A letter to Polk County.

Every Polk County voter can vote in this race. School board races are countywide — the district number only decides where I live, not who you can vote for. And this one ends Tuesday, August 18. No November runoff. No second round. One night, and it is decided.

I grew up poor, in a Catholic orphanage that took in children nobody was coming back for. What changed my life was not money, and it was not government. It was a good K–12 education. Teachers who expected something of me, and the discipline to meet it. I came to America more than twenty-five years ago with almost nothing and built technology companies that do business worldwide. In 2025 I was appointed to the Board of Trustees at Florida Polytechnic University and confirmed by the Florida Senate. Now I am asking to serve the schools that serve your kids.

Here is the record, and it belongs to a 24-year incumbent.

Kay Fields has sat on this board since before most of today's seniors were born. In those 24 years, Polk never climbed out of the bottom third of Florida districts. We rank 62nd of 67 in money per student — we send a dollar to Tallahassee and get back 97 cents. Teacher vacancies ran 311, then 330, then 300 in three straight years, while the rest of Florida cut theirs by nearly 18 percent. One in eight Polk classrooms has no certified full-time teacher. The state teachers union counted more openings here than anywhere else in Florida.

Things only started moving when conservatives got elected to this board and forced a change in strategy. Polk's graduation rate just hit a record 87.7 percent — proof of what happens when the board finally has people willing to fight the status quo. We will not finish that work by re-electing the status quo.

Parents raise children, not bureaucrats. My plan in four parts: bring the money home and fix the formula, put parents first with real transparency, staff the classrooms and restore order, and build the trades programs Polk employers will actually hire.