district, as it stands right now, a success? Orange County carries an A rating from the state, yet roughly half its students still read below grade level even as it graduates about 97% of them.
Asked whether that adds up, Farrant said it does not. “If a little 50% are reading on grade level and yet we’re graduating 97% of the children, that doesn’t add up to me,” she said, arguing the district needs “courageous leadership” willing to close those learning gaps rather than paper over them.
Gallo looked at the same numbers and saw progress. “I would say yes,” she said, noting that Orange County outperforms the state in reading and math proficiency. “We are actually raising the ceiling and the floor at the same time. So we’re really narrowing those achievement gaps.”
The work isn’t finished, she added, but the district has made “phenomenal progress” recovering from pandemic learning loss.
Both agree the district’s greatest strain is its teachers, who are fighting over a raise of around 1% while health care costs are projected to climb roughly 10%. Their fixes point in opposite directions.
Gallo wants to solve it locally, and specifically: a quarter-mill referendum whose dollars would flow directly into teacher and support-staff salaries. “We’re going to have to fix this problem locally, because I’ve been counting on Tallahassee for 20 years to fix the problem, and they just haven’t,” she said, adding that the district is also working to bring down pharmaceutical costs to ease the health care burden.
Farrant framed the answer as discipline rather than new revenue. “There are so many ways that we could really try to trim that fat and cut back on areas that maybe we’re spending a little frivolously,” she said, pointing to programs funded in flusher years. “Now I think we need to really look at what is essential, what do we need, and how can we use the extra funds to really help our teachers.”
[ELECTION 2026: Make sure you’re eligible to vote|How to vote by mail|Election Myths]
That disagreement sharpens into the central fault line of the race: whether to ask taxpayers for more money. Both candidates support the one-mill renewal already on the November ballot, which they call necessary. It’s the additional quarter-mill that splits them.
Gallo said she would champion it. “I will be spearheading it if elected,” she said. Told that voters have watched the district close schools and cut teachers, and asked whether that makes a new tax a hard sell, she bet on public goodwill. “When you talk to the voters in Orange County, they love our teachers, and they’ve always been very supportive,” she said. “Our teachers deserve a living wage. I think it has a good shot.”
Farrant drew a hard line the other way. “I’m not into adding taxes. I don’t think we need to put that burden on the taxpayers,” she said.
Pressed on how the district closes its gap without new money, she pointed back to the cuts themselves. “How can I go to the taxpayers and say, we’ve closed schools this year, we’ve lost 6,000 students, but we need your money? There’s got to be other ways.” The savings, she said, have to come at the district level rather than the school level — “and some of those decisions, we’ll feel it.”
The race has also turned, at moments, to the culture-war fights that have consumed board meetings in recent years — and to the fact that the chair sets the agenda.
Farrant is on record pushing to pull certain books, and has weighed in on bathroom policies and LGBTQ+ History Month; asked how much of her time as chair those issues would command, she pivoted to academics.
“We should be spending our time focused on education, wholesome, foundational education,” she said, blaming district leaders and fellow board members for pushing cultural topics on students. She tied it directly to enrollment, claiming the majority of parents she’d spoken with who left the district “left because of the culture wars going on in the schools.”
Gallo drew the line at zero. “100% of what I’m going to be focusing on is what we’ve discussed previously, 0% on the cultural wars,” she said. “I’m here to represent all students, to support all students. I support our LGBTQ plus community.” She said she was running precisely because those fights had crowded out bigger problems at the board dais.
At its sharpest, the contest got personal, over whose children actually attend district schools. Gallo, a native Floridian who says she and both her children graduated from public schools, noted pointedly that “not all of my opponent’s children are currently in public schools,” framing her own two decades in public education as the contrast.
Farrant called the focus out of bounds. “I first find it kind of inappropriate that anybody would focus on my children or where they attend school,” she said, adding that her children grew up in Orange County schools and her two oldest graduated from Boone High School, her husband’s alma mater. “I would not be in this position if it did not affect my children.”
What voters are left with is two members of the same board offering opposite theories of the job — one defending the district’s direction and willing to ask the community to invest more in it, the other convinced the answer is to cut to the essentials and change course.
The nonpartisan primary is Aug. 18. Either way, Orange County is about to hand one of them the gavel — and the agenda — for a $7 billion district.