County

County Superintendent of Schools

This person leads the county office of education. The job is nonpartisan.

The incumbent lost in June. Karen Sher led the primary with 41.7%. Maggie Marschner took 33.0%. That pushed sitting superintendent Cesar Morales into third place and off the November ballot. The two who advanced meet on November 3. This is a nonpartisan countywide office.

The county superintendent runs the Ventura County Office of Education. That office does not run your local school district — it oversees district budgets and can intervene when one is in financial trouble, runs county-wide programs including special education and juvenile court schools, and provides services individual districts are too small to run alone. It is one of the most consequential education jobs most voters have never heard of.

A sitting county superintendent finishing third is unusual and is the central fact of this race: whatever the county wanted, it was not continuity. Neither remaining candidate holds the office. Ask what you want from its two real powers — fiscal oversight of districts, and the county-run programs serving students no single district can serve alone — and note that both candidates now carry the burden of explaining what they would do differently.

Karen Sher

Karen Sher has served on the Oxnard Union High School District board since 2014 and is now its president. She has more than three decades of teaching experience in public schools. She holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from the University of Southern California. She now works for the California Department of Education, where she directs teacher recruitment, and she advises the state superintendent of public instruction.

She says the county needs steady, transparent leadership focused on outcomes for kids. Her campaign is built around a promise of real accountability, and she says the current administration has not delivered real results. The clearest fact on her own record is her decade-plus as an elected board trustee, a job she still holds today.

She promises transparent leadership that keeps decisions with local school districts rather than the county office. She says her decades in the classroom and her current work on teacher recruitment for the state would shape how she runs the office.

Maggie Marschner

Maggie Marschner has spent more than two decades in education. She started as a classroom teacher in Nevada's Clark County school district, one of the largest in the country, where she was named Teacher of the Year in 2010. Nevada's governor later chose her to co-chair a state council on teacher evaluations. She became a principal in 2018 and most recently led La Reina High School and Middle School in Thousand Oaks.

She says she wants to bring her classroom and school experience to every district in the county, and she promises accountability and results for students and families. The one fact on record is that she led La Reina as principal until 2024, when the school's own governing board voted to close it after its sponsoring order turned down the next year's budget. That decision was the board's, not hers.

She promises what she calls people over programs, meaning she would empower teachers and principals instead of handing down programs from the top. Her priorities are accountability, transparency, and decisions based on public data. She says every student deserves a superintendent who fights for them first, not last.

Your pick

A nonpartisan office: candidates do not run as Democrats or Republicans, and no party appears on the ballot.

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