The Republican-backed Patriot TV host is one of two candidates vying for Karen Rose’s seat.
By Ed James III
Original Air Date: May 27, 2026
Host: We continue our series of candidate profiles for the upcoming Sarasota County School Board elections. The District 5 seat, which represents North Port and surrounding southern portions of the county, has seen two candidate filings: Beth Mayberry and Michelle Pozzie. Today, WSLR reporter Ed James III turns to Michelle Pozzie.
Ed James III: The District 5 Sarasota County School Board race features a sharp contrast in professional experience, educational philosophy and governance style. The seat is currently held by Karen Rose, who was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last year following the resignation of conservative member Tim Enos. The local party leadership has placed high stakes on the race; the Sarasota County Republican Executive Committee recently endorsed a slate of candidates, including Michelle Pozzie, warning that a loss of any of the three seats up for election this fall could shift the current conservative 3-2 board majority. Meanwhile, her opponent, Beth Mayberry, a 14-year middle school math and science teacher, is running on a platform she calls “Pupils Not Politics,” aiming to refocus the board on nuts-and-bolts issues, away from culture wars.
Michelle Pozzie has lived in the North Port area for two decades. She declined to be interviewed by this reporter for a candidate profile, and she referred us to a brief interview WSLR News reporter Brice Claypoole had with her recently on her educational platform and personal background. In that interview, Pozzie, a mother of two, discussed her experience with the school system, which she says informs her perspective on educational choice.
Michelle Pozzie
Michelle Pozzie: My name is Michelle Pozzie. I’m the candidate for Sarasota County School Board District 5. A little bit about me: I’ve lived here in the North Port area about 20 years, and I have two kids, one—my baby—that’s 21, and my 25-year-old passed away about a year ago. But they both went through the public school system—charter schools a little bit, my daughter did. I ended up homeschooling a little bit. They did dual enrollment, early college—the whole thing. So I’ve seen the market of what school choice looks like and how school education is not necessarily one size fits all.
EJ: Pozzie has pointed to her own family as an example of what alternative educational pathways can achieve, noting that her two children earned their bachelor’s degrees at ages 18 and 20 through early college and accelerated programs. In addition to her role as a parent, Pozzie has spent 25 years as an educator in the performing arts—teaching dance, theater and coaching gymnastics at the Sarasota YMCA. She holds a bachelor’s degree in entertainment business from Full Sail University and has worked in independent media and marketing, hosting programming on the conservative digital network PatriotTV.
Pozzie is a familiar figure in local politics. In April of 2023, she filed to challenge three-term incumbent Republican State Representative James Buchanan for the Florida House District 74 seat. Running as an “America First”-backed challenger, Pozzie campaigned on a platform focused on curbing inflation, protecting gun rights through a state Second Amendment Protection Act, opposing “woke” educational policies and advocating for “medical freedom,” a movement that gained traction locally following criticism of COVID-19 protocols at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Though Buchanan won the August 2024 primary with approximately 74% of the vote to Pozzie’s 26%, her run established her profile as a prominent voice within the county’s conservative grassroots movement.
That activism includes speaking out at local government meetings on hot-button community issues. In late 2023, she questioned county funding for the American Library Association, stating she did not support banning books but opposed taxpayer funding for the national organization. Her perspective on public school board debates was outlined in an April 2022 guest column for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. In the piece, titled “Sarasota parents protecting their kids – that’s not culture war,” Pozzie defended parents’ rights and active involvement in school oversight, arguing that efforts to monitor instructional materials and school policies should not be dismissed as a partisan culture war but rather viewed as natural parental protection of children.
In her interview with Brice Claypoole, Pozzie explained that if elected to the board, her focus would be on academic excellence, supporting school staff and enforcing clear, traditional boundaries.
Pozzie, speaking at a Turning Point USA event honoring Charlie Kirk. | Photos: Pozzie campaign website
MP: My priorities are to make sure that we are the number one choice in Sarasota County as a public school system for those who are looking for K-12 education. That’s first and foremost. We’ve heard—I’ve heard—from parents, from teachers, from students, from taxpayers what they expect out of a school district—what would be the best product—and I think we have the tools to do it. I just think we lack the focus sometimes from a district perspective. I want to be a strong leader, an advocate for a strong public school system. That’s going to include setting some strong boundaries. I think we need to be 100% academic-driven. We need to make sure that we have such a strong district that our administrators in the schools and our teachers feel strongly supported, and that our students understand the black-and-white issues—that there is no gray area when it comes to things like code of conduct.
EJ: The candidates present differing approaches to the district’s fiscal management. For Pozzie, the financial challenges in the district are tied directly to how federal funding was managed in the wake of the pandemic rather than voucher expansions.
MP: Our budget crisis is not because of voucher programs. Our budget crisis—I called out in 2021 on ABC7 when they shut my microphone down at a school board meeting and nearly had me kicked out because I wanted to address our budget concerns We’ve been seeing this trajectory for a while. Parents are choosing other sources for education, and we’ve never asked them why. That’s the biggest thing. Just like a business owner, you would ask, “Where did your clientele go?” We need to do the same thing. But what I want to do is first of all make our district the most productive, the most attractive choice in our county so that way everybody’s coming back and choosing us. The COVID funds—we got drunk and intoxicated off of COVID funds. We hired positions that were permanent under a former superintendent that should have known better, and oddly enough, he’s having the same issue in his district that he moved onto as well. We needed to not take those federal funds and create permanent staff positions—permanent expenditures—because we knew they were short-lived. So we have to do what everybody else has had to do for the last eight years, and that is tighten our purse strings.
EJ: Pozzie suggests that the district may benefit from closer external reviews.
MP: I think we need to buckle up because we will probably have some type of DOGE-ing of school boards coming our way here in the next four to six months, and we have to all be locked in and ready to hear the truth of, “How are we spending, where do the cuts need to come in and how do we rebound and become a stronger district?”
EJ: WSLR News sought to conduct a standard face-to-face interview, but the coordination with Pozzie’s campaign did not result in a sit-down. Originally, Pozzie and I were scheduled to meet for an in-person interview at the WSLR radio station. Due to scheduling constraints, Pozzie requested to change the format to a Zoom interview and subsequently asked to receive the interview questions in advance. After receiving the list of questions, Pozzie requested a written guarantee that her responses would be used in their entirety without any omissions in the final piece. When informed that the time constraints of a 30-minute news program meant not every response could be guaranteed a place in the story, Pozzie declined to proceed with the interview.
The non-partisan election for the District 5 School Board seat will take place on August 18 and is open to all registered voters in Sarasota County.
Reporting for WSLR News, I’m Ed James III.
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