In Jefferson Public Schools, voters are selecting two new school board members this year.
There are five candidates running in total. Two, Michelle Applegate and Thomas Wicke, are running for a seat representing Jeffco’s District 3. Three candidates, Amara Hildebrand, Joel Newton, and Erin Kenworthy, are running to represent District 4.
All Jeffco voters will get to select one candidate for each race in the Nov. 7 election.
Applegate and Kenworthy have the endorsement of the Jefferson County Educators Association, the teachers union.
Since this election will only bring two new members to the five-member school board, the current union-led majority of the board will not change, but could still add new perspectives.
To help readers learn more about the candidates, we asked them each the same set of questions. Read their answers below. Responses may have been edited for formatting, but otherwise each candidate’s answers are as submitted.
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.