York City School District: Who are the 7 candidates vying for four seats on the board?
Seven candidates will be seeking four seats on the York City School Board in the May 20 primary.
Three candidates — Lisa Kennedy, Margie Orr and Tynisha Wilkes — currently sit on the board. They are running on the Democratic ticket.
The challengers, who have all cross-filed, are Breauja Banks, Dolores I. Minaya, Halman B. Smith II, and Aisha Beatty-White.
Three candidates who are on the ballot — Banks, Beatty-White and Minaya — as well as write-in candidate Knowledge Ravon Timmons are running together as part of YCSD New Board. The group says that the current board is failing students and is encouraging voters to elect all new members.
Here, in alphabetical order, are the candidates who are running:
Breauja Banks
Banks, who works for Community Progress Council of York and volunteers as a parent liason at Devers Elementary School, is a new board candidate, according to the campaign website.
Banks provided the following statement:
"What's driving my campaign for a seat on the School Board is concern for the future of our children and our community. While I commend the current board members for their efforts, I do believe there's always room for improvement and new ideas," she said in a statement. "We need a real plan to get our kids on grade level so they are equipped with knowledge and skills to make living wages in an increasingly competitive job market. It's great to see graduates walk the stage, but we need to consider if they're actually prepared for what comes after high school."
Aisha Beatty-White
Beatty-White is a new board candidate. Her family has been a part of the York community for generations, and she is looking to represent the voices of the diverse neighborhoods, according to the campaign website.
Beatty-White offered the following statement:
"My nephew and grandchildren are very dear to me. During my employment with the school district while my children attended, I witnessed concerning events and unacceptable actions impacting our children. This was deeply disappointing. As a product of the York City school district myself — following in the footsteps of my parents and grandparents — this is particularly hurtful. I believe it is my responsibility to speak up and advocate for our youth, and I intend to do just that."
Lisa Kennedy
Kennedy, who has served for eight years on the school board and is the president, has cited increased student achievement as one of the reasons why she is seeking re-election.
"I, first, want to recognize that some may feel we have not met the standard in growth, but there's more than one way to measure said growth," she wrote in a social media post. "As a district dripped in jewels of urban mystique, achieving academic success as a district or for an individual means honoring the needs of every student beyond education with ALL of their various needs. We are a district filled with larger rates of special needs children, multi-lingual needs, and often times students with large educational gaps."
She said the district has a welcome center that allows for the academic assessment of students as well as provide resources to support families. She also described its Multi Tiered Systems of Support and how it is used to evaluate the academic, social and emotional needs of students to help them.
"The ability to engage with our district leadership and building level Principals to ensure they have exactly what they need to provide not only the academic structure for growth but to also truly be able to able to address most any need for our students, that's WHY I've chosen to serve," she wrote.
Dolores I. Minaya
Minaya, a new school board candidate, said she has been involved in the community and connected to things related to the district. She cited several reasons why she's running for the school board.
One is her Spanglish Culture and Art program, which has included students from the York City School District. It has been a way for her to give back to the community, schools, students and parents.
The program has helped to keep students out of the streets, motivated to maintain or improve their grades and engaged in positive activities, she said.
Minaya said she was a parent liaison at York High, which allowed her to better understand the district and maintain active communication with the parents regarding opportunities available for students and parents.
Now that she is running for school board, she realizes that not many know what the board is and its purpose. She said it's important to find a way to bring parents to the meetings, keep them informed, and motivate them to participate in meetings and parent workshops.
"... it's important for the parents and students to learn about the school's rules and policies, as well to know where they can go for answers to their questions and bring concerns or ideas, they might have that could help improve our School District," she said.
Margie Orr
Orr, who is running for her fifth term, said the school board needs experienced individuals to serve and protect the district. It faced cuts and the loss of staff years ago as it battled through financial recovery, but administrators helped them emerge from it.
Now the district is facing possible funding cuts because of a change in the White House, Orr said. She is hearing that programs, such as free meals for students, will be done away with, and the district is under pressure to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion policies. For instance, one of the district's policies is to hire minority contractors and female business owners.
Neither is going away, she said.
Orr added that the district took steps to protect children from federal immigration enforcement on school campuses. She said the board wants to prepare itself for what it might face in the future.
She noted that the recent governors have been a supporter of the district, which is one of the largest employers in the city. It has to keep the funds available to take care of everything.
"I'm fighting this with my heart and soul to protect my district, our children, and the community," she said.
Halman B. Smith, II
In a video posted to Instagram, Smith said he decided to run because he grew up and raised his family in York. He believes it is important to give back to his community and address areas that need attention.
"Our children, quite frankly, are not performing well in our schools," he said.
Students are leaving school with the lowest proficiency numbers in the county, and that needs to change, Smith said.
"When I went through York City schools, there were amazing people that were set up beside me and behind me and they gave me the hope and the opportunities to see that I could do anything I wanted," he said. "And I want our children to experience the same thing."
The educators are in place and have the same heart and passion, Smith said, "but there is something wrong, and we have to make sure we figure out what it is and correct it."
Tynisha Wilkes
Wilkes, who is an incumbent, provided a statement about why she is seeking re-election to the board:
"What drives my candidacy for this seat is my unwavering dedication to growth and progress. Over the past four years, I have witnessed the York City School District undergo a remarkable transformation.
"Here are several key highlights that illustrate this growth: our successful exit from financial recovery and the strengthening of partnerships with esteemed organizations such as WellSpan and Family First Health.
"Let's talk about student achievement. While there are candidates who focus solely on PSSA scores, these metrics do not fully capture the range of our students' successes. The pride on a student's face after excelling on CDTs or reaching a benchmark on IXL speaks volumes. This raises the question: who can truly assess the dedication and accomplishments of our educators and students based solely on PSSA results? Numerous factors can influence performance on these assessments. With over thirty years of experience in education, I can personally attest to the tireless efforts of our teachers and students striving for excellence in every subject. This is a systemic issue that requires all components to work together cohesively to ensure that the needs of every student are met.
"Finally, my commitment to fostering an environment where every student can thrive propels my candidacy and shapes my vision for our district's future. Together, we can build on our successes and address the challenges that lie ahead."
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Meet the 7 candidates running for the York PA School Board
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But life changes.' Any story about the arc of Bill Essayli's career should probably begin on April 10, 2002. While visiting the Wells Fargo branch where his mother worked, the 17-year-old Essayli witnessed a bank robber leaving the building. As Essayli tells it, he instinctively jumped in his car to follow the suspect, writing down the thief's license number so he could report the vehicle to federal investigators. His actions that day earned him a personal letter from then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, a man who would later go on to investigate Essayli's current boss, who praised the teenager's 'tremendous initiative.' Raised by Lebanese immigrant parents on the western edge of the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, Essayli was long drawn to law enforcement, serving as a volunteer in Corona's police department Explorer program. After becoming the first member of his family to graduate college, Essayli attended Chapman University School of Law, which has been home to prominent conservatives like John Eastman and Hugh Hewitt. Essayli went into private practice before two years as a Riverside County prosecutor and four as an assistant U.S. attorney. In that role he worked on the deadly 2015 shooting and attempted bombing by alleged homegrown extremists in San Bernardino. In 2018, Essayli became directly involved in politics, joining a campaign to repeal a gas-tax increase while mounting his own failed, somewhat moderate, candidacy for the state assembly. Four years later, after district lines were redrawn, Essayli ran again on a tough on crime and conservative school issues platform. He was the first Muslim elected to the California State Assembly, representing a diverse, semi-rural region in a district Trump won by 12 points in 2024. But when the clean-cut Essayli came to Sacramento in 2022, he made little effort to conform to the capital's hobnobby culture and was quite open about how much he detested it. Even fellow Republicans who agreed with his politics disagreed with his tactics and aggressive stance toward Democrats and his own party. His political life, as his friend DeMaio described it, was a 'lonely' one. Upon arriving in the capital he hung the 2002 letter from Mueller on his office wall. Essayli quickly made a name for himself by taking up red-meat conservative causes and authoring bills that would require school staff to notify parents if their children might be transgender and mandate government identification to vote. He raged against the state's Covid-19 restrictions and criticized critical race theory. None of his bills became law, but Essayli distinguished himself on the Assembly floor with his penchant for political theater. His pattern of outlandish outbursts and near-physical altercations were of the sort that largely disappeared from the legislative process in the nineteenth century (Jackson himself once had to be restrained from Essayli after the two clashed on the Assembly floor). Other lawmakers, staff and lobbyists traded accounts of their favorite Essayli episodes. In one, he called the speaker pro tempore a 'fucking liar' on the Assembly floor. In another he banged a fist on his desk in petulant fury, shouting into the void of his muted microphone as state lawmakers looked on. To like-minded conservatives, this presented a vision of how a disruptive, aggressive opposition party should function. DeMaio, who was elected to the Assembly two years after Essayli and has followed in his footsteps, said he showed how an opposition party could 'illustrate how the other side is wrong' even if you don't get 'drinks paid for at the bars.' Essayli wasn't worried about rubbing people the wrong way, according to his former chief of staff Shawn Lewis. On a personal level, he was kind and even funny. But Essayli, according to Lewis, was also driven by 'an unshakable sense of what is right and wrong.' The outbursts were no performance, but rather the outward projections of a true believer's frustrations. 'Bill Essayli sees things as they can and should be, not as they are,' Lewis said. But at least some political observers believe that Essayli's moves were calculated. There are few avenues to power for a hard-right Republican in Democrat-dominated California. Serving as an avatar for the Trump administration's talking points within the state Legislature was one of them. And the performances led to even bigger platforms: regular appearances on Fox News that won him a casual following nationally among the MAGA faithful. 'I think he's a very smart guy,' Anthony Rendon, a former Assembly speaker, said of Essayli. 'There's nothing Bill does that isn't very well thought-out.' In April 2025, Essayli announced that he would be leaving Sacramento to accept an interim appointment as the top federal prosecutor for seven Southern California counties with a population of nearly 20 million people. Elsewhere, Trump sought out personal confidants, longtime political allies and loyal defenders to fill U.S. attorney's offices. In his hometown of New York City, Trump named Jay Clayton, who had served as his appointee atop the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the post. Trump's former personal attorney Alina Habba was named the prosecutor in New Jersey, home to Trump's Bedminster golf course. In Washington, D.C., he has placed conservative legal activist Ed Martin, a former lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants, and Fox News host Jeanine Pirro into powerful prosecutorial positions. Essayli does not have the same direct connection to Trump's circle, but his appointment vindicated the way Essayli had spent his brief time in Sacramento. Upon being named to the post, he made clear he was ready to adopt Trump's ethos. 'I intend to implement the President's mission to restore trust in our justice system and pursue those who dare to cause harm to the United States and the People of our nation,' Essayli said. Newly backed by a small army of lawyers and special agents, Essayli is aiming at many of the same targets that eluded him as a politician. In April, he launched a task force to investigate fraud and corruption within homelessness funding sources administered by California's Democratic officials. In May, he threw his support behind a Justice Department investigation into Title IX violations in the state, alleging that transgender athletes were 'violating women's civil rights.' 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On Monday, Essayli announced that his prosecutors would use social media and video evidence to pursue protesters who threw objects at officers. Yesterday, two protesters were charged with possessing Molotov cocktails, which Essayli said would be punished by up to 10 years in prison. 'I don't care who you are — if you impede federal agents, you will be arrested and prosecuted,' Essayli wrote on X after Huerta's arrest on June 6. Immigrant advocacy and LGBTQ+ rights organizations allege that he intends to use that authority to 'prosecute his political opponents.' 'Bill Essayli spent his short career in the Legislature with a singular agenda: to attack the students and families he was supposed to serve,' said Kristi Hirst, the co-founder of Our Schools USA, an advocacy organization that pushes for LGBTQ-friendly school policies. 'Essayli is not interested in seeking justice.' Those concerns have now manifested in a political campaign called Stop Essayli run by Jacob Daruvala, a former constituent of Essayli's and a local LGBTQ+ advocate. The lobbying effort, which remains something of a hail Mary, is aimed at persuading Sens. Adam Schiff and Padilla to block Essayli's official confirmation, which would rid him of his interim title. If a permanent replacement is not confirmed within 120 days, the federal district court for his jurisdiction would instead appoint someone else to serve in the role until a Senate confirmation is successful. But without the votes to block his path, it is only a delicate historical courtesy, which Schiff and Padilla will have to ask the Senate to respect, that stands between Essayli and a permanent assignment. Daruvala is asking California's senators to withhold their 'blue slips,' a Senate tradition in which committees defer to a nominee's home-state senators for guidance on confirmation. There is something poetic in that question. After Essayli made his name defying the decorum of the California Legislature, it is only decorum that can halt his upward rise. Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.
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