In a way, the two candidates running for the Knox County school board’s 5th District seat have the advantage of timing.

Concerns include crowding, student services and communication.

For the last few decades, the most persistent concern and complaint of parents in Farragut and the surrounding area has been crowding in their schools — particularly the overflowing Farragut Primary and Intermediate buildings.

But even as Republican Lauren Morgan and Democrat Terrye Whitaker have been making their cases to succeed incumbent board member Susan Horn, the school system has been taking a crucial step toward improving that situation.

The board voted last year to purchase 41 acres of property on Boring Road in the heart of Farragut, which will be home to a new K-5 elementary school with a capacity of 1,200. That will relieve pressure on the existing buildings.

Still, even with help on the horizon, ongoing development in and around District 5 seems likely to continue to put pressure on its schools, including its middle and high school facilities.

Horn identifies as a Republican even though she never ran as one — school board races were still nonpartisan when she ran in 2016 and 2020. But she has been among the more conservative voices on the board, raising concerns about public health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently about materials in school libraries.

That seemingly puts her in line with the political personality of the district, which votes strongly Republican in most local, state and national elections. It is also represented on County Commission by a Republican, incumbent John Schoonmaker. 

Morgan presents herself as a successor to Horn, following in her footsteps as an engaged parent with conservative values. Whitaker, whose daughter graduated from Farragut High School in 2005, has been less directly involved with schools in recent years. But she said she is running to give voters in the district a choice.

Morgan’s political advantage carries over to fundraising, with a reported $30,950 through the end of March. Contributors include multiple members of the Haslam family and other major Republican donors. She had $21,910 on hand. Whitaker reported just $3,540 raised through the first quarter, with $1,339 on hand.

Here’s a look at the two contenders.

Lauren Morgan

Morgan is running for office not far from where she grew up in West Knoxville. She attended Knox County Schools from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade, graduating from Bearden High School and then studying nutrition at the University of Tennessee.

After earning her degree, she did a dietetic internship at the University of Maryland and spent the next few years working as a clinical dietitian in the Washington, D.C., area. In the course of her work, she realized that what she actually enjoyed most was communicating and sharing information with people.

“That's a piece that I have carried with me is disseminating the information, whatever it may be, to the people who need it most,” she said in an interview at the Summer Moon coffee shop in Farragut. “So while I'm not a practicing dietitian anymore, I love communication.”

She said that’s a strength she would bring to a seat on the school board, providing ongoing streams of information to parents and residents about what’s going on in the district.

Morgan and her husband, Tommy, moved back to Knoxville after a few years in the D.C. area and have lived in District 5 for the past 12 years. He works as a nuclear engineer in Oak Ridge. They have three children in the Farragut public schools, entering grades 3, 6 and 7 next month.

“I've got a good perspective of what it's like as a mom of three kids in Knox County Schools, and as someone who grew up in Knox County and a product of Knox County Schools,” Morgan said.

She also founded and runs a nonprofit called Project Gabriel, which provides support to parents grieving the loss of a child to miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death. It arose from Morgan’s own experience — her second son died shortly after being born with the chromosomal disorder Trisomy 18.

“The thing that I found when we were going through that was I felt like we were the only people to ever experience this,” she said. “And then I realized it is all around us, whether miscarriage, stillbirth or infant loss, because it is so prevalent. It’s so common, (but) it’s such a taboo thing that nobody talks about. So I realized we need to do this in community, we need to do this together instead of people being isolated in these significant losses.”

Project Gabriel runs a monthly support group and organizes social occasions where people can be around others who understand what they’re going through. It also sends people cards and notes on significant dates, “just trying to be a positive, like, ‘Hey we’re there with you in this,” Morgan said.

She has served on the boards of parent-teacher organizations at her children’s schools, which she said has given her some insights into how they function. 

“I've gotten a good look at things kind of on the inside, I've been able to have good relationships with teachers and administrators and kind of gauge what it's like from their perspectives,” she said.

When she heard that Horn wasn’t planning to run again after serving two four-year terms, she thought that it was a good opportunity to take her engagement to a higher level. 

“Seeing the day to day of what’s going on in my kids’ lives and then at the larger scale of how the school board impacts that, I couldn’t sit by and not jump in,” Morgan said. “I am someone who does want to make a difference.”

She has had both positive and negative experiences as a parent, in some cases seeing how the overcrowding in schools was creating difficult situations for her children. She recounts a story of her daughter being assigned to a learning intervention group that ended up having to meet in essentially a closet, with the kids sitting on the floor, because there was nowhere else for them to go. Another time, she was shocked when her son told her his classroom didn’t have enough clipboards for students to use for an assignment.

“I want to make sure that our kids do have what they need to be successful, that our teachers and staff have what they need to be successful,” she said. “I think those are basic things to make sure that we have in place for our kids at school.”

Morgan also has experience as a parent of children with special needs — one who struggles with learning and another who is gifted. She said she appreciated Superintendent Jon Rysewyk’s appointment of a parent-led special education task force and was grateful for the group’s work.

“I do understand the frustration of the parents who have been coming back to the meetings saying, hey, it's been six months, it's been however many months, and nothing's happened,” she said. “I do get that frustration, because I am a parent who had to advocate very fiercely for one of my kids to receive the services that she needed.”

She said as a board member she would work to ensure the district follows through on the changes recommended by the task force and adopted in a board resolution last year.

She is also concerned about pay for teachers and staff. She said almost every year she hears from one of her children’s teachers that they’re leaving Knox County for another district or leaving education altogether. “They’re good teachers, they are the people that we want educating our children,” she said. “So I think it is critical that we do continue to increase teacher and support staff pay.”

On school vouchers, she emphasized that decisions will be made at the state level and local school boards don’t have much say. She said that the best response for local districts will be to do everything they can to meet the needs of their students.

“If we're doing that, and we're successful at that, then the vouchers aren't even an issue,” Morgan said. But, she added, “I do think that parents know what’s best for their child. And I think that when our schools are not able to meet the needs of our kids, that parents should have the choice in where their kids go to school.”

Terrye Whitaker

Whitaker hasn’t run for office before, but she has been politically involved with the Democratic Party, both here and in the past when she and her husband lived in Colorado.

“I worked for the (Colorado) state Senate for a couple of years, and helped elect Democratic candidates in Colorado,” she said during an interview at the (since shuttered) Honeybee Coffee location in Farragut. “I did a lot of door-knocking for them. I was an officer in the county party for a couple of years.”

When they moved back to Knox County in 2022 after a dozen years away, Whitaker took her newfound set of experience and skills and got in touch with the local party. 

“I had no intentions of running for office when we moved back,” Whitaker said. “I mean, my politics are definitely different from what you perceive as the majority of this state.”

But not long after she connected with the Knox County party, she said, “They started saying, we need to have people who are Democrats to run for office.”

Running for school board was an obvious pick for Whitaker. She has been bothered by a lot of what she’s seen since returning to Tennessee, and she wanted to present another vision.

“The school board should not be a partisan race, but the Legislature in its infinite wisdom evidently changed that,” she said. “And then seeing all of these horrendous school board meetings, where Moms for Liberty were just turning it into a free for all, I went, ‘There needs to be someone to run.’”

Whitaker has a varied resumé that has landed her in Knox County multiple times over the past 40 years. She grew up in East Texas and graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. She was the only one of her family to leave Texas, as she and her husband — who will celebrate their 51st anniversary this year — moved several times because of his work.

The first time a move brought them to East Tennessee was in 1981, when her husband went to work for a company in Oak Ridge. Whitaker worked for a time for the 1982 World’s Fair. But after a few years, an opportunity at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory took them to Washington state, where they both worked as Department of Energy contractors. 

A subsequent move returned them to Knox County, where their daughter attended school and graduated from Farragut High in 2005. Whitaker found various education-related jobs, including working at Huntington Learning Center and substitute teaching at Farragut and Webb schools. In 2010, another shift took Whitaker and her husband to Colorado for a dozen years until her husband retired. They moved back here to be close to their daughter.

Whitaker said her experiences as a Knox County Schools parent were positive. But she has friends who had difficulty getting needs met for their children.

“If you’re not willing to advocate, it seems like a lot of things fall through the cracks,” she said. “Part of it, I think, is not knowing where to go. And in some cases not even knowing what questions to ask.”

She added, “And I would hope that the board members for their district would be one of several who would be advocating for the kids and for the teachers.”

She is concerned about working conditions for school employees. While knocking on doors, she said she met a Knox County teacher who said that her classroom hadn’t been cleaned by a custodian all year, because the school was short-staffed. (Knox County has struggled with custodial vacancies.)

While she thought the rollout of the district’s new salary schedules was “atrocious,” with many staff members complaining about a lack of clarity and communication, Whitaker said she supported the increased pay it brought to most employees.

But, she said, higher salaries aren’t enough.

“When you have to be the teacher, the counselor, the mother figure, the custodian, all the things, you put too much on a teacher's back,” she said. “When they don't get their planning periods, because they're filling in for another teacher. This is why teachers are leaving. They’re burned out.”

She is opposed to vouchers, which she believes will pull money away from schools and students that need resources the most. She was frustrated by the Knox County school board’s refusal to speak up against Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher proposal. Board Chair Betsy Henderson and Vice Chair Steve Triplett both opposed an anti-voucher resolution, along with other Republican members of the board.

“There’s nothing we can do, other than sign a freakin’ resolution against them,” Whitaker said. “And every time I think about that it makes me want to scream at Ms. Henderson and Mr. Triplett. Because to me, that is not advocating for what you’re doing.”

She said she has heard some concerns about Rysewyk’s administration, including its communication with board members. But she is willing to give the superintendent the benefit of the doubt and see how his restructuring of the district administration works out.

“Having come out of the school system, he has pretty good knowledge of the school system here,” she said. “So that’s advantageous.”

And while she is running as a strong Democrat, she said it is important for all elected officials to remember that they represent everyone in their district, not just the ones who voted for them.

“No matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent, you still represent the same people,” she said. “They’re going to have the same issues regardless of your politics. So you need to be listening to what their issues are, and try to work together to resolve them.”