Kirschling, Lynch, Dorau Win in Record Turnout for Iowa City School Board Election

The stakes were high in last night's school board vote, and it showed up in the voter turnout.

According to the unofficial tally from the Johnson County Auditor, a record setting 8,727 voters or 11.85 percent of the electorate turned out Tuesday night to vote to fill three vacancies on the school board.

The winners were: Incumbent Tuyet Dorau with 43 percent of the vote (3,734), Chris Lynch with 36 percent of the vote (3,118), and Brian Kirschling with 35 percent of the vote (3,035). The only other candidate to get above 30 percent of the votes was fourth place finisher Phil Hemingway, who finished just 104 votes behind Kirschling. Hemingway also finished a close fourth to Patti Fields in the 2011 election.

Kirschling spoke to Gregg Hennigan of the Gazette and praised the large voter turnout.

“I think that there’s so many issues facing our district and so many big things that we’re about to embark on that, obviously, everybody’s been paying attention,” he said.

Hennigan also has some brief analysis on how the new structure of the board could change the decisions made by the previous board, such as the recently approved $250 million districts facilities plan that includes the eventual closing of Hoover Elementary School.

In summary: it's not clear how it will be affected at this point.

What is clear is that North Corridor residents circled the wagons around their candidates of choice in this election, with the largest turnouts respectively (Coralville, 1,191 and North Liberty, 1,022) of all voting sites targeting more than 70 percent of their votes to Tuyet Dorau and Chris Lynch. Kirschling, who received votes with far more even distribution across the voting precincts than Lynch, received the third highest amount of votes from these precincts, with over 20 percent in both.

Lynch and Dorau both received endorsements from the North Corridor Parenting group, which also recommended the use of bullet voting to maximize the effectiveness of the votes for the candidates.

The larger number of Iowa City based candidates also appears to have spread out the vote, weakening the chances of those candidates.  

Adam Sullivan of the Press-Citizen also has quotes from all of the winning candidates.

Also approved Tuesday night, a physical plant levy that will help fund equipment and repairs for schools in the district and a Kirkwood Community College 10-year levy.