- June 30, 2026
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When JT White was growing up, he had a front row seat to see the sort of difference educators can make in young people’s lives.
The son of educator Deborah Houston, who retired as the principal of Manatee Elementary, he heard from her about how students' faces changed throughout the day. They first entered with frowns or signs of hunger and by the end of the day they were happy to be part of Houston’s class.
He was told time and again by classmates in middle school that his mom made students feel special, seen and loved.
“That is the type of impact that you want to have,” White said. “That's lasting for a lifetime.”
White, a parent of a Bayshore High School graduate, JT White Jr., and a 1-year-old, Titan, is running for the District 2 school board seat for Manatee County. He grew up attending schools within the school district — Jessie P. Miller Elementary, Ballard Elementary, Johnson Middle School and Lakewood Ranch High School.
White has also worked a variety of roles within the school system, including an emotional/behavioral disability unit specialist at Palmetto Elementary, a computer tech at both Rogers Garden Elementary (now known as Rogers Garden-Bullock) and at Freedom Elementary. He was also a dean assistant at Palmetto High School.
Within the emotional/behavioral disability unit at Palmetto Elementary, White learned a lot, especially patience.
“They brought it home to me that everyone cannot be treated the same, everyone cannot be talked to the same, everyone cannot be taught the same,” White said. “Everyone needs their own special little set of things that they need to make them go.”
White has not run in an election before, unless you count his time as student body president at Johnson Middle School. He outlined three main goals he would pursue if he is elected – to reduce spending on ineffective technology and reinvest it in people, to support and retain good teachers and to invest in trade education.
When White worked as a computer tech at Rogers Garden-Bullock, he determined early that he didn’t think the digital programs, such as i-Ready and Lexia, would have a positive impact on students. He said the district needs to determine which programs are ineffective and direct the money elsewhere, using it to hire quality reading coaches.
“If these children are not being equipped with the proper tools they need to lead, what is the world going to look like when I'm 80?” White said. “I want to help prevent, for a lack of a better word, the degradation in our education system. I see where it's going and I made my predictions 15 years ago. If we don't change now and recalibrate our relationship with technology, we're going to be in a way worse situation in 2042.”
One of his main focuses is working to retain the best educators as burn out, lack of support or finding better job opportunities takes them away from their positions.
“They need to have different avenues where they feel accepted, appreciated and valued by our school district,” White said. “That's the only way we're going to be able to keep them. I came up with a formula to give them the proper amounts of money that they deserve, but that would be attached to how well they move their kids from the proficiency rate to the literacy rate, math, science and reading.”
White said it is important for students to have options that do not involve going to college as many don’t want to pursue that path. He hopes to start implementing hands-on training in trades as early as seventh or eighth grade in fields such as carpentry, culinary arts, welding, robotics and engineering.
“Our trade education is mediocre, to say the least,” White said. “They have to travel to different schools in order to get this education. This education should be made available for them at their school. That way, when it’s graduation time, they may have a job waiting for them as soon as they graduate, or they might have a business waiting for them to create as soon as they graduate.”
White went to Hillsborough Community College and studied mass communication in radio and television broadcasting and has interviewed various people from all sorts of different backgrounds during his time in radio. Through that, it has opened his eyes to see through multiple lenses and not just his own experience.
“I want Manatee County to be the most high achieving district in the state of Florida and we can only get that way if we pay attention to what the teachers, students, and the administrators are saying to the leadership,” White said. “We can only get that way if we continue to foster best practice methods, which nine times out of 10 is human interaction. No one can teach a child like a human.”
