While the incumbents appear to have secured their seats for another term, at least two new faces will be joining the Howard County school board, according to unofficial election results.

Newcomers Andre Gao and Andrea Chamblee hold razor-thin leads for two councilmanic district seats, with all precincts reporting. School board veterans Jen Mallo and Antonia Watts took the lead in their districts, though Mallo’s lead is less than 400 votes.

Incumbent Jolene Mosley ran unopposed.

The two at-large members, who are elected countywide, are not up for reelection until 2026. The current student member of the board, James Obasiolu, a senior at Atholton High School, is the last seat on the eight-member board.

The school board has had a transformative 2024 year, from naming a new superintendent to overcoming a contentious school budget season to deflecting a push to restrict the content of school library books. A newer hot button topic is the ongoing debate over students’ access to cellphones.

District 1

Andre Gao, 64, campaigned for priorities like strengthening the school system’s operating budget and funding school construction. He holds 49.85% of votes in District 1, according to unofficial election results.

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Meg Ricks, 43, trails closely with 49.63% of votes — only 56 fewer votes than Gao.

Dawn Popp, campaign manager for Ricks, said the campaign is still feeling hopeful.

“We definitely don’t think this is the end,” Popp said Tuesday night. “Looking at the numbers right now its effectively a tie.”

Popp said it’s her understanding that there are over 3,000 mail-in ballots to be counted and those that have been have “skewed toward Meg and we hope that continues.”

Gao did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.

Gao and Ricks aligned in wanting students to silence their cellphones during class, but differed on the push to restrict content in school libraries. Ricks stands firmly against allowing a single person or group to dictate what students can and cannot read, while Gao never took a firm position, only saying “we need to select material carefully,” at a League of Women Voters spring candidate forum.

Ricks, who ran unsuccessfully for an at-large seat (elected countywide) on the school board in 2022, told The Banner she wants to see the school system budget prioritize retaining great teachers with competitive pay, reducing class sizes, and meeting the requirements of Maryland’s billion-dollar education reform plan, the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

Husband and wife Seth and Ianna Martin voted for Meg Ricks. The Ellicott City couple voted for Ricks because she’s known for advocating for school safety and has plans to address overdevelopment and overcrowding in schools.

District 2

Antonia Watts leads newcomer Larry Doyle, 74, with 66% of votes.

Watts, 43, has served on the school board since 2020.

In her second term, she plans to prioritize student achievement, fiscal responsibility, and teacher recruitment, retention and diversity.

In response to efforts by Moms for Liberty to remove certain content from school libraries, Watts told The Banner, “All children deserve to see themselves and their friends in instructional materials and in media center books.”.

Watts also supports students silencing their phones for the entirety of a school day.

Doyle’s top campaign priorities were school safety, offering competitive teacher salaries and “the continued struggles of many minority students and boys in particular,” according to his website.

He is against phones in the classroom, and while he is usually against censorship, he supports some restrictions on school library books.

“In many cases, educators have gone too far in their offerings and when this happens, the community has the right to remove or ban certain books,” Doyle said in an email.

District 3

Jolene Mosley has served on the Board of Education since 2020. Mosley did not respond to emails from The Banner during the election cycle.

She was endorsed by the Howard County Young Democrats, the African American Coalition of Howard County and the Howard Progressive Project.

She received 97% of the votes in District 3, with 2.5% going to write-in candidates.

District 4

Current school board chair Jen Mallo, 55, leads newcomer Julie Kaplan, 52. Mallo has 50.27% of votes to Kaplan’s 48.93%.

Mallo was first elected to the board in 2018 for a two-year term and then was reelected in 2020 for a four-year term.

Mallo’s campaign priorities were removing cellphones from classrooms, ensuring special education students are supported and fully implementing the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

Mallo is against campaigns to restrict content in school libraries, saying that the act is a restriction on free speech.

On the topic of restricting school library content, Kaplan told The Banner those decisions should be made with caution, considering age appropriateness, community input and academic freedom.

Removing cellphones from classrooms creates healthier environments, Kaplan said.

Kaplan’s said her priority is to “restore pragmatic budgeting,” deliver top-ranked schools to students, and have school environments be psychological and physically safe for students.

Reservoir High senior Armaan Malhotra, 18, cast his vote for the first time in the high school gym Tuesday evening. He voted for Kaplan.

Trevor Greene, the president of the board of directors of the Howard County Jewish Advocacy Group, urged residents to vote for Kaplan outside River Hill High.

”Julie has shown herself to not be a candidate just for the Jewish people, but for all people,” Greene said. “And she’s really running for the right reasons.”

Greene said Kaplan’s opponent, Jen Mallo, has shown that she understands antisemitism, and he’s hopeful that whoever wins can help improve the schools.

Denise Smith voted for Mallo because she heard from her neighbors about all the good Mallo has done on the school board for the last six years. As a parent of two students in the school system, that was important to Smith.

District 5

Andrea Chamblee, 63, is just barely leading her opponent, former Del. Trent Kittleman, 79. Chamblee holds 49.84% of votes, while Kittleman has 49.64%. Chamblee leads by just 62 votes.

Lizz Hammon, Chamblee’s campaign manager, said Tuesday night “we are feeling fantastic regardless of what happens because we were told from the very beginning ‘Don’t bother, you will never be able to win in District 5.’”

Hammon said there are over 5,000 mall-in ballots left to count and given Chamblee’s “margin on the mail-ins is enormous … we are feeling really, really good about the mail-in ballots.”

Kittleman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.

Chamblee is the widow of John McNamara, a sports writer and editor, who was murdered in the 2018 Annapolis Capital Gazette shooting.

Among Chamblee’s top priorities are limiting redistricting, which she said should be done “only as a response to capacity issues.” Chamblee’s other priorities include the school system being fiscally responsible and to tackle its laundry list of decaying school buildings with renovations and newly built schools, she said on her campaign website.

Chamblee characterizes the campaign to ban books in schools as “gratuitous” and does not support it. Chamblee told The Banner that book bans are primarily motivated by bigotry.

While Chamblee and Kittleman agreed on students not having cellphones during the school day, they didn’t align on much else.

Kittleman’s top priorities include age-appropriate education, common-sense student safety and alternative education options — such as charter schools and homeschooling — as outlined on her campaign website. Kittleman supports having school resource officers in all schools; they’re currently only in high schools.

Wanting a book removed from the library is not banning a book, Kittleman told The Banner.

Kittleman told The Banner she “supports a parent’s right to request a book be removed from school libraries.” She said it is not an unreasonable ask for “pornography” to be removed from school libraries.

Kittleman served in the Maryland House of Delegates for about eight years. She is the widow of state Sen. Robert H. Kittleman.

Voter Steve Hartong supported Kittleman. “I’ve known for her a long time, and I think she brings a lot of insight, experience and common sense,” Hartong said outside Centennial High School an hour before the polls closed. “She’s a very intelligent person.”

Lail Kleinman, 41, voted for Chamblee because of her stance on addressing gun violence in schools. He also disliked Kittleman’s association with Moms for Liberty

Banner reporters Maya Lora and Abby Zimmardi contributed to this report.