Norristown area Democrats refused to support the local school board president’s reelection bid. It may result in the loss of Latino representation

The Norristown Area School District, whose student body is half Latino, may no longer have Latino representation on the board in January after tensions between the existing board and local Democrats culminated in the effective ouster of two of the board’s first Latino members.

School Board President Chris Jaramillo had the support of Democratic leaders in Norristown, East Norriton and West Norriton when he was appointed in 2020 and sought his first full term in 2021. But now local Democratic leaders have refused to back Jaramillo, or anyone on his slate of aligned candidates. Party leaders cited broad concerns with Jaramillo’s leadership. But Jaramillo has said party leaders are retaliating for his refusal to bow to countywide pressure campaign for tax abatements that would deny potential revenue for the school district.

The Democratic committee in the Norristown area has endorsed a new slate of candidates that includes the area leader for the local party while lacking Latino representation. Meanwhile, Jaramillo’s slate, which included incumbent board member Tessi Ruiz, who is also Latina, was removed from the ballot after voters, including the husband of the Democratic municipal chair for West Norriton challenged their candidacy in court for insufficient paperwork.

Leaders in Norristown worry the lost representation will mean less of a voice for Latino students and parents.

“I think that will definitely hurt our community in a way because they’ll feel like there’s no one there who understands me,” Ruiz said on a podcast last week.

Latino representation on the Norristown Area School Board has meant a lot for Latino students and parents, said Obed Arango, Executive Director of the Centro de Cultura Arte Trabajo y Educacion (CCATE), which advocates for the community and offers classes to students in Norristown.

He said the relationship between the district and Latino parents has improved since Jaramillo and Ruiz joined the board. In a notable move, the board voted earlier this year to approve a “welcoming-school” ordinance, prohibiting immigration agents from carrying out enforcement actions on school grounds.

“For the first time they saw themselves represented. I am afraid that that participation and that trustability that was gained could be lost,” Arango said.

This is especially painful, Arango said, at a time when increased federal immigration enforcement has spread fear through the community.

Andres Dircio, a 21-year-old graduate of Norristown Area High School who joined the district when he was 11 after immigrating from Mexico, said he believed he might have felt more connected to his school if there were Latino members of the board before his senior year.

Dircio has remained involved in the community, eventually taking a job at CCATE, and said he’s been impressed with the work the school board has done to advocate for diversity. He said his heart breaks to see that representation eliminated.

“It feels like we’re taking two steps backward,” he said.

In an interview with Arango on his podcast Dialagos de la Villa Immigrante, Ruiz said the lived experience she and Jaramillo brought to the board informed policy decisions and helped them connect with families.

For some parents, she said, they now won’t have a board member who even speaks their language.

“That perspective won’t be heard,” she worried, while urging Latino parents to continue to speak up.

Party endorsement is typically a critical first step to winning the May primary and, in heavily blue towns like Norristown, the election. Earlier this year, local Democrats endorsed Cynthia Davenport, a retired multicultural marketing consultant and current substitute teacher, Terell Dale, an engineer, Jeremiah Lemke, a former school principal in North Philadelphia who currently works for an education nonprofit, Jordan Alexander, a community activist, and former Norristown supervisor and current leader of the local party, Bill Caldwell for the five open seats on the board. In addition to serving as area leader for the local party, Caldwell is the first deputy in the Montgomery County Treasurer’s Office under Jason Salus, the county treasurer and chair of the county Democratic Party.

Davenport, Dale, Lemke and Alexander declined to comment for this story. Caldwell, who said he joined the slate to add political experience, said the board, despite a lack of Latino members, would still represent Latino students.

“Those schools have got to be safe places where kids can put as much of the stuff as is going on away and do their learning,” Caldwell, who is running for a two-year term, said. “They’re all our kids. We will not abandon them.”

He said the incoming slate was still “enormously diverse.”

“We’re Black, we’re white, we’re LGBTQ. We do come from a background where we get being not the majority in a room,” he said.

But Angie Hinton, executive director at PA Youth Vote and a former president of the NAACP of Norristown, said that by refusing to endorse the existing slate, the Democratic Party in the Norristown area has broken trust with minority communities, disrespecting their representation.

“It’s a disgrace and it’s a continuation of, you know, the marginalization, right, and these parties that really use this process as a way of just disenfranchising people,” Hinton said. “This has been a continued problem in Montgomery County.”

For many, what makes matters more frustrating is the belief that the party rejected Jaramillo’s slate for the school board because of a proposed tax abatement, not anything related to education or his work on the board.

Jaramillo says he lost the party’s support because of one vote he and the rest of the board made in July 2024 to reject a tax abatement for an affordable housing project for seniors in Norristown.

The situation comes after allegations of a pay-to-play culture that stifled dissent riled the 2023 endorsement process for Montgomery County Democrats. While the county party made reforms to address concerns, many of the same leaders hold power countywide and allegations of an unfair system have persisted.

“I’m realizing that special interests are, or have permeated into these local elections and to school board,” he said.

In 2024, the Norristown Council and the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners approved a local economic revitalization tax assistance abatement (LERTA) for Elon Development to expand work on the housing project.

The school board, which accounts for the largest chunk of property taxes, unanimously rejected the tax abatement over concerns about the company’s credentials, they came under fire in 2021 for selling an affordable housing development in Philly, and a belief that the project could move forward without public assistance.

The decision, Jaramillo said, resulted in significant pushback, including tense meetings with township and county leaders as well as Democratic state Rep. Greg Scott and House Majority Leader Matt Bradford. According to campaign finance records, Bradford received a $25,000 donation from an executive in the development firm earlier that year.

Bradford didn’t respond to a request for comment on the school board race, his involvement in meetings about the tax abatement or the donations he’d received from the development firm. Representatives of the company did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite the pressure, the school board refused to reconsider, and Jaramillo said when he met with Caldwell to discuss his plans to seek reelection, Caldwell told him the party would not support him if he did not reconsider the tax abatement.

“I was a bit taken aback,” Jaramillo said. “I thought I was on the pathway of doing what needed to be done as a school board director.”

The project, which was the third phase of a senior housing development, moved forward having received tax abatements from Montgomery County and Norristown Borough. But the school district’s abatement would have represented the largest chunk of tax breaks.

In an interview, Caldwell said the rejected tax abatement was an example of the broader concerns he had with the school board, but not his sole reason for refusing to support Jaramillo and his slate.

He said there was “constant friction” between the Norristown School Board and township leaders in Norristown, East Norriton and West Norriton. Many people, for many reasons, he said, were calling for change.

“I was very clear with all of them that I was not prepared personally, not prepared to support them unless they were prepared to support the municipalities in another way,” said Caldwell, a former Norristown supervisor. “And that conversation started about two years ago and it went nowhere.”

The decision to “dig your heels in” on a tax abatement for an affordable housing project, he said, was a prime example of that friction. Communities like Norristown, he said, need to use economic incentives like LERTAs to bring in development and, because the project in question was a senior housing facility, it wouldn’t have cost the district money in terms of more students to serve.

Now, he said, there’s little reason for borough leaders to help the school board.

“It’s bad leadership,” he said, referring to Jaramillo. If elected to the board, Caldwell said, he hoped to leverage his political experience to repair relationships he says are damaged and broken.

In an email to The Inquirer, Jaramillo dismissed the broad criticisms of his leadership and said his commitment to his community was “unwavering.”

“It is unfortunate that they are deflecting by questioning my leadership. Leaders stand on their values. Those who know me well have witnessed my work ethic and understand the values I hold,” he said.

Caldwell said the firm’s connections didn’t factor into frustrations over the school board’s vote. He said the school board race has been a local fight that hasn’t involved the state or county-level Democratic parties.

Other members of the local Democratic committee said they were aware of the LERTA but that it wasn’t necessarily the guiding force in their endorsement vote.

One municipal chair, Patty Mark, cited concerns about Jaramillo’s lack of engagement with parents. Another, Roseanne Milazzo, the municipal chair for West Norriton who also serves on the West Norriton Board of Supervisors, said Jaramillo had failed to foster relationships with other local leaders, leaving opportunities for collaboration on the table, and wasn’t sufficiently supportive of other Democrats. Particularly egregious, she noted, was that Jaramillo missed the high school graduation last year.

His rejection of the LERTA, she said, raised yet another flag questioning whether the board would support West Norriton if it was seeking a tax abatement for a project.

Milazzo said she would have supported Ruiz if she had been willing to run on a new slate rather than with Jaramillo.

“We found some other candidates who wanted to run and we feel that they will be more willing to deal with us and interact with us,” Milazzo said. “They have experience ... we found more qualified candidates.”

The denied endorsement, and his removal from the ballot, Jaramillo said, underscored the barriers that exist to candidates from marginalized backgrounds. He said he had been encouraged to run a write-in campaign but had not yet made a decision.

“The fact that the party, the local party’s endorsement, is such a significant component of this,” Jaramillo said. “That contributes to the barriers of write-in campaigns or campaigns that don’t come from affluent backgrounds or don’t have the financial capital.”