Bianca Seward/Houston Public Media
Protestors hold up signs outside of a Cypress event featuring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Oct. 21, 2025.
School board elections are often uneventful. But after months of board infighting, secret recordings and a surge of campaign cash making it one of the most expensive races in recent history, the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD School Board of Trustees race is anything but quiet.
Cy-Fair ISD has three trustee seats on the Nov. 4 ballot, with the early voting period ending Friday. It’s the third-largest school district in Texas and the board oversees 117,000 students as well as a $1.2 billion budget. Elected officials on the board serve four-year terms.
Two years ago, political conservatives gained a 6-1 majority on the board and have since then implemented a number of right-wing policies, including aggressive book-banning practices, the addition of Bible-focused elective courses and deleting 13 middle school textbook chapters that touched on topics such as vaccines, diversity and climate change.
Over the last few years, a red wave captured several Houston-area school boards. In Katy ISD, Clear Creek ISD and Fort Bend ISD, conservative majorities took hold, but those same school boards have seen a recent swing back toward the center of the political spectrum.
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“This election is a microcosm of school board battles across Texas,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “Conservatives have won victories in several districts, but some backlash has left those wins vulnerable. The Cy-Fair race will tell us a lot about how much conservative bite there is in school board politics in suburban areas.”
After Katy ISD voters in May eliminated the district’s conservative majority by ousting school board president Victor Perez, who championed controversial policies regarding gender identity, some voters and parents in Cy-Fair ISD are hoping for a similar swing.
“It is time to take our schools back, to bring back safety and sanity, to make our school board meetings boring again,” said Tara Cummings, the parent of a high school student in Cy-Fair ISD.
Cummings is concerned about the direction of the school board in the suburb northwest of Houston.
“Over the last four years, Christian nationalist extremists have taken over our school board and have done just massive damage,” she said.
Among the candidates this fall, two slates have emerged. In hopes of breaking or keeping the majority, two teams of three candidates running for each position have banded together.
School board races are technically nonpartisan, meaning candidates do not have official party labels. However, the “NRG” slate in Cy-Fair ISD has self-identified as the conservative candidates.
RELATED: Here is what’s on the November 2025 ballot in Harris County
“[This race] illustrates how the partisan dynamics that have shaped the rest of the country have crept into these nonpartisan races,” Rottinghaus said. “Although these school board elections are officially nonpartisan in Texas, this election is definitely replete with partisan influence outside money and ideological slates. So I think this is a race that will tell us a lot about where the shifting balance of power is in terms of these big suburban school districts in Texas.”
Current trustee Natalie Blasingame (position 6), along with Radele Walker (position 5) and George Edwards (position 7), have nicknamed their slate “NRG” after the first initials of their first names. The trio has been endorsed by Glorious Way Church, the Harris County Republican Party, the Texas Republican Party and others.
Blasingame is currently the vice president of the board and holds the position 5 seat. She is now running for position 6 against her former ally and current board president Scott Henry.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott held a “Get Out the Vote” event on Oct. 21 in Cypress that was advertised online as an event supporting the conservative Cy-Fair ISD candidates. The night before the rally, Blasingame posted to her Facebook page that a “yuge endorsement announcement” was coming.
Blasingame, Walker and Edwards were present at the governor’s event and nodded along when he talked about education broadly and some of the issues they’re running on, but he did not mention the Cy-Fair school board race and did not endorse or even mention any of the candidates’ names.
Cypress Republicans via Facebook
Cy-Fair ISD trustee Natalie Blasingame, right, along with school board candidates George Edwards, left, and Radele Walker, pose with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during an event in Cypress on Oct. 21, 2025.
Neither Walker, Edwards nor Henry responded to requests for an interview or comment. Blasingame declined an interview request, saying she had been “unfairly portrayed in the media.”
Running against them are Lesley Guilmart (position 5), Cleveland Lane Jr. (position 6) and Kendra Camarena (position 7). They say they’re running as the “pro-public education” slate.
“We all have current students in the district. We all currently [have] skin in the game,” Guilmart said. “The other slate does not. The other slate is not entirely made up of educators, and they also, again, aren’t advocating to our elected officials for the level of funding we need.”
Four years ago, when Blasingame and Henry were first elected, Guilmart and other parents formed the nonpartisan group Cy-Fair Civic Alliance, now Cy-Fair Families for Public Schools, to “protect local public schools from political and religious extremists.”
“When our then six-to-one extremist board majority voted to cut bus routes and then spent the summer censoring instructional materials,” Guilmart said, “I just got really fed up and decided I wanted to run at that point.”
In an interview with Houston Public Media, Guilmart said she thinks Blasingame running against Henry is an “indication that the folks behind the curtain that hold the purse string want school boards in a more right-wing agenda.”
There are two more candidates running for the board. Terrance Edmond is on the ballot as a candidate for position 5, though he did not participate in the district’s candidate forum in October, and Elecia Jones is running for position 7. Both of Edmond’s campaign finance reports show no money raised and $138 spent. Jones’ show $55 raised and nothing spent.
Conservatives splintered
Four years ago, Blasingame and Henry ran for the position 5 and 6 board seats, respectively. They ran as a trio alongside Lucas Scanlon, who is not seeking re-election, as a conservative slate fighting against “divisive agendas” in schools. They were backed by the Harris County Republican Party.
The three worked in tandem to push conservative policies like a library materials policy which passed unanimously in 2022 to give more autonomy to parents to choose what reading materials were appropriate for their child.
However, in 2024, Henry and Blasingame’s votes began to differ. When Blasingame pushed a policy that would create official chaplain positions in the district, the board, including Henry, voted it down. Henry also voted to temporarily raise taxes and voted in favor of passing the 2025-2026 budget, on which Blasingame abstained from voting.
Bianca Seward/Houston Public Media
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks to a crowd of supporters during an event in Cypress on Oct. 21, 2025.
Blasingame was asked about running against Henry in an hour-long appearance on the Chris Heasley Show.
“We worked well together for a while, but [Henry] went left on me,” she said.
She added that Henry and Scanlon had previously questioned her for inappropriate vendor relationships. Blasingame has been accused of secretly recording her colleagues and one of their wives. In that same Chris Heasley Show interview, Blasingame says she told her colleagues when she was recording them and that it’s legal for her to do so because Texas is a one-party consent state. She says she recorded a separate conversation with Scanlon’s wife – though did not name her – and says complaints about the recordings happened after she was endorsed over Henry by the Harris County Republicans.
“Now that the election got tricky, they started to throw [the recordings] out there,” Blasingame said on the Chris Heasley Show.
The Harris County Republicans moved to endorse Blasingame over Henry in August. Precinct Chair Judi DeHaan proposed a motion in September to revoke the endorsement over concerns for “Blasingame’s recent actions,” but ultimately withdrew the motion and the endorsement was upheld.
Neither DeHaan nor the Harris County Republican Party responded to a request for comment.
Cy-Fair ISD trustee Julie Hinaman, often the lone dissenter against the conservative majority, took to social media to air her concerns about Blasingame’s plans if elected to another term. A few days after the Oct. 15 candidate forum, Hinaman called out the “NRG” conservative slate in a Facebook post, warning that if the slate “supported, managed, and controlled by state and local political groups is elected, CFISD will no longer be independently governed and locally focused, but will be governed by a politically driven and politically beholden school board.”
Hinaman also wrote that if Blasingame, Walker and Edwards are elected to the board, it would result in “additional removal of librarians on campuses,” “disregard for basic ethics” and a “disregard for separation of church and state.”
RELATED: Cy-Fair ISD’s libraries are frequently closed after trustees cut librarian positions in half
Splitting up the conservative vote in position 6 is a gamble. It could leave a path for Lane, a nonpartisan candidate, to grab the school board seat.
“The ideological churn we’re seeing in these districts is that you’ve got a lot of internal competition,” Rottinghaus said. “That internal competition can lead to a candidate who maybe isn’t aligned with one of the other of these dominant factions to have a chance to win.”
When asked if this helps or hurts him in the race, Lane said he is focused on his own campaign.
“No matter what’s going on with the people that I’m running with, I’m going to put my best foot forward and show individuals that my passion is education and I want their children to excel,” he said.
‘Gut check’
Rottinghaus said a win by a nonpartisan slate would be “at least a little bit of a gut check when it comes to how conservatives are pressing some of their issues on the school boards.”
He added that because it’s an off-year election cycle, meaning no other major or high-profile offices or candidates are on the ballot, it’s unfair to over-ascribe meaning to the election results.
In 2023, just 16% of eligible voters participated in the Cy-Fair ISD school board race that locked the board into a 6-1 conservative majority.
“Looking at the kind of tea leaves on this is a little bit opaque,” Rottinghaus said, while adding, “I think most voters on the school board elections prioritize pragmatism. They want to see centrism in the sense that it helps to get things done.”
Bianca Seward/Houston Public Media
Protestors outside a Cypress event featuring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Oct. 21, 2025, hold up signs in support of Cy-Fair ISD school board candidates Kendra Camarena, Lesley Guilmart and Cleveland Lane Jr.
Cy-Fair’s race this year, however, has grabbed the attention of the governor. And a flood of cash has poured into the campaigns.
Campaign finance reports released Monday show a second wave of cash coming into the campaigns. The first round of reports showed nearly $200,000 had poured into the race, raised by the individual campaigns and political action committees.
“That definitely is a signal of how important these races have become,” Rottinghaus said. “These used to be about community activism. It used to be about parents running the boards, but now it’s a lot more of a kind of professional political operation, so you’re seeing a lot more money flow into it as a result.”
Rottinghaus adds that because in recent years education funding has been more limited, it becomes more complicated for incumbents to hold on to their seats.
“If this was a time where education funding was flush and all the districts were totally brimming with cash, then I don’t know that we’d have this kind of fight,” Rottinghaus said. “But because the money is tight, it starts to bleed into some of these political concerns and some finger pointing that otherwise might not exist.”
Turnout will be critical on Election Day. Reports from the Harris County Clerk’s Office show that polling locations in the Cy-Fair area have seen some of the most robust turnout during early voting.
“We’re going to just make sure people get out and vote,” Lane said. “We want to put the trust back in ‘trustee.'”