Some of the biggest names in Pasco County politics along with parents and other supporters were present April 20 as former Florida state lawmaker John Legg kicked off his campaign for Pasco County Schools superintendent at Phi Delta Kappa Hall in Odessa.
ODESSA, Florida —With the puck about an hour from dropping at a Tampa Bay Lightning playoff game, John Legg didn’t want to risk alienating his fellow hockey fans. He promised to talk fast and get everyone home on time so they could watch the game.
As the Bolts prepared to face a hostile crowd at the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Scotiabank Arena, the founder of Pasco County’s oldest charter school and a former state lawmaker found himself on home ice last week, surrounded by his most loyal fans, as he dropped the puck on his 2024 campaign for Pasco County superintendent of schools.
Unlike the Lightning, whose ultimate goal is to take home the Stanley Cup, Legg isn’t looking to take home a trophy.
“Our purpose is not to get me elected, because if the purpose is to get a person or a politician elected, we have failed,” Legg said. “Our purpose is to help the kids in Pasco County. It is to ensure that the baton is passed, and every child, no matter where they come from, no matter their income level, no matter what happens to them, they have an opportunity to succeed.”
Despite the display of humility, Legg is entering the race with a long list of wingers that include virtually all of the county’s – and some of the state’s – most powerful officials.
Three of five Pasco County School Board members, plus a former board member, showed up to the campaign kick-off. The board chairwoman, a former student and teacher at Dayspring Academy, the school Legg founded with his wife, Suzanne, gave the opening speech.
Other VIPs attending included the county sheriff, three county commissioners, the president of one of Florida’s state colleges, the public defender, the clerk of the circuit court, and the county tax collector, who once wielded tremendous power in Tallahassee as a House majority leader and Senate president pro tem.
(Legg, also, was a House speaker pro tem and chaired education committees in both chambers of the state legislature. You can see a complete political bio here. Additionally, he is a member of the governance board for Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)
Legg shared his philosophy that parents have a critical role in their child’s education during the kickoff of his campaign for Pasco County Schools superintendent.
Though Legg didn’t delve deeply into policy at the event – this crowd already gets it – he and other speakers praised the principles behind education choice and parental empowerment.
“Dr. Legg is a champion for children and their families, the board chair, Megan Harding, said. “He has worked so hard to move the needle to ensure that all children receive the world-class education that they deserve.”
During his speech, Legg recalled his humble origins as a child growing up in Hudson, a community on Pasco County’s northwest coast, where the per capita income in 2022 was $30,567. In 2020, the school board closed the neighborhood elementary school after it received only one grade above a D in nine years.
Legg said his childhood experience drives his passion to extend opportunity to all children regardless of income.
“The idea of higher education and economic opportunity really wasn’t in our family’s background because we were low income,” said Legg, who holds a doctorate in education. “Kids like us didn’t go to higher education. Kids like us didn’t get post-secondary training. We didn’t even know what post-secondary training meant.”
Legg began his higher education journey at Pasco-Hernando State College, a two-year community institution at the time. A crusty volunteer tutor named Charles Whitehead helped him pass basic algebra. Whitehead and others, Legg said, inspired him to want to pay it forward.
In 2000, Legg, working as a legislative aide at the state Capitol, founded Dayspring. The school, less than 5 miles from struggling Hudson Elementary, serves students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade across five campuses.
Dayspring has consistently earned an A rating from the state and maintains a waitlist of about 1,400 students, 43% of whom are classified as economically disadvantaged. Legg said allowing students to leave schools that are failing or simply not the best fit creates opportunities for everyone to have a chance to achieve success in life.
“Every child, every person, belongs to the parent and not the school system. Not the bureaucracy,” he said to audience applause. “Parents have a critical role in their child’s education and should be empowered to make choices.”
While that statement may seem bold to those who live in other places, it doesn’t break new ground in Pasco, which has a track record for expanding choice within the district and partnering with charter schools, including Dayspring, to accommodate the county’s rapid growth.
Last month, Magnet Schools of America selected current Pasco Superintendent Kurt Browning as its Superintendent of the Year. The school district has opened 26 new magnet schools and programs with topics and fields of study based on community need and student interest. Options have expanded to include fine arts, career and technical programs, early college, and computer science pathways.
Legg and his family are avid Tampa Bay Lightning fans.
Browning, whose announcement last summer that he would not seek a fourth term as superintendent prompted Legg to file his candidate paperwork the next day, consolidated all types of choice programs, which had previously operated separately, under a single district department.
"If we're going to compete, then we've got to provide what moms and dads are looking for," Browning told the Tampa Bay Times in 2015.
If elected, Legg would be the first person with a charter school background to take the helm of the county school district, the largest in the nation that still elects its superintendent. But he would not be the first charter school founder to take on a leading role governing public school districts.
John King Jr., who served as U.S. Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama, founded Roxbury Prep, a top charter middle school in Massachusetts, and later led Uncommon Schools, a network of nationally recognized charters. In 2011, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools inducted King into the Charter School Hall of Fame. Last year, he became the 15th chancellor of State University of New York.
Even if Legg loses, education choice will be the winner in Pasco.
Chris Dunning, a longtime principal in the district, now leads Wendell Krinn Technical High School and is running as a no-party candidate. Krinn, the district’s first technical magnet high school, opened in 2018 and provides opportunities for students in 14 career areas including biomed, cybersecurity, pre-engineering, HVAC, and welding.
Dunning, who, like Legg, has a doctorate in education, has devoted a section of his campaign website to school choice and wants to add specialty programs across the district so that transportation to non-zoned schools is not an obstacle to those seeking access.
Regular school board attendee Michelle Mandarin, who calls herself “a Mama Bear fighting for better education” on her campaign website, also is running for the top seat. She has positioned herself as an education choice advocate, championing the need for more parental control in education decisions.
No Democrat has entered the race in Pasco, once a swing county that has since turned ruby red and where most local races are decided in GOP primaries. The last Democrat to hold countywide office was tax collector Mike Olson, who died less than a year after winning re-election and beginning his 33rd year in office.
Election day is 18 months away, a lifetime in politics. But if money is a predictor, Legg, who has $148,675 in his campaign fund compared with Dunning’s $6,320 and Mandarin’s $0, appears set to score on a power play.
Winning a third elected office, the superintendency, would give Legg the hat trick of his political career.
Representative John Legg, R-Port Richey, defending his Education Accountability bill on the House floor.
After several years of serious consideration, John Legg, a former state senator and longtime educator who co-founded one of the first charter schools in the Tampa Bay area, has decided to run for superintendent of the Pasco County School District.
“I believe the skillsets I bring are what Pasco County needs right now,” said Legg, 47, who in 2000 co-founded Dayspring Academy and since then has expanded it to five campuses.
Legg, who lives in Port Richey and earned a doctorate three years ago in program development with an emphasis in sustainable educational innovation, believes a changing society needs new educational models.
“What I see happening as a result of the pandemic is that the old model of education simply is no longer working, and new models of education are being deployed,” he said. “We’ve had success at Dayspring, and we’ve had setbacks, as any (school) that has been open 23 years will. But I think the big arc is the arc of success, as we have provided flexibility and innovation to adapt to a changing culture and changing demands of a workforce, and a changing population.”
A former legislative aide, Legg, a Republican, first was elected to public office as a member of the state House of Representatives in 2004 and served eight years. Unable to seek re-election due to term limits, he ran successfully for the state Senate in 2012.
Suzanne and John Legg
Redistricting in 2015 placed him in the same district as Wilton Simpson, then Senate president-designate for 2018-20. Legg decided not to run, and focused instead on expanding Dayspring and raising, with his wife Suzanne, the couple’s five children. He also began serving on the board of Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.
Through the years, his name has come up whenever the district school superintendent position is on the ballot. He’s been asked whether he will run “probably several times a week” for the past few years.
“I’ve never directly said ‘no.’” Legg said. “Usually, it was ‘not yet.’ Now, it’s an emphatic ‘yes.’”
He filed the paperwork earlier today, one day after Superintendent Kurt Browning, also a Republican, announced he would not seek re-election in 2024 as head of Florida’s 10th largest school district. Browning, who spent 26 years as Pasco supervisor of elections and served as Florida secretary of state under two governors, became superintendent for the largest county in the United States with an elected superintendent in 2012.
Under Browning’s leadership, the district, which serves just over 77,000 students at more than 100 schools, expanded school choice by adding a new technical high school and the district’s first magnet schools. He also added accelerated learning programs, which earned him recognition from the College Board and Cambridge International.
Legg, who at times has criticized the Browning administration for what he sees as a failure to improve performance in lower-income areas of the county, praised the district’s expansion of choice, but called that expansion a beginning, pledging to do more if he is elected, especially in the pockets of poverty on the county’s western coast and eastern border.
He sees academics as the county’s biggest challenge and noted that schools that earned C and D grades from the state 20 years ago are receiving the same grades now, while schools in areas where more affluent families live continue to get A and B grades.
“We have to empower parents with parental choice in order to move that needle in low-income areas,” Legg said. “Pasco County has started moving more in that direction, and that needs to be accelerated. Parents need to look at what is the best fit for their students, still with accountability, still with standards.”
Legg describes his campaign in way similar to how jewelers talk about diamonds, but instead of the four C’s of cut, color, clarity and carat weight, Legg outlines the six C’s of customization, content, creativity, collaboration, community, and character.
Of those, he sees customization as the center stone.
“That doesn’t mean we’re McDonald’s and we’re going to serve burgers and serve them with mayonnaise or ketchup and pickles,” he said. “It means we’ve got to allow people to go to Chick-fil-A. If Chick-fil-A meets their needs, we’ve got to find a way to make sure the need is being met.”
That measure of choice will look different to different people, Legg maintains.
“There still needs to be accountability; there still needs to be outcome measures. But we’ve got to look at what partners we can work with to move the needle. It can be charter schools; it can be private schools; it can be public schools.”
Legg said that if elected, he will make sure all schools offer content-rich curriculum and that principals have the flexibility to be creative in meeting their community’s needs. Additionally, he will work to ensure that schools provide a sense of community to staff, students, and teachers.
An advocate of educators, Legg believes that Pasco teachers, who earn less than their colleagues in nearby counties, should be paid more. He is “100 percent” behind an August referendum to raise property taxes by a maximum of 1 mil — about $300 for a $325,000 home with a $25,000 homestead exemption — to improve pay for teachers, bus drivers and other staff, excluding administrators.
Legg noted that Pasco, a bedroom community for those who commute to Tampa and St. Petersburg for their jobs, is experiencing massive growth and will need solid leadership to navigate it. U.S. Census figures show that Pasco’s population, estimated at 464,697 in 2010, grew to 561,891 in 2020.
The county administrator compared the growth to the equivalent of “a good-sized city.” The county property appraiser recently announced that Pasco issued 6,420 single-family home permits in 2021 and is still averaging 500 a month this year. Meanwhile, a recent study shows that Pasco’s school enrollment grew by 6% since the start of the pandemic.
Legg and Browning made headlines recently when the Pasco County School Board approved a plan to accommodate growth that involved a partnership with Dayspring to help educate students in the Angeline development, a 6,200-acre site that is expected to house 30,000 new residents.
The area includes a 775-acre parcel that will be home to a Moffitt Cancer Center research and corporate innovation district. Dayspring would build a K-5 school in the development with assistance that could include impact fees that the district collects from developers to accommodate growth, district capital funds, or bonding.
Legg will start his campaign with slightly more than $140,000 left over from his successful state Senate District 17 campaign in 2012. If elected, he and his wife plan to gradually turn over leadership of Dayspring to others who have been groomed for that responsibility to avoid possible conflicts of interest.
After years of mulling the possibilities, Legg is convinced now is the time for him to step forward.
“I think there is a sense of urgency right now, and I want to go out there and express that sense of urgency,” he said. “We’re never going back to normal. We’ve never going back to pre-COVID. We’ve got to define what is the new normal.”
The Pasco County superintendent hopeful believes that defining the “new normal” – and spearheading and receiving approval for bold new agendas – has a better chance of success with an elected superintendent at the helm as opposed to one who serves at the pleasure of a school board.
“I would come with a mandate from the voters,” Legg said.
