Ahead of Tuesday's election, campaign cash flows into some central Pa. school board races

On Tuesday, the majority of voters in the Harrisburg region will see a ballot that contains at least one school board race. These contests can often be confusing, with multiple little-known candidates — or sometimes none at all.

The broad trend in school board races this year largely depends on which side of the Susquehanna River you’re on. Few, if any, school districts in Dauphin County appear to have a contested board race (barring any concerted write-in campaigns), and in several cases there are open seats with no one on the ballot.

The West Shore suburbs of eastern Cumberland County, however, are a different story. Several districts have hotly-contested races that have pulled in sizeable amounts of money that would’ve been considered unusual just five or ten years ago.

But the trickling down of state and national politics to the local level has made school board contests far less anodyne than they once were. In Cumberland County, a significant amount of the effort – and finances – going into the races is driven by a liberal backlash to the wave of conservative pressure on school boards in the last several years.




https://www.pennlive.com/politics/2025/11/ahead-of-tuesdays-election-campaign-cash-flows-into-some-central-pa-school-board-races.html