Unofficial results of the school board byelection held Saturday are in favour of Cathy Speth.
A total of 312 people cast a ballot to fill the seat left vacant by Tom Hendrickson. Speth earned about a third of those seats, with 103 votes, according to a tweet sent out by Fraser Cascade School District.
The nearest candidates to her was Sequel Adamson with 66, and Cheryl Davidson with 56. The other candidates were Holly Traas, with 39 votes, Tom Durrie with 30, Wilfried Victor with 16, and Bronwyn Punch with two votes.
Only those living within the area for that trustee seat were able to vote in the byelection. Also, this is the first time those voters could cast a vote in many years, as Hendrickson was consistently acclaimed due to a lack of candidates.
Speth has 2 years of experience in education, and is the chair of the Aboriginal Educational Council (an elected position). In a question and answer published in The Standard leading up to the byelection, she said she ran with the encouragement of trustee Ron Johnstone as well as her band chief.
Speth has lived in Spuzzum all of her life, with the exception of when she attended post-secondary for business management and three years of the Certified General Accounting program.
Preliminary results of the SD78 Trustee By-Election for Area 3 (Fraser Canyon) are as follows: pic.twitter.com/Gd0YBQRSnk
— School District 78 (@sd78bc) July 29, 2019
“My elementary and secondary education life started in Yale and ended at Hope Secondary School,” she said in her election material.
Official results of the byelection will be made public by the school district on July 31.
READ MORE: Community feels void left by passing of School Board Trustee Tom Hendrickson
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