Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Sean Rice on Tuesday night said he felt exactly like he used to feel before a football game back in high school: nervous—really nervous. The 32-year-old candidate for Fairbanks North Star school board Seat A paced back and forth in the Borough Assembly chambers as he waited for the municipal election results to come in.

“I’m not calm,” he said. “That’s why I’ve got my hands in my pockets.”

Early in the evening, Rice and his opponent, Howard Thies, were neck and neck as results from precincts across the borough slowly trickled in. As more and more precincts’ results were counted, Thies pulled ahead, but not by much.

At the end of the night, with 41 of the 42 precincts counted, Thies had 5,248 votes while Rice ended up with 4,880.

Rice said he was pleased to have kept the race so close, especially since he, as a relative newcomer to politics (he ran for school board last year as well, losing to Leslie Hajdukovich), was up against Thies, who has served for the past even years on the Fairbanks City Council.

“He has the name recognition,” Rice said. “It’s easy to win a battle when the odds are stacked in your favor. But it’s the true test of the worth of a person to go against those odds.”

Thies said he was impressed with Rice for his ability to get people out to vote.

“He’s got some good ideas,” Thies said of his opponent. “I’d love to talk to him. The more broth in the soup, it makes it thicker. … Whatever he can add to that soup to make it work, I’m certainly willing to talk to him.”

Thies, 57, said his first priority on the school board will be to curb the dropout rate. “Hopefully we can alert parents to how important it is to keep their kids in school,” he said.

Rice ran for school board, he said, because he wanted to make sure the voice of working-class parents like him was heard. He’ll still work to make that happen, he said, even though he didn’t win Tuesday’s closely contested race.

The race for school board Seat B wasn’t nearly as close. Incumbent Wendy Dominique garnered 7,574 votes while Hope Cermelj only received 1,915 votes.

Dominique works for the Army’s Logistics Support Element on Fort Wainwright and is the executive director of the J.P. Jones Community Development Center in South Fairbanks. She has served on the school board for the past three years.

One of the major successes of her first term, she said, was the changes to the discipline policy. Those changes, she said, were aimed at reducing the number of suspensions and expulsions.

One of her priorities this time around will be improving the educational experience for minority students in the borough. She would like to see more classes teaching children about minority cultures.

Cermelj had originally filed to run for Seat G on the Borough Assembly but was disqualified from that race because she hadn’t lived in the borough long enough. She sued the borough in an effort to get her name back on the ballot for assembly, but had her lawsuit dismissed last week. Since she couldn’t run for Borough Assembly, Cermelj ran for school board instead.

She said all the confusion about which position she would be running for ultimately ruined her chances of getting elected.

On Monday, Cermelj said, “The bottom line is, it will be a miracle if I win this election.”

Staff writer Robinson Duffy can be reached at 459-7523 or rduffy@newsminer.com.