Editor's note:
Gwen Bryant clarified a comment about school district leadership taking a leadership style survey.
From all eight Akron Board of Education candidates, you’ll hear a common refrain: I’m here for the students.
For some, that means supporting Superintendent Mary Outley’s initiatives and exploring areas of collaboration and agreement with other board members. For others, the job is one of public accountability and transparency.
The school board race for Akron Public Schools features eight candidates — including three incumbents — vying for four seats. After Election Day on Nov. 4, Summit County’s largest school board could look quite different. The winners will begin serving their four-year terms in January.
The incumbent school board members running for reelection are Diana Autry (former board president), Gregory Harrison and current Board President Carla Jackson. Longtime member Bruce Alexander is retiring from this public office after 16 years.
New faces in the race are Cynthia Blake, Gwen Bryant, Nathan Jarosz, Karmaya Kelly and Phil Montgomery.
In recent forums and events, candidates shared visions for Akron Public Schools. The district serves more than 20,000 students, employs more than 3,500 people across 47 schools and community learning centers and maintains an annual budget of more than $500 million. The candidates detailed how they would work with Outley, and what, exactly, is the role of a school board member.
Successful candidates will join a school district that’s managing two major construction projects and facing a bleak financial outlook. School board members also supervise two employees: the superintendent and treasurer. Meanwhile, they approve all expenses more than $10,000 and set vision, goals and policies.
Given the public’s familiarity with incumbent candidates, we’ll start this voting guide with the newcomers. Much of this reporting is based on a candidate forum on Sept. 30 in West Akron at St. Sebastian Parish, where all eight candidates fielded questions.
Financial expertise a pillar of Phil Montgomery’s campaign
Montgomery, the director of Finance and Budget for Summit County, recently obtained his treasurer’s license from the state. Montgomery touted his deep financial experience as an asset: With the county, he oversees a budget of more than $700 million. He also served in 2011 on the Akron City Council for Ward 8.
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Montgomery said he has “skin in the game.” Two of his daughters attend the National Inventors Hall of Fame STEM Middle School, and his life experiences as a member of the LGBTQ community can help him lend insight into policies the board may consider that impact students.
“As a board member, I think we have to look at the resources we have available,” Montgomery said, “and we have to look at the needs of the students, and make sure that we’re tailoring those academic paths to the needs of the students.”
That stewardship of resources is a pillar of Montgomery’s campaign, something he said will be enhanced by his background in policymaking. Regarding policy, he said he wants to set “guardrails” for the superintendent and school district to operate within — without micromanaging how objectives set by the school board and administration are met.
“I think we just have to come together with a mutual goal to move the district forward, putting the kids and educators and families first, and if we can agree on that, we should be able to get through things together,” Montgomery said.
Montgomery also pledged to hold monthly meetings across APS clusters so he would hear directly from community members.
More information: https://www.electphilmontgomery.com/
Cynthia Blake wants to support superintendent, shorten meetings
Blake is a longtime Akron resident and APS graduate with a professional background in “community lending of economic development,” where she worked with prospective homeowners to secure loans. Blake unsuccessfully ran for Summit County Council, where she was unopposed in the Republican primary before losing to Brandon Ford in the 2024 general election.
If elected, Blake said her background in finance will aid her. She said she wants to be “the voice of you, the community.”
She said she would support Outley, the school superintendent, and make every effort to arrive at board meetings prepared. Blake has criticized at least some current school board members for “grandstanding” and “berating” people who present reports at meetings.
“I wouldn’t be one of those type of board members to be defiant or try to belittle my superintendent,” Blake said. “I would try to uplift her as well as I would try to uplift the district.”
Her priorities are making school board meetings shorter and diving into the district’s finances through the Finance and Capital Management committee. She also said the board’s role is not to draft policy but instead to review and pass it, countering the current practice of collaboratively writing and amending policies in committee before the full board votes.
Blake said she would press for transparency from the treasurer’s office, which publicly presents regular financial updates, and for the district’s ongoing construction projects. She also said she would work to remove “Community reflections,” a portion of the school board meeting’s agenda where members share observations from their time in the community.
More information: https://makenomistakevoteforblake.com/
Karmaya Kelly hopes new voice, fresh perspective resonates with voters
Kelly is a newcomer to Akron’s politics. She said she ran for office in response to the community’s call for new voices in the city’s public education landscape.
“Expertise and experience is important,” Kelly said. “But what’s important is bringing the needs and the worries and addressing the barriers that our children that attend the schools in our district face.”
Kelly said her years of working with mental health advocacy groups in the community, specifically Red Oak Behavioral Health and Urban Ounce of Prevention, give her insight into the struggles of Akron’s students.
“Each of us have experienced the difficulties that some — not all — but some of our students have experienced, and they deserve to have somebody on that board who knows exactly what they’re going through,” she said.
Kelly said that, if elected, she would bring transparency, integrity, honesty and leadership — with a healthy dose of listening — to a school board that several times over the past school year has been publicly divided on key issues. Collective effort, something she said has not been on display, would be central to her efforts.
Kelly also said she would respect the roles of the school board and superintendent in an effort to minimize micromanaging of top administrators.
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Nathan Jarosz leans on nonprofit experience to foster school board collaboration
Jarosz is the youngest of the board candidates but no rookie to the region’s politics. Before running for the Akron Board of Education, he challenged Rep. Derrick Hall in the 2024 primary election for the Ohio House of Representatives. He lost by about 500 votes.
In his campaign messaging, Jarosz touts his student-focused nonprofit, Leadership Influencing Teen Empowerment, as a reason he’s worthy of votes. The nonprofit focuses on providing “leadership development and emotional intelligence training” for middle and high school students, according to his campaign website.
That background, he said, would help him navigate any conflicts that arise between school board members, especially during contentious votes.
“What I bring to the board is an expertise in leadership development, learning how to build dynamic teams, how to foster collaboration and how to prioritize a mission,” Jarosz said.
Jarosz said he wants to ensure the school district’s leadership is stable, especially after premature exits from former superintendents Michael Robinson and Christine Fowler-Mack before the end of their contracts. To that end, he said he would trust Superintendent Outley to effectively lead the district.
“All of us who are running to be a school board member, we’re not running to be superintendent,” Jarosz said. “And what that means is that we have to allow our professionals to do their job.”
An even bigger priority for Jarosz: Ensuring Akron schools remain on stable financial ground.
More information: https://friendsofnathanjarosz.com/
Gwen Bryant touts decades of education experience
Bryant is a longtime Akron teacher turned national education consultant, work that she said keeps her in schools across the nation roughly 20 days each month. She taught in APS for three decades, and that experience, she said, helps her identify best practices to fold into Akron’s public schools.
If there’s a curriculum the district is considering purchasing, she said she’s likely seen it.
“I know the system,” Bryant said. “I was a part of the system and did it. … I know best practice nationally.”
Bryant said she wants to address the national teacher shortage by pursuing alternative licensing pathways for staffers who aren’t certified to lead classrooms, something the school district announced earlier this year it’s working toward.
Regarding the budget, she said she wants to use data to identify areas that could be cut. But, she cautioned against reducing teacher jobs, given the national shortage.
“When you look at schools, they have systems,” Bryant said. “And if the leadership is not working, that’s where you start. Because if the leadership’s not working, nothing else will work.”
If elected, Bryant said she would ask fellow school board members to take a leadership style survey, which would then be available for school district administrators. It’s a practice she uses in consulting that she said will help others navigate school district leadership.
She also emphasized the need for another school finance levy in the future, something that’s likely unavoidable due to Ohio’s public school financing systems.
More information: https://www.votegwenbryant.com/
Carla Jackson hopes to empower students, families
Jackson, the current board president and a lifelong resident of Akron, said she’s called to Akron Board of Education work because she wants to be a part of the change she wants to see.
In her day job, she’s an administrator at Emmanuel Christian School, a local private Christian school in Akron.
“I have to be a voice for the voiceless,” Jackson said. “All children are not going to have the opportunity to open enroll into another public school district, or they’re not going to have parents or caregivers that take the time to go through the voucher process.”
Empowering families to advocate on their behalf is central to her campaign.
She said student empowerment would take the form of promoting entrepreneurship. She also wants to improve the school district’s relationships with local trade unions, with the hope that by the time students graduate, they can be apprentices in their trades of choice.
Jackson acknowledged there’s been turmoil over the past year among school board members, and learning to navigate seven different elected officials with seven different personalities has been a major on-the-job lesson for her as the board’s president for the last 10 months. (She previously served as vice president).
“I’m grateful to those of my colleagues that, even if we don’t agree, I’ve been able to reason with and we’ve been able to move forward in a sense of peace,” Jackson said.
Looking forward, she said the best way to ensure stability within the school board and school district is to adhere to policies that ensure stable governance and decision making — even if there’s disagreement at school board meetings.
“This is how we will move the district forward,” Jackson said. “This is how we will show the community that we are about what we say we’re about.”
More information: Carla Jackson 4 School Board
Gregory Harrison wants ‘deliberative dialogue’ to ensure accountability
Harrison is a graduate of Garfield CLC. He’s currently a pastor at Antioch Baptist Church and, prior to that, served in the armed forces before working for years as an officer with the Akron Police Department. Prior to his appointment last year to the school board (following the departure of Job Perry), Harrison spent a decade as an audience member at school board meetings.
“I have been questioning the use of resources for the last 10 years, the priorities of the school for the last 10 years,” Harrison said. “Not just questioning them, but actually trying to understand exactly what is going on with our children. I’m running for school board because I believe now I can make a difference on the other side.”
One of his major focuses as a current school board member is ensuring public transparency around finances and decision making, both from the board and the district’s administrators. Outside of that, he was critical of the disparity between graduation rates and testing scores on Akron schools’ state report card.
Harrison said he wants to ensure students aren’t just graduating but leave being “proficient in reading, writing and arithmetic.”
He differed from some candidates in saying that the school board, not the superintendent, sets the vision. Notably, he stopped short of explicitly saying he would support all of Outley’s initiatives.
“You have the right person for the job,” Harrison said. “And once that’s established, the board has to really, truly engage in deliberative dialog, which means that four people don’t decide what the vote is.”
Harrison also advocated for equity across the district’s 47 schools and various athletic facilities, including public access to the community learning centers outside of school hours. He noted the possibility that staff would be cut over the next year, a likely outcome of the school district’s financial crunch. But he said he wanted to be careful to protect classroom resources.
More information: https://harrison4schoolboard.com/
Diana Autry leans on board experience to make case to voters
Prior to being appointed to the Akron Board of Education in 2019 and winning a seat on the board in 2021, Autry spent years volunteering with the Buchtel Community Learning Center Parent Teacher Association and the Akron Council of PTAs. For the past 23 years, Autry has worked as a registered nurse at Akron’s Children Hospital.
“My character and my life’s work is centered around service to children, families and my community,” Autry said. “This is not a political win for me in order to be a stepping stone.”
Autry correctly noted that she’s the most experienced of the incumbents running for reelection, saying she may not know everything but she’s “battle tested” and “still standing.” She said she’s sat on every committee and had to make hard decisions as the prior board president.
Specifically, she said she pushed former Superintendent Michael Robinson last year to recommend the school board pursue a levy — while advisors told district leadership the community would not support it. That dual operating levy and construction bond ballot initiative passed with nearly 60% of the vote.
Autry was a key advocate in the prompt appointment of Outley to the superintendent role, a process that did not seek outside candidates or engage in public interviews. Given that, she’s a supporter of the district’s top leader and her initiatives. The key to managing the relationship between the school board and district leadership is “building a culture of trust and respect.”
She touted her efforts to build relationships and some consensus among school board members through board retreats, while saying that members have to respect and work with board leadership.
“If seven board members are going to the superintendent with seven different concerns versus working through our board leadership respectfully, then that’s where you see issues,” Autry said.
Outside of board relationships and the superintendent, Autry said she’s supportive of expanded literacy programs. She was also an early advocate for district-wide full-day prekindergarten, which Robinson launched.
More information: https://autry4asb.com/