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School Board incumbent withdraws

By EDDY RAMIREZ
Published March 21, 2006

INVERNESS - Pat Deutschman said she dropped out of the race for the Citrus County School Board District 3 seat because she wants to spend more time with her husband, Fred, and two sons, Alex and Jonathan.

Deutschman, 54, who has served on the board for eight years, announced her decision to other board members and superintendent Sandra "Sam" Himmel on Friday.

Only two months earlier, Deutschman had filed campaign paperwork declaring her intention to seek a third term. On Jan. 5, she told the Citrus Times that she was eager to serve another four years. She wanted to help boost high school graduation rates, revamp the facilities planning process and improve accountability at the School Board level.

In a recent interview, she told the Times that she had reservations all along about running.

"Something wasn't sitting right with me," she said. "I had lost that personal connection to the schools that was there when my children were in school."

Her departure leaves Renna Jablonskis, the district's director of student services, as the only candidate in the race. Jablonskis, who entered the race only days after Deutschman did, has been an aggressive campaigner.

Within a month of announcing her candidacy, Jablonskis had collected enough signatures to waive a fee required to run for office.

Deutschman said her decision to pull the plug on her campaign had nothing do with Jablonskis.

"It would not have mattered if I was running unopposed," Deutschman said.

She said her husband, an Inverness attorney, told her during a jaunt through their Floral City neighborhood last week that he was unhappy, saying he has been losing sleep over her decision to run again. Shortly after, she said, she decided to withdraw.

"I realized (the School Board) was taking away a lot of time from my family," she said. "And my family comes first."

Deutschman said she leaves the race with a sense of accomplishment.

During her tenure, Deutschman helped create a system to track student learning gains, delivering on her campaign promise to improve accountability, she said.

More recently, Deutschman has worked to address the dropout rate by supporting the move toward small learning communities known as freshmen academies at all three high schools.

She also recently lobbied successfully for an outside firm to conduct a detailed assessment of all the schools in the district. The assessment will help identify school buildings needing repair or reconstruction and ways to pay for those fixes.

One frustration was getting more parents involved and the school district to be more responsive, Deutschman said.

She thinks her successor should be an outsider who can be a bridge between the community and the school district.

"I have said all along that the School Board needs to be balanced," she said. "You don't want everyone to be like-minded."

For now, Deutschman will continue to work at her husband's Inverness law firm and help teach Sunday school at her church, Our Lady of Fatima in Inverness. She will also spend more time with sons Jonathan, 24, who is living with her, and Alex, 22, who is studying architecture in Paris.

[Last modified March 21, 2006, 02:30:40]