One of the two Santa Fe school board members up for reelection appears to be on a glide path to return to office unopposed while another will face two or possibly three challengers.
The filing deadline was Tuesday for candidates seeking to run in the Nov. 4 election. A spokesperson for the Santa Fe County Clerk’s Office, which oversees local elections, said ballots had not yet been finalized but will be in the coming days.
Santa Fe Public Schools’ District 3, which includes essentially everything in the school district north of Agua Fría Street, appears to still be an uncontested race for board Vice President Kate Noble. While William “Bill” Adams, who according to his campaign filing lives south of Santa Fe, sought to challenge her, he was disqualified because he lives in District 2 and not 3, County Clerk Katharine Clark said Friday.
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Jack Lain, principal at El Camino Real Academy in 2020, gets spare laptops for students during the first day of hybrid schooling during the pandemic. Lain is running for a seat on the Santa Fe Public Schools board.
The District 5 seat, representing a midtown area stretching from Agua Fría Street south to Interstate 25, and east along Cerrillos Road from Airport Road to St. Michael’s Drive, has summoned four contenders, although it’s possible only three of them will make the ballot.
The three confirmed candidates are former El Camino Real Academy principal and longtime educator Jack Lain — who will appear on the ballot under his legal name Jakob Lain; Juan Blea, a writer, educator, and former city and state employee; and Lynn Gardner Heffron, who was appointed to serve in the board seat for the past year following previous board president Sascha Guinn Anderson’s departure June 2024 to study to become an Episcopal priest in Austin, Texas.
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Juan Blea, left, and his wife, Cherelle Blea.
The fourth District 5 candidate, who might not appear on the November ballot, is Brenda Colburn, who filed her candidacy by the deadline but said she may be disqualified based on a “technicality.”
“I was so late to the game,” she said in a phone call Friday morning. “And I didn’t know what all the rules were.”
Colburn, a local real estate agent, said she wasn’t informed by the County Clerk’s Office when she filed that she needed to set up a candidate bank account, leaving her confused the following day when the lack of an account impeded her from finalizing her candidacy information.
At that point it was too late for the candidate who didn’t even “plan on taking funds,” an idea she said would “keep me more honest” and one she didn’t think would be a big deal.
“I’m not running a full-blown campaign,” she said. “It’s just for school board.”
Despite her expectation that the lack of a candidate bank account would disqualify her, the County Clerk’s website listed her candidacy as “qualified” by Friday afternoon after appearing as “pending” in the morning.
“The ball is in her court,” Clark wrote in a text message Friday afternoon, adding the state Secretary of State’s Office advised her to qualify candidates like Colburn that “qualify on our end.” Colburn, Clark added, had at least through the weekend to decide her “course of action.”
As a Native Hawaiian who moved from there to New Mexico in 2017, Colburn said her last-minute decision was the product of a heated discussion with her friends about the woes of New Mexico. She called her new home a beautiful state where people suffer, children don’t receive the education they deserve, and a lack of industry and cheap housing seem to indicate things will not improve fast enough.
Her proposal to her friends: “You go file in your county and I’ll file in mine.” Her friends did not follow through on the proposition, but she was “completely serious” about it.
Despite what might be a failed bid, Colburn said she might consider running next time, owing to what she called corrupt public officials and conditions for youth that reminded her of a “troubled” upbringing in Hawaii without ample social support.
“I speak this from experience because … I grew up like that,” she said. “I want to see better for my community and for this state.”