When Betsy Henderson decided to run for Knox County mayor, the District 6 seat on the Board of Education opened up.

District 6 includes fast-growing Hardin Valley and has been a Republican stronghold.

Private-school teacher Lee Ann Eaves and Hardin Valley Academy booster Kevin Crateau are squaring off in the Republican primary to run for the post. Thierry Sommer’s name is also on the ballot, but he stopped actively campaigning and urged his supporters to switch their allegiance to Eaves.

The winner faces Cadence Collins, who is unopposed in the Democratic primary, in the general election.

The Northwest Knox County district includes fast-growing Hardin Valley and Karns but also dips into the Norwood and Pleasant Ridge areas inside the Knoxville city limits.

The district is solidly red. Henderson, a Republican, won the school-board seat in the 2022 general election with 59.5 percent of the vote. In 2024, Republican County Commissioner Terry Hill won reelection with 58.7 percent of the vote (she was unopposed in 2020). The district makes up the bulk of the 89th state House District, where Republican state Rep. Justin Lafferty has been elected four times with shares of the vote ranging from 64 percent to 70.1 percent.

Eaves has raised a little more than twice as much money as Crateau — $15,940 to $7,363. Crateau is largely self-financing his campaign (though Hill, who also previously held the district’s school-board seat, is a contributor), while Eaves has received donations from several members of the Haslam family and Knox Liberty Organization, a right-leaning political group founded by Eaves consultant Erik Wiatr.

Kevin Crateau

Crateau has been active in the schools in Hardin Valley for two decades, and he’s been the president of the Hardin Valley Academy Foundation for the past eight years. He’s also on the board of the Karns Fire Department.

“Anybody who knows me knows that I’ve been very involved in my community, always stepping up to do something,” he said. 

Crateau said he’s been steeped in education issues for more than 20 years. His wife was a teacher at Hardin Valley Academy and now is a principal at Bearden Middle School. 

He got more involved when he, now-County Commissioner Kim Frazier and another parent successfully pushed for the construction of Hardin Valley Middle School. He’s president of the Hardin Valley Academy Foundation, which has raised about $120,000 for professional development for teachers, technology, facilities and other needs.

Crateau said he wants to work for schools throughout the district.

“It’s a long district with three really distinct groups (Hardin Valley, Karns and Northwest Knoxville). They really just want to be recognized by their board rep for the accomplishments of their students and their teachers,” he said. “They want to be heard. They want a board rep who’s going to listen, who’s going to reply with an email (and) acknowledge some input from a constituent.”

Crateau said the rapid population growth in Northwest Knoxville will continue to present challenges to the schools in the area.

“The growth is not stopping,” he said. “Overcrowding, transportation issues, traffic around the schools are some of the big things.”

Systemwide, he said, the 865 Academies are working well and should be expanded into middle schools.

“Allowing students to go through that, recognizing their tendencies, their skill sets, and allowing them to just have a better vision of where they can go beyond their high school education, whether it’s post-secondary education or straight to employment or enlistment … they have a prescriptive approach to making sure that we do things that are tailored to individual students and their skills.”

Special education should also be a focus, Crateau said, as it’s the issue he’s heard the most about from teachers, administrators and parents. 

“We’ve got a growing amount of students that are on IEPs (Individualized Education Programs), and we have growing caseloads for our special-ed coordinators and our case managers,” he said.

Crateau said teaching assistants working with the most highly specialized needs students make an average of only about $30,000 a year and should be paid more.

“The administrators out there, including my wife, can’t say enough about how great they are and how vital they are to making the special-ed offerings in each school work for each student,” he said.

Crateau, 49, grew up primarily north of the Ohio River — Ohio, Michigan and Massachusetts — and “married into Tennessee,” he said. He earned a marketing degree, with an emphasis in sports marketing, from Ohio University in 1998. He and his wife moved to Knox County 23 years ago and have three children. He works in marketing for Regions Bank.

He said his banking background would be an asset for the board.

“I’ve been dealing with multimillion-dollar budgets for 25 years,” he said, noting that he’s had to make tough decisions when evaluating programs. “I do that every day.”

He said his work on the board of the Karns Fire Department is an example of how he can apply his private-sector expertise to budgeting. “We look at the budget every year,” he said. “We look at the changes from proposed to actual budgets; we ask questions about why things might have changed. And ultimately, we vote on a budget that handles new fire trucks and new stations.

“What I tell people is, look at my qualifications and look at the qualifications of my opponent and tell me who you want running a $700 million organization,” Crateau said.

Crateau said that the campaign has gone well and that self-funding the effort has enabled him to focus on the issues and not on raising money.

“Talking to people, being active in the community, expressing the things that I believe in or the things that I want to focus on, (that’s) what has gotten me to where I am in this campaign,” he said.

“I think it’s important for folks to know that the person they’re voting for is invested in their district and has proven through 24 years that I’m focused on Hardin Valley, Karns and the rest of the district, and I’m willing to put the work in,” he said.

Lee Ann Eaves

A 40-year classroom veteran, Eaves said education is moving in a direction that concerns her.

“The reason I decided to run is because of the concern that I have for students and teachers and just staff in general,” she said. “Education is changing to where it’s not the typical community, public school. It’s becoming a vastly different dynamic, and we need to, as a society, look into that.”

She continued: “My biggest issue is the elementary school (students) having access to inappropriate reading material. I think that that should be within the home and at a parent’s discretion to make that decision if they want their child to be introduced to that.”

Eaves said school safety is another major concern, adding that her grandchildren are in public schools and they have all had safety issues that have bothered her.

“I’ve been pretty much through every aspect of what a teacher can go through,” she said.

She also is concerned about immigration. “I think that (undocumented immigrants) need to go back home until they’re processed legally,” she said. “I’m just a concerned Nana, and I just want my voice to be heard. I want the people’s voice to be heard. I want parents to have the ability to make decisions about their kids. They know their kids best.”

Eaves is a strong proponent of school choice, including vouchers that use public funds to pay for private-school educations.

“I actually am 100 percent for vouchers,” she said. “I know there’s a lot of flak with that, but I believe the money should follow the child, no matter what type of setting. We need to give the responsibility back to the parent and them to make the decision of what is the best educational setting their child would work in. Our kids are growing up in a different world, and the traditional public school does not meet all the needs of our kids today.”

Eaves, 65, grew up in Huntington, W.Va., and moved to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee. She has a bachelor’s degree in elementary education, with endorsements in preschool and reading recovery. She has two children and 10 grandchildren.

Eaves taught in Anderson County Schools for 27 years. After she retired as a public-school teacher, she joined the faculty at Grace Christian Academy. She’s currently teaching in Grace’s hybrid program. “It’s two days on campus, three days at home, so the kids still get the ability to socialize and have a school-type setting but still get the benefit of homeschooling,” she said.

One issue facing the district will be welcoming students rezoned from Powell Elementary School to Karns Elementary School as part of the district’s plan to alleviate overcrowding at Powell. “I want to make sure that they still feel that small-town community and support them and let them know that we are happy that we have the facility to be able to meet their child’s needs on a public-school level.”

This is Eaves’ first run for public office, and she has hit a couple of bumps along the way. She survived a move earlier this year to take her name off the ballot. 

Republican Party bylaws state that only “bona fide” party members can run in the primaries and that candidates are only bona fide if they voted in three out of the past four statewide GOP primary elections. According to the News Sentinel, Eaves has not voted in a statewide primary election since she registered to vote in Knox County in 2013. State party officials initially removed her from the ballot, but she successfully appealed the decision.

Still, she said, campaigning has been a positive experience.

“I’ve hit my 500th door this week, and people are very appreciative of me being out, knocking on their door and meeting me,” she said. “I’m a Christian, conservative Republican, and I am here to be a voice for parents, teachers and students, and I would like to see our community continue to grow in a positive manner. And I get a lot of positive feedback from these people that I knocked on their door. I’ve had several people pray over me, and that was very touching.”

Eaves repeatedly said that listening to stakeholders is one of the most important aspects of serving on the school board.

“We need to listen to the whole of them, from students to bus drivers and everybody in between, about what their needs are and what their concerns are,” she said. “That’s why I’m running. I want to be that voice for them.”