This year’s race for four seats on the St. Paul school board features eight candidates, including the board chairwoman, who filed just before the deadline.
Jeanelle Foster said in a Facebook video Tuesday that she decided “in the last hour” to run in the special election for the final two years of Steve Marchese’s term following his resignation. She faces Clayton Howatt, a PTO president who won the DFL Party endorsement without opposition.
Foster indicated she did not want to run against fellow board member Jim Vue, who fell just short of earning a DFL endorsement, in the six-way race for three four-year terms.
Foster’s 2017 campaign website remains online, and along with it a long list of endorsements, including from the DFL and local teachers union. Foster didn’t seek endorsements this time because she wasn’t sure she would run. She said she would remove the endorsements once she figures out how to do it.
“Apparently, there’s folks calling and making a stink about it,” she said in the video. “I will take those things down that I have not earned in this cycle.”
Vue is the only incumbent running for a four-year term.
Joining him in that race are the DFL-endorsed Halla Henderson and Uriah Ward, the teachers union-endorsed James Farnsworth, and two others who ran in 2019, Jennifer McPherson and Ryan Williams.