Zone 3 Salem-Keizer School Board race too close to call as progressives clinch other seats
One Salem-Keizer School Board race is a toss-up after Marion County election officials tallied thousands of ballots Thursday.
Jennifer Parker now leads Angelo Arredondo Baca by just 294 votes in the Zone 3 race to represent south Salem, out of more than 41,000 votes cast.
She is the sole candidate from a conservative slate of four backed by Marion + Polk First to come out ahead on election night.
Parker is a single mother of a son with disabilities who graduated from Sprague High School in 2016. She’s been a longtime employment services manager at Work Unlimited, a nonprofit serving people with disabilities. As of Thursday evening tallies, she had 21,041 votes, or 50.3%.
Arredondo Baca, a current Oregon State University student, said he’s running because he wants to provide a fresh perspective on the board as someone who was raised in the district’s system and graduated recently. He’s the son of Mexican immigrants and learned English in local schools. He serves as a guardian for his sister, who’s currently a junior at South. He had 20,747 votes, or 49.6%.
Marion County has about 3,000 remaining ballots to process and count that are from within the district’s boundaries, Clerk Bill Burgess said Thursday. Another 671 have been rejected for signature issues. Voters will receive a letter in the mail and have until June 10 to fix those issues and potentially have their ballots counted.
Ballots are still counted if they arrive in the mail up to a week after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day. School board directors represent a geographic area, but all voters in the district get a say in all races.
Marion County will next update its results Friday evening, while Polk County will update next week.
Three other school board races appear settled, with Lisa Harnisch winning election in Zone 1, Karina Guzmán Ortiz securing a second term for Zone 5 and Mel Fuller winning in Zone 7. All three were part of a slate of candidates backed by Community for Salem-Keizer Schools, a coalition of union and progressive groups. All three candidates have claimed victory.
Regardless of the outcome of Zone 3, progressives will hold a majority of seats on the seven-member board. That means discussions about returning police to schools, a focus of the conservative slate, likely won’t get a hearing, and Superintendent Andrea Castañeda will have support from the majority of her board for maintaining diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the district even as the Trump administration threatens school funding over such efforts.
Tight school board races have become more common in recent elections. The Zone 3 race in 2021 came down to fewer than 100 votes, with Ashley Carson Cottingham winning the election over Linda Farrington.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers education, economic development and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for over a decade and is a past president of Oregon's Society of Professional Journalists chapter. Outside of work, you can often find her gardening or with her nose buried in a book.
