Two former school board members are running for a vacant Senate seat in a west Boise swing district.

Republican Sen. Codi Galloway did not seek re-election this year in District 15, opening the seat for a race between Democrat Nancy Gregory, who just ended a 24-year run as a trustee for the Boise School District, and Republican Desi Burbank, the secretary of the Idaho PTA who previously served as a school board member on a North Carolina military base.

Gregory wants to bring her decades of experience with school governance to the Legislature. She advocated for Boise schools for 24 years, but said that won’t her mission as a senator.

“I’m not being elected as an advocate for Boise schools,” Gregory said. “That’s the set of trustees who are sitting. That’s their job. That’s not my job anymore. And I’m focused on D15 and the role of state government.”

She said the Legislature has been chaotic lately, and lawmakers need to be more responsible, transparent and predictable.

“I think that’s good PR,” she said. “When you are doing your work well, your public perception improves.”

Burbank, a mother of six, is also a former school board member, but in a very different role for Department of Defense schools.

Her husband served in the Army and was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. School board members on a military base, she said, are not elected and instead act as advisors to the superintendent. That experience showed her that teachers are a school’s greatest asset.

“Teachers are the ones with boots on the ground making things happen, and they really can make or break a student’s love of schooling,” she said.

Burbank is a fiscal and social conservative, but said she isn’t fully aligned with the Idaho GOP platform.

“There’s going to be things that I might even agree with Democrats more than Republicans,” she said.

The Senate seat in District 15 flipped from blue to red in 2024, when Galloway defeated incumbent Democrat Rick Just by a 1.77% margin. A Constitution Party candidate received 2.24% of the vote.

The district’s two House seats are split. Democrat Rep. Steve Berch controls Seat A, and now faces Republican Steve Kesyer, and Republican Dori Healey holds Seat B, and faces Democrat Jae Etchart.

With no unaffiliated or third party candidates on the ballot in District 15, West Boise voters will have three clean races between Republicans and Democrats on Nov. 3.

When she was president of the Idaho School Boards Association, Gregory said Boise sometimes had to take a knee in order to help out other districts with different needs.

“That’s how I will legislate,” Gregory said. “I will look at the benefit that comes to the state. Being a state senator means that I have to have a bigger lens, but I will be focusing on what the constituents in D15 are telling me.”

First elected as a trustee in 2002, Gregory said she’s seen a lot of educational swings. Back then, she was told she had to get a fax machine to receive materials. Now, the school board livestreams every meeting for the world to see.

She saw the evolution of education through No Child Left Behind, a recession, the Luna Laws, a global pandemic and four U.S. presidents. She passed 24 school district budgets and worked through shifts in curriculum, professional development and strategic planning.

“I have to say that it’s been so fascinating to watch the evolution of educational governance over the past 24 years, and we continue to refine our process,” Gregory said.

She told EdNews she is running to bring all of that experience to the Legislature. She recognizes what happens at the Statehouse impacts schools, families and communities.

Gregory said lawmakers have spent a lot of time on cultural and ideological issues, but the public wants them to focus on affordability, the cost of groceries and protecting public lands.

“The culture that exists outside of the school building affects the mental state of students that walk into our buildings every day, and I wish that they would just let us deal with it and teach kids,” Gregory said.

On education issues, Gregory said she doesn’t want to see another dollar put into the $50 million Parental Choice Tax Credit and would prefer to see it defunded. She would like data on the income levels of families that use the tax credit and, if elected, would ask for more accountability.

She said House Bill 516, which places limits on teachers’ union activities, is disrespectful and has made it harder for teachers to have a simple conversation inside a school building.

“It was a real blow to teachers in terms of the kind of respect that they get as workers,” she said.

She said she is interested in serving on the Senate Education Committee and is interested in influencing the budget process. She said the past two sessions have been “fairly chaotic” with so many “gotchas,” including the radiator cap process used to pass HB 516 on the final day of the session.

“That’s not respectful of the people who are trying to pay attention to what the legislators are doing, and just the fact that they did it was a testament that they didn’t want us to know what they were doing until the very last minute,” Gregory said.

She described herself as a reasonable, approachable collaborator who likes to do the work of governance.

“If anything, I would encourage us, as an elected Legislature, to check ourselves, to ask ourselves: Is this respectful? Is this a transparent form of government? Can we do better?” she said.

As a school board member for Department of Defense schools in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Burbank was the eyes and ears of the superintendent.

Now, she wants to be the voice of parents in the Idaho Legislature.

Burbank grew up in Eastern Idaho attending Sugar Salem schools and met her husband at Utah State University. Together, they moved to California, where her husband studied to become a dentist for the Army. During his nine years of military service, they were stationed in North Carolina and Oklahoma before coming back home to Idaho.

Along the way, she raised six kids. All have attended public schools. She’s now secretary of the Idaho PTA.

“Being here in the Treasure Valley has just been — it’s just exceeded all of my expectations,” Burbank said. “Even as an Idaho kid, it’s exceeded my expectations.”

While stationed at Fort Bragg, Burbank got involved in education. She was the PTA secretary, PTA president, then a school board member. But the role of a board member on a military base is a bit different. She wasn’t elected, and described it as more of a parent advisory board for the superintendent.

According to the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, Fort Bragg spans 251 square miles and hosts the largest military housing unit in the world.

Burbank said there was one middle school and seven or eight elementary schools during her time on base. While on the board, the base went through redistricting, which she said was not popular. Some schools were decommissioned.

“We experienced a lot in those two years, besides having another baby during that time too, and my husband was in residency at the time, so it was a little crazy,” Burbank said.

Throughout that time, she said she realized she is much happier when she is involved and contributing to the community. And that teachers are a school’s greatest asset.

“Teachers around the country, not just here in Idaho, but our teachers everywhere we have lived,” she said. “That has been the consistent thing.”

She’s had a great experience with public education in Idaho, but has noticed one difference compared with schools in Fort Bragg. The military provided preschool and kindergarten with a full-time teacher and full-time aide in every classroom. The state of Idaho does not provide any funding for pre-K.

“That was just huge for our kids, and provided that gateway to education,” Burbank said of universal preschool. “So when kindergarten came, that was an easy transition.”

Burbank described herself as a thoughtful, social, fiscal conservative, but she doesn’t fully align with the Idaho GOP platform. Specifically, she takes issue with the party’s stance on higher education funding. She said investing in higher education is an investment in Idaho.

“I like to hear both sides,” Burbank said. “I like to hear what the Democrats are saying, or what the Republicans are saying, and recognize that there’s a whole spectrum within both parties as well.”

When asked about social issues — including the transgender bathroom bill and Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which prohibits transgender girls from playing girls sports — Burbank said it is important to protect kids from a man coming into a woman’s bathroom and to keep biological males out of women’s sports.

“We’re worried about protecting our kids and making sure that our kids have safe places, whether that’s sports or bathrooms,” Burbank said.

She added that she has family and friends who are part of the LGBTQ community and they need to be loved and respected.

Burbank was a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed this summer against Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane and Attorney General Raúl Labrador to overturn the state’s limits on coordinated expenses between political parties and candidates, as Boise State Public Radio first reported.

“Plaintiff Desi Burbank is a current Republican candidate for the Idaho Senate in Legislative District 15 who wishes to coordinate without limitation campaign expenditures with her official Republican party organizations,” the complaint states.

But the other plaintiffs, the Idaho Majority Club and the Libertarian Party of Idaho, filed an amended complaint a week later, removing Burbank as a plaintiff.

Burbank told EdNews she originally joined as a plaintiff after a couple of lawyers approached her and asked if she wanted to be involved with updating Idaho law to match federal law on contribution limits between parties and candidates. But she said she was surprised when she saw the lawsuit was filed with her name on it.

“When all was said and done, it wasn’t at all what they had said, and so I immediately pulled my name off of the lawsuit,” Burbank said. “So there’s really no story there except for that.”

With one month until Election Day, Burbank said voters in District 15 are looking for a senator they can trust, who will listen and represent them well.

“I hope that voters realize that this election matters, that voting local matters,” Burbank said. “There’s a lot of disinterest, apathy, frustration with what’s going on nationally. But what really matters is voting here locally.”