Five seats on the Memphis-Shelby County Schools board drew healthy-sized fields of contenders at the Thursday, April 4, noon deadline for candidates to get on the Aug. 1 ballot of state and federal primaries and nonpartisan local elections.

Here is the Shelby County Election Commission’s list of those who qualified at the deadline. The list is not a full accounting of candidates in the statewide primaries for U.S. Senate.

The only school board seat without an incumbent seeking reelection is the District 4 seat, held by Kevin Woods.

Candidate field set for Arlington elections

The five contenders are:

• James Bacchus, an education consultant and former high school principal at Hamilton and Kingsbury.
• Alvin Crook, a Memphis Light, Gas and Water employee and coach at Memphis School of Excellence.
• Tamarques Porter, an information-technology specialist with the Internal Revenue Service and Tennessee Higher Education Initiative board member.
• Eric Harris, the founder of Jessran — a year-round pre-kindergarten program for children as young as two years old.
• Anecia Washington.

Meanwhile, MSCS board chairwoman Althea Greene drew challenges in District 2 from Natalie McKinney, the school systems former policy director and executive director of Whole Child Strategies, as well as Ernest Gillespie, a special-projects coordinator at Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

District 3 incumbent Stephanie Love is being challenged by Memphis-Shelby County Education Association director Jesse Jeff; Ozell Pace Jr., a residential services coordinator at Youth Villages; and Angela Rogers.

District 5 incumbent Mauricio Calvo has opposition from Audrey Elion and Sable Otey.

• Elion is a management consultant and codirector of “Sowing Justice,” a nonprofit environmental group in the Alcy-Ball area.
• Otey is a financial and fitness coach who was on the U.S. bobsled team in the 2018 Winter Olympics and a physical-education teacher in the school system.

District 7 incumbent Frank Johnson faces challengers Chavez Donelson, Danielle Huggins, Towanna Murphy and Jason Sharif.

• Murphy ran for City Council in 2023.
• Sharif is founder of the Respect The Haven Community Development Corporation in Whitehaven.
• Donelson’s website says he is a community leader active in the Alcy-Ball area. A video also posted on social media supports Republican candidates and shows a video snippet of former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign appearance in Millington.
• Huggins is an elementary school teacher with MSCS and a travel agent.

All the candidates who made the Thursday deadline in the primaries and nonpartisan general election races have another week to withdraw from the ballot if they wish.

All those who made Thursday’s deadline for filing in the Republican primaries with the Shelby County Election Commission must then clear the Tennessee Republican Party’s rigid requirement that any of its primary candidates must have voted in three of the last four state Republican primaries.

In the Shelby County delegation to the Tennessee Legislature, several incumbents won election at the deadline by virtue of no opposition in their primary or the companion primary on the August ballot.

They are:

• Kevin Vaughan, Republican, State House District 95
• Jesse Chism, Democrat, State House District 85
• Karen Camper, Democrat, State House District 87
• Torrey Harris, Democrat, State House District 91

The Shelby County delegation has one open seat, a seat where there is no incumbent seeking reelection.

District 96 Democrat Dwayne Thompson is not seeking another two-year term in the capitol.

He is backing former Shelby County Democratic Party chairwoman Gabby Salinas in what looks to be a crowded Democratic primary.

A total of six other contenders checked out petitions for the Democratic primary and none in the companion Republican primary.

By Thursday’s filing deadline, four other contenders had filed to get into the Democratic primary with Salinas:

• Telisa Franklin, a promoter and president of the Memphis Juneteenth Festival.
• Eric Dunn, who has run several races for elected office, including the Shelby County Board of Commissioners in 2018.
• David Winston, managing partner at Film Capital Strategies, who ran for Memphis City Council in 2018.
• Orrden Williams, a perennial candidate.

The winner of the Democratic primary will claim the seat and keep it in the Democratic column.

The only Republican in the Shelby County state House delegation with a challenger is District 97 incumbent John Gillespie.

Christina Oppenhuizen qualified for the August primary at the Thursday deadline after turning in her petition earlier but not having enough signatures of voters living in the district.

The winner faces Democrat Jesse Huseth in the November general election.

Huseth had no primary opposition.

“This state is restless,” Huseth said Tuesday, April 2, at an East Memphis fundraiser that drew a crowd of 50 to the Brookhaven Grill. “Blue and red people are fed up.”

Huseth didn’t focus on Gillespie but on the Tennessee Legislature as a whole, calling for the state to expand Medicaid coverage and reverse the state’s near-total ban on abortion access as well as “defend public schools.”

Huseth also praised the Tennessee Promise program of former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam that offers two tuition-free years of college at the state’s community colleges, noting that Haslam is a Republican.

Sara Kyle, a Democrat, in State Senate District 30 is unopposed in the primary with no contenders in the district’s Republican primary. But Kyle will face independent Mitchell Morrison on the November general election ballot.

Several of the legislative races advance to November general election matchups because the incumbent and a challenger from the other party are each running unopposed in their respective primaries.

That is the case in:

• District 99, where Republican incumbent Tom Leatherwood meets independent challenger William Mouzon, a network engineer at Williams-Sonoma Inc. and minister at Morning Grove Baptist Church, in November.
• District 98, where Democratic incumbent Antonio Parkinson is paired with Republican challenger Cecil Hale in November.