Knox County’s District 3 is a bit hard to describe geographically, taking in an irregular slice of northwest territory from Henson Road along the Middlebrook Pike corridor through Cedar Bluff all the way past Pellissippi Parkway.

The conservative activist group Moms for Liberty has a presence in the race.

It includes both city and suburban neighborhoods and is the third-most racially diverse of the county's nine districts, with a racial minority population of 23 percent in the 2020 Census.

On the Board of Education, it is currently represented by Daniel Watson, who is finishing his first term and decided not to seek reelection. Watson, executive director of the nonprofit Restoration House, is an interesting figure on the board. He was elected in 2020, while the body was still nonpartisan, and he had substantial backing from traditional Republican donors.

Perhaps to the surprise of some of those donors, he has emerged as one of the more progressive voices on the board, particularly around issues of economic and racial justice. (Maybe this shouldn’t have been unanticipated from someone who has a racially mixed family and co-founded and runs an organization that serves low-income single-parent families.)

As the board has shifted along partisan lines, with a five-member Republican majority, Watson has remained a self-declared independent and has often voted with a four-member Democratic/independent minority. When he was considering a reelection bid, he said he would only run as an independent.

But with him out of the race, the seat will turn more partisan in one direction or another. Two Republicans, Angie Goethert and Robert Daspit, are contending for the nomination in the March 5 primary. The winner will face Democrat Patricia Fontenot-Ridley, a veteran teacher who is retiring this year.

On the Republican side, Goethert — a parent and founding chair of the local chapter of the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty — appears to have consolidated the establishment Republican support that was behind Watson in the 2020 election.

She has reported contributions from multiple members of the Haslam family, along with former school board member Doug Harris, former state Rep. Martin Daniel, and Scott Henderson, the husband of school board Chair Betsy Henderson. Goethert reported a total of $19,473.50 raised through Jan. 15.

That substantially outpaces Daspit, an Air Force veteran and certified teacher and coach with experience in Knox County schools. He reported raising $1,434, more than a third of it in self-donations.

But Daspit has one interesting force on his side: The Knox County chapter of Moms for Liberty, with which Goethert is no longer involved, endorsed him on Tuesday.

We will detail Fontenot-Ridley’s background and priorities ahead of the Aug. 1 general election. But for now, here’s a look at the two Republican contenders. 

Robert Daspit

Daspit was born and grew up in Houma, La., a small city about 60 miles west of New Orleans. He attended Nicholls State University in Louisiana on a football scholarship, and had hopes of playing in the National Football League.

“I ended up walking on, I was a contracted free agent for the New Orleans Saints for nine weeks, and then I got dismissed,” he said. He had earned a teaching degree, so he went ahead and got certified to teach, working as a history teacher and coach before enlisting in the Air Force.

After eight years in uniform, which included some assistant coaching for the Air Force Academy football team, he left the service. He and his wife ended up moving to Knoxville in 1984 — “We’d never been in Knoxville before, we love it here” — and Daspit went into medical sales.

He said he rose to become vice president of sales and marketing for “a pretty good-sized medical company,” and retired six years ago. With time on his hands, he turned back to teaching, earning his Tennessee license with help from the Troops to Teachers program.

Since then, he has taught and/or substituted at Knox County schools from Austin-East to Powell, along with a year as a physical education teacher in Smith County.

Some of the impetus for his school board run came from what he’s seen up close in local schools, as a teacher, parent and grandparent.

“I’ve lived in this district for 35 years,” Daspit said. “My two daughters went to school here. My grandson goes to Bearden High School.”

Specifically, he thinks the school board needs more representation from people with classroom experience.

“I've talked to teachers and I've been around teachers a lot,” he said. “And it just felt like this is a time for me to run and to do something.”

He believes the district needs to focus on better pay and benefits for employees from teachers to custodians, in order to fill persistent job vacancies and add more staff where needed. But, as he made clear at a candidate forum on Jan. 30, he does not favor higher taxes to meet those needs.

“I will not vote for a tax increase, nor do I think we need one,” he said. “We have $660 million allocated to the schools. That’s plenty of money to do everything we need to do with our schools. We need to change some of the ways that we're doing business.”

One area that he thinks needs particular attention is student discipline. He is opposed to the district’s move toward restorative practices for students who disrupt class or otherwise misbehave. The restorative approach is supposed to help students understand the impacts of their actions and make appropriate redress, but Daspit thinks it mostly gives students a sense of impunity.

“I propose eliminating the RLC (Restorative Learning Center) programs,” he said. “I've been around it for a while, I've been involved with it for a while. The ISS (in-school suspension) program, which we all were familiar with, is what we need to go back to.”

In the 3rd District specifically, Daspit sees needs for infrastructure improvements at many of its aging facilities: Bearden Middle, Bearden High, the Cedar Bluff schools. He is also focused on school safety, ensuring there are adequate security and law enforcement officers available, and even crossing guards.

Daspit said he thinks that overall, Superintendent Jon Rysewyk has “done a great job,” but he said he is waiting to see the actual impact of some of the changes Rysewyk has put in place, like a new regional administrative structure and the 865 Academy career-track programs in high schools.

“If we’re going to put the academy model out there and use it, what is the short-term effect and long-term effectiveness?” he asked. “For the students, for the parents, for the teachers, how is this going to affect them? I haven’t seen any of this, and I haven’t even heard about it all that much.”

He is not opposed to Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal for statewide school vouchers, but he thinks the school system needs to think practically about its likely impacts. His coaching background leads him to suspect private schools will see it as a chance to recruit young athletes.

“This is what’s going to happen,” Daspit said. “‘My kid wants to go to Catholic because Catholic’s got a good football team.’ Well, Catholic’s going to drop their tuition down (to the voucher amount) to get that kid in. … So we have to have a plan here locally and communicate with the folks in Nashville to talk about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.”

He shares the concerns raised by Moms for Liberty about some materials in school libraries. He said the district needs to take a closer look at such complaints.

“You can’t tell me it’s not there,” he said. “I’ve seen it in the schools I’ve taught at. I’ve been in the libraries, I’ve seen stuff there and it’s bad. That’s not what our kids need.”

That stance helped earn him the endorsement of the Moms for Liberty chapter, which in recent months has been petitioning the school board and administration to remove and restrict books from school libraries.

In announcing their endorsement, local chapter Chair Sheri Super posted on Facebook, “We also present Robert with the Red, White & True Award for his support of parental rights, the purging of inappropriate materials in schools, a forensic audit of KCS finances and the removal of the ineffective Restorative Practices discipline program.”

Overall, Daspit promised to be a no-nonsense advocate for teachers, students and parents alike. “If we can’t stand up and make the big decisions, and the tough decisions, we’re not going to have successful schools in our county. And I don’t want that to happen.”

Angie Goethert

Goethert was already an involved parent before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, in the usual non-activist ways. Her son and daughter are both graduates of Hardin Valley Academy.

“When they were in school, I was always room mom and I've been PTA president and done those things,” she said. “But I always felt like I was advocating for kids and parents. I just thought I was in the classroom volunteering and helping the teachers and doing those kinds of things — but I would ask a lot of questions.”

When the pandemic hit with all its attendant disruptions in the spring of 2020, as her son was preparing to graduate from high school, she started having a lot more questions.

Goethert, 56, grew up in Manchester, Tenn. She came to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee, and never left. 

“I fell in love with Knoxville and my husband, John,” she said. “And we made this our home.”

She earned a degree in retail management from UT and worked in a series of mostly now-departed stores, starting with Miller’s. Later, she ran a UT-themed gift shop on Cumberland Avenue, selling fraternity, sorority and general Vol-themed merchandise.

As school closures disrupted her son’s final months of school and graduation — a time her children referred to as “the wheels falling off the bus” — and then carried over into the next school year with mandatory masking and quarantining, Goethert found herself connecting with other parents who felt railroaded by state and county health mandates.

“I kind of felt like parents didn’t know that they could speak up,” said Goethert, who became a regular presence at school board and County Commission meetings, one of a burgeoning number of anti-mandate activists. “No matter what anybody thinks or sees or says about what I said, the only thing I asked for was for it to be a parent's decision about what was happening. I did not believe anybody needed to tell anybody what to do.”

She emphasizes that — unlike some people during the fiery public forums of those months — she did not yell or call anyone names. Instead, she became the founding chair of a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, which formed in Florida in 2021.

The organization has since gone on to fame or notoriety, depending on your political perspective. On the right, activists and politicians have heralded it as a grassroots effort by conservative parents to fight against public health restrictions and against school materials that discuss issues of race, gender and sexuality in terms they find offensive.

On the left, the Southern Poverty Law Center has called it an “extremist group” that promotes views that it characterizes as “antigovernment and conspiracy propagandist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender identity, and anti-inclusive curriculum.” The group has also faced pushback from local school boards, controversies including one chapter quoting Adolf Hitler, and a sex and rape scandal involving one of its founding members in Florida.

Goethert said that during her time with the group, it mostly provided organizing information and advice on how parents could be effective advocates.

“More than anything, the national founders of Moms for Liberty were helping other parents figure out how to speak at meetings, and how to do it the right way,” she said. “You know, how to go in there and educate and inform. I'm not about the screaming. I'm just not. And I believe that if you sit down and talk to people, then you agree on more than you disagree on.”

When a federal judge imposed a continued mask mandate on Knox County schools for most of the 2021-22 school year, Goethert was among the parents looking for ways to push back on it. She felt that the significant difficulties that mask wearing imposed on some students were being ignored in the judge’s order to protect vulnerable students with disabilities.

She helped form another group, Unmask Knox County Kids, which filed its own lawsuit — with donations from County Mayor Glenn Jacobs and state Rep. Jason Zachary, among others — seeking relief from the courts. For need of a defendant, that suit was filed against the school board itself. When the board settled the original suit that had produced the mask mandate, Goethert’s group’s suit was dismissed as a matter of course. (Albeit acidly, with a judge calling it “meritless” and “a political orchestration.”)

Goethert said at this point, it’s hard to know whether the group’s efforts had any impact on the case eventually being settled and the mandate lifted. It was part of a persistent chorus of voices protesting the mandate, which was joined by school board members as well as Jacobs and other local Republican officials.

“I don’t know for sure, and I don’t think any of us will ever know for sure,” she said. “But everything did seem to all of a sudden move when that happened.”

With that issue settled, Goethert said she drifted away from Moms for Liberty. In her mind, she said, the group’s primary local purpose was to fight the health mandates. She remained engaged and a regular presence at school board meetings, and supported the selection of Jon Rysewyk as superintendent in 2022. Rysewyk named her as a community representative for his transition team after he was hired.

“The thing that I appreciate about Jon is his willingness to constantly bring everything back to kids,” she said. “Anytime I've been around him, it's like, ‘Is that what's best for kids?’”

She said she has heard positive feedback from teachers and administrators about the degree of decision-making Rysewyk has delegated to the building level. “I’ve talked to several people who feel like their principals are the adults in the room, and they’re not afraid to take the reins of those schools,” Goethert said. ”Some of this is from teachers who have come to work here from other counties.”

Her own priorities on the board would be continuing the district’s focus on literacy skills, career and technical education, fine arts, and teacher salaries. Of the arts, she said that her daughter benefited tremendously from music education. She is now a music student at Tennessee Tech.

“Her high school experience was not what we would want it to be, for a hundred reasons,” Goethert said, referring to the pandemic disruptions. “Because so much was taken from her where she couldn’t do things normally. And music is what saved her. It was what she could go to.”

As for her relations with the current leadership of Moms for Liberty, Goethert is noncommittal. “I haven’t done anything with Moms for Liberty for two years, so I don’t know what goes on now,” she said.

She didn’t offer an opinion on the local chapter’s recent efforts to challenge school library materials, suggesting that the state Legislature is a better avenue for anyone seeking that kind of authority. “If the state law changes, then I’m sure Knox County’s policy will change,” she said.

Goethert said that her own children grew up in a rich reading environment. “We laugh about it, we probably have 2,000 books in our living room,” she said. “We are a dying breed. This doesn’t happen anymore. But our kids picked up on that.”