Former School Board Member Trevor Tucker Enters Race Against Christy Chong in Rematch

Trevor Tucker, who served on the Flagler County School Board for 13 years until his surprise defeat by Christy Chong in 2022, is running for his old seat again. 

Tucker filed today, the third candidate to do so for the District 4 seat of the School Board. Roy Long and Chong filed previously. The District 1 seat is open, with candidates Cathy Moon and Jill Woolbright–the former school board member–in the race so far. Will Furry, the incumbent, is the only candidate to have filed so far in District 2. 

“The school board currently is not very cohesive, and I would like to help to make it more cohesive,” he said. For most of his 13-year tenure, the board remained mostly out of the headlines and had a reputation for being among the better-functioning local governments in the county. 

That changed around 2020 as candidates with increasingly ideological agendas won elections to school boards–not just in Flagler County–and Gov. Ron DeSantis further politicized candidacies by endorsing local candidates in non-partisan races for school boards, breaking with former governors’ customs. 

“If the school board isn’t functioning very well, then how can the district function very well, which ultimately may hurt students,” Tucker said. “The other reason is, I’ve had multiple people ask me to run. I have the experience, and I would like to help out the school district for my children and everyone else’s children.” 

As a board member he prized collegial decision-making without being in lock-step with colleagues, an approach that earned the School Board the Master Board designation by the Florida School Board Association during his tenure. The designation has eluded the board for several years. 

“I think most people want folks who are just rational,” Tucker said. “You can make an argument, but there’s a difference between making an argument and then being–how to phrase this correctly–being rude or condescending.”

Tucker was in the room for much of the night last November during a School Board meeting when Chong and Will Furry, who had chaired the board for two years, filibustered for nine hours Lauren Ramirez’s attempt to be designated the board’s vice chair. Furry and Chong, in one of the board’s more vulgar displays of opportunism and hypocrisy, told Ramirez she lacked experience, though Chong had served no longer than Ramirez when Chong was named vice chair two years ago, and has none of Ramirez’s education credentials. (See: “Against 2 Colleagues’ Claims of Inexperience, Lauren Ramirez Achieves Elite FSBA Certified Status.”)

“You can disagree with someone. But you don’t have to make it into a spectacle of, ‘I’m definitely right. You’re definitely wrong’,” Tucker said. The board he sees cooperates on routine issues. “But anytime they get a controversial topic, then it becomes very split and adversarial.” It hasn’t helped, he concedes, that the board at times ends up in a 2-2 split, with a seat vacant since Derek Barrs left to take a job in the Trump administration. “Derek Barrs before he left was a very calming influence on the board,” Tucker said. 

Tucker’s three children–a 21-year-old is about to graduate college, a 16-year-old is a junior in high school, a 4-year-old will be entering the school system next year–have or will all have been students in Flagler County schools. 

Chong, a nurse who was little known, beat Tucker in a two-way race, with 56 percent of the vote. The result stunned him, though in retrospect may not have been surprising: Tucker had barely campaigned, assuming, as he had in his previous races, that his name, his controversy-free tenure on the board, his experience and his reputation as a no-frills, all-business fiscal conservative would be enough to win him reelection. 

It wasn’t. 

“I didn’t campaign hard enough,” Tucker said in an interview today. “There’s a lot of new people in the county who probably don’t know any of the school board members, and I did take it for granted that people would know me. But if you have moved here recently, you may not be as in-tune. So I didn’t campaign as hard as I should have. This time, I plan on campaigning harder.” 

The Chong campaign had also benefited from mailers that, maliciously false though they were, made Tucker and two other candidates running for the board look like criminals. Tucker never responded forcefully enough, if at all, to the mailers. “I don’t ever plan on ever running a dirty campaign or anything like that, so I don’t want to be belaboring on that,” he said. “I will say I lost because I did not put enough work in.” 

You’d have been hard pressed to see a Tucker campaign sign anywhere. He also plans to embrace social media and have a website this time, as he did not in 2022. 

Tucker has owned his own business for over 20 years–Sun Country Pest Control–and for a few years had a business that turned around failing schools, a venture that ended during the pandemic as contracts were not renewed. 

Tucker said LaShakia Moore, the superintendent and the board’s one unifying force, “is doing a very good job.”  He is hoping she will stay a long time, breaking a pattern of short-tenured superintendents who barely have time to get their procedures in place before they either leave or are fired. He supports “school choice,” but would rather see a more level field between district students and students on school vouchers, which provide upwards of $8,000-a-year in public money per student for private school or homeschool: if district students are required to take the state’s standardized tests, he’d like to see the requirement apply to voucher students. 

Tucker was originally appointed to the School Board in January 2010 to complete the term of the late Peter Palmer. He ran for the seat that year, winning with 56 percent of the vote, was re-elected with a 58-vote margin four years later, and with 56 percent of the vote in 2018.