Three of the five seats on the Maryville City Schools board are on the November ballot. Tuesday is the only time you’ll see the candidates answer the same questions in the same room.
Here’s a fact about school boards that most of us never think about until we’re standing in a voting booth: they don’t get to decide how much money they have. The legislature sets the funding formula and decides how many private-school vouchers to pay for. Washington decides what happens to federal dollars for special education and low-income students. Maryville City Council sets the property tax rate. The five people on the Maryville Board of Education are handed the result of all those decisions and asked one question: now what?
That question is at the heart of the Maryville School Board Candidate Forum on Tuesday, Sept. 29, at the Blount County Public Library. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the forum begins at 6 in the Sharon Lawson Room. It’s free, open to everyone, and will be livestreamed on the Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM) Facebook page.
On Nov. 3, Maryville city voters will fill three of the board’s five seats, a majority. Board chair Julie Elder’s term runs 2018–2026, and Bart Stinnett’s and Isaac Simerly’s run 2022–2026. Only Simerly is running again, so at least two of the three seats will go to newcomers.
Four candidates are competing. Republicans Isaac Simerly, Bo Gillooly and Brian Davis advanced from August’s primary, and Irene Guerinot was the sole Democratic candidate.
Three of the four have confirmed for Tuesday: Simerly, Davis and Guerinot. Gillooly told organizers he has a prior commitment and can’t attend.
One detail worth underlining: this is a city election. Only registered voters who live inside Maryville city limits vote for the Maryville school board.
The forum is put on by the Blount County chapter of Public School Strong, a campaign of SOCM. SOCM was founded in 1972 as Save Our Cumberland Mountains, organizing East Tennesseans against strip mining, and has been doing grassroots community work across the state ever since.
Dustin Park, who helped launch Public School Strong in Tennessee and organized the Blount County chapter, got connected to SOCM three or four years ago through local education work, around the time the state’s third-grade retention law was moving through the legislature. He joined SOCM’s statewide public education steering committee, which built Public School Strong on a model from North Carolina. The idea is simple: teach people what school boards do and how to attend meetings, then get residents in every county to pledge to show up. Two years in, Park says the campaign has a presence in more than 20 Tennessee counties.
After a legislative session spent largely fighting vouchers at the state level, with what Park calls “some successes and some failures,” the group concluded local work was where it could make the biggest difference. “We have three school systems,” Park said of Blount County. “There’s a lot to do.”
The local chapter started meeting about a year ago and organized into committees: legislative issues, school board attendance, community outreach and, with elections this year, voter engagement. Its first forum, in April, paired Blount County school board candidates with county mayoral candidates ahead of the May primary. The Sharon Lawson Room was standing room only.
Organizers invited Alcoa’s school board candidates as well, but Alcoa’s two seats were effectively decided in the August primary, where no Democrats ran, and neither candidate is attending. (Julie Rochelle told the group she’d be out of town.) That leaves Maryville as the only contested school board race in Blount County this fall.
Ask Park what needs public attention most and he answers in one word: financing.
Start with the biggest recent decision, one the school board didn’t make. In 2025, Maryville City Council approved a $55 million bond to expand Maryville High School with a three-story, 48-classroom wing and a new performing arts center, bringing ninth graders back to the high school campus, with a goal of finishing by August 2027. To pay for it, the city’s 2026 budget set the property tax rate at $1.63 per $100 of assessed value, a 13-cent increase dedicated to debt service on the expansion bond, which works out to about $8 a month for the average Maryville homeowner. The council set the rate. The next board lives with the debt and fills the building.
Then there’s the state. Tennessee’s Education Freedom Scholarship program, which pays private-school tuition with public dollars, started with 20,000 scholarships in 2025–26 and was raised to 35,000 for 2026–27 after more than 56,000 families applied; this year’s scholarship amount is $7,530. The program isn’t directly hitting Maryville’s budget yet, Park says, “but the faster that grows, the more it’s going to affect school budgets, and not just school budgets but county budgets.” All three Blount County school boards have formally opposed it; Maryville’s board took up a joint resolution with Alcoa City Schools and both city governments in January 2024.
Park points to Knoxville as the cautionary tale. This summer, Knox County Schools faced a $7.8 million shortfall for 2026–27 after the county commission redirected property tax revenue away from the district and the state’s projected funding came in lower than expected. District officials called the situation unprecedented, saying they knew of no other case where a board was asked to revise a budget it had already approved. The fix included a five-day furlough for employees on 255- and 260-day contracts and cuts affecting roughly 29 teaching positions.
Add the possibility of federal cuts to programs serving students with disabilities, English language learners and low-income families, and you have the questions organizers want answered Tuesday: What would you cut? What would you protect? Where would you look first?
“That is very much in their purview if they get elected,” Park said.
The questions were written by the chapter’s election committee, made up of Park, Marilyn Finley, Brenda Bell and Mark Evans, then sent to the full membership for feedback before being finalized. Every candidate received the complete list ahead of time. “This is not meant to be a gotcha type of thing,” Park said. “You’ll be fully prepared.”
Tom Taylor, the former Maryville mayor, will moderate, as he did in April. Everyone gets the same opening question, why are you running and what qualifies you, and after that Taylor chooses from the pool as he sees fit. Candidates get two minutes per answer with a timekeeper, and 30 seconds for a closing statement. There’s no live audience Q&A, but you can submit a question in advance through the RSVP link.
Public School Strong is not neutral on policy. Its stated pillars are fully funded, equitable, honest and safe public schools, and it has lobbied against vouchers in Nashville. But Park says the group is nonpartisan, and that’s much of the point of the forum. “Most of the forums that happen locally are partisan forums,” he said. “We want to create a space where we’re not.” He’ll add, unprompted, that his group believes school board races should never have become partisan, as Maryville’s have been since 2022, when candidates first ran in party primaries, and the forum is run as if they weren’t.
Asked why this election matters to the many Maryville residents without children in the system, Park didn’t hesitate.
“Because it’s about the community,” he said. “We believe public schools are the cornerstone of our democracy, and especially our local democracies. Even if you don’t have kids, these are the people who are going to be working in the businesses around town and serving you. They’re taking care of you, taking care of your parents, your friends and family. It benefits all of us to have strong schools that are producing strong people and building strong community.”
There’s a less lofty version of that argument, too. Maryville City Schools is a big reason people move here, and a big reason property here is worth what it’s worth. Three of the five people who oversee it are being chosen this fall, and you get exactly one evening to watch them answer the same questions, on the same clock, in the same room.
