The Board of Education election in Knox County’s 3rd District brings together two candidates with quite different backgrounds and perspectives when it comes to public education.

Republican donors have given Goethert a fundraising edge, but Fontenot-Ridley didn't have to fight a primary.

The Republican, Angie Goethert, is a parent of recent Knox County Schools graduates and was a founder of the local chapter of the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty — which has, among other things, raised questions and concerns about the motives and trustworthiness of Knox County teachers.

The Democrat, Patricia Fontenot-Ridley, is one of those teachers — or was until last month, when she retired after 30 years of teaching physical education in county schools. She believes that having voices on the board with educational experience is important to good governance of the district.

But of course, neither is as mono-dimensional as those descriptions might make them sound. Goethert is no longer involved with Moms for Liberty — and wasn’t even endorsed by the group during the Republican primary in March — and argues strongly for better pay for Knox County teachers. She defeated a Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidate, Robert Daspit, in the primary.

Fontenot-Ridley, meanwhile, knows the district as not only an employee but an involved parent. Her son, now grown, attended Knox County Schools throughout his K-12 career.

The diverse 3rd District stretches from urban neighborhoods west of downtown through Cedar Bluff all the way to Lovell Road. It is a traditionally Republican area, although in the most recent race in the district — for County Commission in 2022 — GOP candidate Gina Oster defeated Democrat Stuart Hohl by fewer than 90 votes.

Whichever candidate wins the school board race will affect the partisan makeup of the board one way or another. The board is currently made up of five Republicans, two Democrats and two independents. One of the independents, Daniel Watson, is the District 3 incumbent. He decided not to run for a second term in order to devote more time to a pre-school that he and his wife recently started.

At least through the first three months of the year, deep Republican pockets gave Goethert a large fundraising edge, with more than three times the donations of her opponent. She reported raising $25,502 through the end of March, from contributors including multiple members of the Haslam family and other GOP heavy hitters like construction magnates Raja Jubran and Wes Stowers. She had $1,340 on hand. 

Fontenot-Ridley had raised $7,351, with supporters including Hohl (who is now the county Democratic Party chair), City Councilwoman Lauren Rider and philanthropist and developer Philip Lawson. But with no competitive primary to worry about, she actually reported more cash on hand than Goethert at that point, with $3,974.

Here’s a look at the two contenders. (The profile of Goethert is updated from our primary race coverage.)

Patricia Fontenot-Ridley

Fontenot-Ridley has spent nearly all of her life in Knox County Schools and in the 3rd District. She grew up in the Cedar Bluff area and attended Cedar Bluff elementary and middle schools, and graduated from Farragut High School.

She was an avid athlete, playing volleyball, softball and basketball. She also grew up in a family full of teachers — her mother was an art teacher, two of her sisters are piano teachers, two of her cousins are educators, and even her father took up teaching at Pellissippi State Community College after spending 30 years as an electrical engineer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

So when Fontenot-Ridley attended Tennessee Technical University, she decided to combine her interests with the family vocation. “I always loved sports, so I thought physical education would be a pretty good fit,” she said.

After graduating from TTU in 1990, she initially taught part-time in Anderson County while she was pregnant with her son and during his first few years. In 1993, she took a full–time position with Knox County, and remained there until her retirement this spring.

She initially taught for eight years at Vine Middle School, and then the next 22 years at Belle Morris Elementary. Her son, meanwhile, attended Cedar Bluff Middle and Bearden High, giving Fontenot-Ridley up-close experience with both urban and suburban schools.

Some teachers would be ready to take a break from thinking about education after retirement, but Fontenot-Ridley said that when a friend suggested she think about running it took her only a few days to decide to do it.

She said she thinks having educators’ perspectives represented on the board is important. After a brief period about eight years ago when six of the nine Knox County school board members had experience working in schools, there is now only one (Jennifer Owen, who is seeking reelection in the 2nd District).

“People say that there's a teacher shortage, and we had two teachers at Belle Morris that left halfway through the year for different reasons,” Fontenot-Ridley said. “But I think it's more of a teacher retention problem, because even a lot of seasoned teachers are so dissatisfied with what they have to do in addition to instruction. It's pretty frustrating.”

As a longtime elementary school instructor, she is especially concerned about the recent state law that imposes various requirements and the threat of being held back on third- and fourth-grade students who don’t score high enough on state reading tests.

“That’s a lot of pressure for an 8-year-old, a 9-year-old to go through,” she said. “So I think that situation is pretty unfair. And the teachers are worried, because they want their students to succeed, and so there's a lot of pressure on them, too.”

Fontenot-Ridley said she is glad that many teachers and other school employees are receiving sizable raises in the coming year because of the adoption of a new salary schedule (based on a consultant’s study of comparable market rates). But she has also heard from some who are receiving less than they expected, and others who are confused about the entire pay scale.

“This is like, ‘If you’re in this group and this group, you’re going to get this, but if you’re in that group, you’re going to get that,’ and it’s just confusing at best,” she said. “I think the whole figuring out who gets what could have been a lot less complicated.”

She said she was glad to see Superintendent Jon Rysewyk say he didn’t see any need to take advantage of a new state law that would allow school employees to carry guns at work. But she’s been disappointed by his and the school board’s equivocation on Gov. Bill Lee’s efforts to create a statewide system of school vouchers.

“I am extremely not a fan of vouchers,” Fontenot-Ridley said. She noted that both schools she taught in were Title I schools, meaning they have high percentages of low-income families — the kind of families that Lee and other voucher advocates say could benefit from a state-funded check to pay for private school tuition. She doubts they actually would.

“If they get a $7,000 voucher, they have an almost impossible way to make up the rest of the money that they would have to pay,” she said. Instead, she said, she suspects the biggest beneficiaries of the entitlement program would be affluent families who already send their children to private schools: “It’s a way for people to get a $7,000 discount on their kids’ education.”

She is also skeptical of calls from conservative groups like Moms for Liberty to remove books from school libraries. “Censorship is pretty serious, I don’t like censorship at all,” she said “I think our librarians and our teachers know what they’re doing. Our librarian knows every child by name, and she knows what they like to read, and she's very in tune with what would be appropriate for them and what would not be appropriate for them.”

When Fontenot-Ridley pulled a nominating petition last fall, she initially intended to run as an independent. But she said she quickly realized that she didn’t know anything about running a political campaign, and that support from an established party infrastructure would be a big help.

Choosing one wasn’t hard. “I’ve always identified as a Democrat,” she said. “I look at everything, the candidates and the races, but pretty much most of the time, (Democrats) align with what my beliefs are.”

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.”

Her engagement led her to becoming the founding chair of a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, which formed in Florida in 2021. The organization, which has deep connections to the Republican Party, 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.”

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 helped form another group, Unmask Knox County Kids. It filed its own lawsuit seeking relief from the courts. 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.”)

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.”