Teresa DeWitt and Heidi Brandt.
By Brice Claypoole
Original Air Date: April 24, 2026
Host: We are continuing our dive into Sarasota School Board candidates running in District 1, for the seat currently held by Bridget Ziegler. Today, Brice Claypoole brings you profiles of Teresa DeWitt and Heidi Brandt.
Brice Claypoole: Two conservative candidates are running for the Sarasota School Board District 1 seat.
Heidi Brandt
First to enter the race was Heidi Brandt. She’s wracked up impressive fundraising numbers and garnered the support of Sarasota’s Republican establishment. Brandt’s daughter attends Southside Elementary, and Brandt serves as the vice president of the school’s Parent Teacher Association. Her campaign has focused on what she calls “empowering parents,” ensuring schools have adequate resources and increasing campus safety.
Brandt did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls from WSLR. When I caught up with her at an event, she declined to provide comments for this story.
The other candidate is Teresa DeWitt. A native of Oklahoma, she says she’s worked as an air traffic controller, saleswoman and art teacher. For a time, she ran several pre-schools in Arkansas that she says were attended by over 250 students. She’s also a licensed counselor and says she’s driven by a passion for kids.
She moved with her family to Sarasota several years ago, and her children attended Southside Elementary. She says she performed an independent audit of school district spending. Concerns about what she found prompted her to support the slate of conservative candidates that swept the school board races in 2022. Now, she’s running for the seat held by the most prominent of those candidates: school board chair Bridget Ziegler.
Teresa DeWitt
Considering DeWitt’s focus on fiscal responsibility, my first question for her was how to deal with the district’s looming budget crisis. As a result of declining enrollment, the expiration of COVID-era funding and expanded voucher programs, Sarasota schools are facing major budget shortfalls and sharp staffing cuts.
DeWitt, who is sympathetic to the school voucher program, says the way out of the district’s financial woes is for public schools to become more attractive. She also wants to ensure the parents can enter school campuses and walk their kids to the classroom.
Teresa DeWitt: If our school district—traditional education—does not become competitive—if we cannot figure out why we are losing enrollment, if we can’t get those students back—and not just the students but the families—if Tallahassee is making these changes, and if we don’t do our part at the local level, then we are going to continue to see dollars disappear.
BC: Rather than a state-level change in voucher policy, DeWitt says the school district needs more fiscal discipline and better education.
TD: There’s a narrative out there—sometimes I think it’s being created—and what’s happening is, if we start treating parents and students as collateral damage, how are we ever going to get our enrollment up? If we say that our parent is the bad guy because they’ve tapped into a voucher—it’s really easy to say, “Oh, hey, the vouchers are the problem” or “homeschoolers are the problem.” That is not the problem. The problem is that we have to make sure that our traditional education system has the reading scores where they need to be—also pays our teachers. We need to be able to pay our teachers what they deserve.
BC: One point of contention surrounding DeWitt’s campaign is her past association with Moms for Liberty, a far-right parental rights group co-founded by Ziegler. That past prompted the local advocacy group Support Our Schools to warn that DeWitt poses “a danger to public education”. DeWitt, a former co-chair of the group, says her time with Moms for Liberty was short and ended in separation over what she describes as the group “becoming political.”
TD: I partnered with Moms for Liberty for about six months. What I was doing—I was helping with mental health. I was educating some of the local moms. I would speak at the board meetings for a little bit. I think I was their co-chair for maybe two months. They decided to become political, and I decided that being a licensed mental health therapist wasn’t a good fit for me, and I wanted to help my school district in other ways. No hard feelings—anything like that—but I decided to remove myself from the organization.
BC: On the so-called “culture war” issues that have roiled the school board in recent years, DeWitt staked out a conservative position. She said these issues first came to her attention when they were included in grants from the federal government.
TD: In the fine print of some of the block grant language, there were specific things that had to be attached to LBGTQ, DEI. So they were forcing districts to decide curriculum based on some of these parameters, but they weren’t being clear with everyone. One of my positions with the culture stuff is anything that is divisive—anything that is political—I feel it does not have a place in our education system.
BC: She also noted that the debate distracts from the mental health of students, including those who identify as LGBTQ.
TD: I believe that, right now, we have 42% of our children—our students—identify as hopeless or depressed. 69% of our LBGTQ students identify as depressed. We need to start having real conversations about all students—all issues—and the politics and the cultural divisiveness has to stop.
BC: Students’ mental health is a key priority for DeWitt.
Teresa DeWitt and her two children
TD: Right now, school counselors in the state of Florida, the ratio is 452 students to one counselor. Right now we have a school in our district—because they let go of school counselor, they have 700 students to one counselor. We can’t afford not to have services. I tell everyone, “You are going to pay for the mental health of students. Just what cost do you want to pay?”
BC: According to the American School Counselor Association, the student to counselor ratio in Florida was 432 to 1 during the 2024-25 school year. DeWitt has numerous proposals to address mental health.
TD: If we can fundraise for a $14 million new building, we can fundraise for mental health dollars. Also, some grant writing. We could pull down some block grants without specific language attached, where we can all decide as taxpayers what that grant looks like. The other thing that we can do is we can actually hold forums for students—a mental health forum. I’m licensed. I can hold a mental health forum every day—or we can do what we call process groups where we have a licensed therapist in there. The thing that we have to make sure is we have to quit putting a stigma on the mental health of our students. There’s a lot of people in our community or in our school district who don’t wanna talk about our students hurting, and I don’t get that.
BC: Already, DeWitt has gained detractors. Peter Schorsch is a political columnist and publisher of the news site Florida Politics. On Thursday, he published a polemic arguing that DeWitt’s candidacy is doomed by her association with Moms for Liberty and Ziegler, the unpopular school board chair. He highlighted poor polling numbers and minimal campaign donations for DeWitt, to argue that Brandt is the stronger conservative candidate to face Democrat-backed Jimmy Glover.
DeWitt, however, is sticking it out. In a text message, she called Schorsch’s article “a hit piece” and added “I will let voters at the ballot box decide if I am a serious candidate and anyone who steps up to assist our children with their education on either side of the isle is not an embarrassment, they are dedicated.”
For WSLR News, this has been Brice Claypoole.
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