A special runoff election was held on Tuesday for the District 2 seat on the Atlanta Public Schools school board. Aretta Baldon won the election with 551 votes over fellow candidate David Huntley’s 405. A nine-candidate general election had previously been held on September 17, and the top two vote recipients, Baldon and Huntley, advanced to the runoff since neither had won at least 50% of the vote.
The special election was called after Byron Amos resigned his seat in January 2019 to run for the Atlanta City Council. He was defeated in the runoff election for that position in April. Amos had served on the board from 2011 to 2019, most recently winning re-election in 2017. Baldon will fill the remainder of Amos’ unexpired term, which ends in 2021.
In a June 20 article, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that the vacant seat “could be a critical swing vote on the board.” Due to the unoccupied seat, the board has had at least one vote end in a 4-4 tie, which led to the automatic defeat of a motion.
Atlanta Public Schools served 60,133 students during the 2016-2017 school year.
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