More than 110 seats on K-12 school and community college boards are on the ballot next month across San Diego County — and for the first time in recent years, we asked every candidate running about their opinions and plans should they be elected. School board races don’t get nearly the same level of attention as presidential, mayoral, congressional and other high-profile races. But school boards have direct impacts on local residents — they are charged with serving and educating the children in your community, they propose bond measures that would raise your taxes to pay for school facilities, and they control the ways that much of our tax dollars are spent. While school board seats are technically supposed to be nonpartisan positions, many school board candidates are endorsed by political groups, receive campaign funding or other support from political groups and discuss political issues in their campaigns. School boards can also serve as springboards for some members’ political careers. Some candidates in current high-profile local races are current school board members, like state Assembly candidates Andrew Hayes, a school board trustee in Lakeside, and Darshana Patel, a school board trustee in Poway. And in some cases, school boards have become battlegrounds for increasingly political debates over banning books, how to address topics of race and gender in schools and how schools should balance keeping parents informed with protecting students’ privacy. We asked about some of those in our questionnaire. Out of more than 180 candidates running for a K-12 or community college school board in San Diego County, 107 people participated in our questionnaire. It should be noted that what they told us reflects their statements and positions, and that we did not independently fact check all the claims in their answers. Voters in many areas of the county won’t get any choice in who represents them on the school board because only one person — if anybody — signed up to run. More than a third of the school board seats up for grabs next month are uncontested and will automatically be awarded to the lone candidate on the ballot. We asked those candidates, too, to participate in our questionnaire, but only one of them responded. And there are at least three more board seats that will not be filled at all, because not enough people signed up. San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district, has three board seats up for grabs, and two of them are automatically going to the incumbents because nobody else filed to run. San Diego Unified Trustee Richard Barrera will be automatically re-elected to his fifth term on the board, and Trustee Sharon Whitehurst-Payne will be automatically re-elected to her third. By contrast, some of the most stacked school board races are in Grossmont Union High, where there are two open seats with four people running for each, and in Chula Vista Elementary, where one board seat has five people vying for it. Those candidates who responded to our questionnaire had different ideas of what they think is the most pressing issue in their district. Many focused on district organizational or financial problems, like declining enrollment, budget deficits and administration turnover and turmoil. Some focused on student issues, such as academic recovery, performance on state standardized tests and school safety. There was some discussion — but not as much as I might have expected — of equity issues, such as how to address student poverty, homelessness or achievement and opportunity gaps. There was much discussion about improving student outcomes overall, but less about how to help specific student groups who have consistently lagged, such as students with disabilities, English learners and homeless and foster students. It’s also interesting to note the large differences in board representation per student across the county. For example, Rancho Santa Fe Elementary School District has a total of two schools and 500 students —and seven people competing for three spots on its board. Julian Union High, a single-school district with 100 students, has five people vying for two spots. At the other end of the spectrum, San Diego Unified has four people vying for three spots on a board that represents 95,000 students. In this way, school districts differ from how many other elected bodies work. While legislative and county supervisor districts each tend to have roughly the same number of residents within them, the number of residents represented by any one school board official varies widely depending on the district’s size. Depending on a district’s size and number of candidates who signed up, voters will have varying levels of choice in terms of who they can vote for and in how many constituents their board members are in charge of representing.