Ventura County voters have a rare opportunity this year to elect a county superintendent of schools from a truly blank slate.
Though the position is an elected one, the last five county superintendents were appointed to the job at first, to replace a predecessor who retired midway through the term. And when those superintendents stood for re-election, they almost never faced opposition.
This year, the incumbent lost in the June primary, in the first contested election for the office since 1998. The runoff coming up in November will be the first election without an incumbent county superintendent on the ballot since 1934.
The candidates in the runoff are Karen Sher, a middle school teacher and elected high school district board trustee in Oxnard;
and Maggie Marschner, an education consultant and former teacher who was the last principal of La Reina High School and Middle School, an all-girls Catholic school in Thousand Oaks that closed in 2024.
Sher came in first in the primary, with 42% of the vote, and Marschner was second, with 33%. In county elections, when no candidate reaches 50% of the vote, the top two advance to a runoff.
The current county superintendent is César Morales. He was appointed to the job in 2021 by the Ventura County Board of Education – an elected body that shares governance with the superintendent over the Ventura County Office of Education – and elected without opposition in 2022.
In June, Morales placed third in the three-person primary, with 25% of the vote. Records of 19th-century elections are hard to come by, but the archives of the Ventura Free Press, a predecessor to The Star, indicate that the last superintendent of schools before Morales to lose a re-election bid was Charles T. Meredith in 1890.
About the county superintendent's office and the candidates
The Ventura County Office of Education has about 700 employees and $135 million in its general operating fund. That makes it smaller than the county's larger local school districts, including those in Ventura, Oxnard, the Conejo Valley and Simi Valley.
The county superintendent does not directly run most of the county's public schools; that job falls to the elected school boards and appointed superintendents in each local district.
The county office provides budget oversight, payroll processing, teacher training and other services for school districts and puts on science fairs, mock trials and other programs for students. It also oversees some of the county's charter schools, and it runs a few schools and academic programs itself, including ones for students with special needs and those incarcerated in juvenile justice facilities.
Both of the candidates for superintendent point to teacher training as an area where the county office can do more, especially when it comes to spreading best practices in basic reading and math instruction.
In 2025, 48% of students in Ventura County public schools met or exceeded the state standards on the annual standardized test for English and 35% met or exceeded the standard in math. Both figures were slightly below the state's overall scores.
Sher, 56, grew up in Thousand Oaks and moved to New York for college, first earning a bachelor's degree from Buffalo State University and then a master's from State University of New York at Albany. She recently finished a doctor of education degree at the University of Southern California.
She moved back to Ventura County in 1999, and since then she's been a middle school teacher in the Oxnard School District. For the past three years, Sher has been on special assignment with the California Department of Education, as the department's director of teacher recruitment.
Sher lives in Camarillo, which is part of the Oxnard Union High School District. She was elected to the high school district's board of trustees in 2014 and is wrapping up her third term on that board.
She said her major accomplishments as a trustee include managing the transition to remote school when the pandemic started in 2020; planning to build affordable housing for teachers on district property; and overseeing a steady improvement in the district's graduation rate, which was about 93% last year.
Marschner, 45, was born in Ventura, grew up in Camarillo and now lives in Port Hueneme. Her family moved to Las Vegas when she was in high school, and she came back there after college to take her first teaching job.
She taught in public and private schools in Las Vegas, and she also worked there as a reading intervention specialist, a school district administrator and an elementary school principal. In 2019, Marschner returned to Ventura County to take the principal's job at La Reina, a school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame, a Catholic religious order.
Midway through her fifth year as principal, the school's board of directors announced La Reina would close at the end of the school year.
Some parents were outraged, and filed a lawsuit that is still working its way through the courts, claiming that they paid tuition and donated to the school even when its board members knew it was destined to close. The suit does not name Marschner as a defendant, and she said she only learned of the planned closure a week before the students and parents did.
Sher called La Reina "a failing school" and "a sinking ship" under Marschner's leadership. Marschner said she's proud of her work, especially in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, and does not consider the school to have been failing.
"We did incredible things there. The closure was forces outside of us," she said. "It's a decision for the Sisters of Notre Dame. They have a global and a national perspective for their order."
Board majority supports Marschner
Though the office of county superintendent race is nonpartisan, with no party affiliations listed on the ballot, there is a partisan split in the race. Sher is a Democrat, and she has the support of the Ventura County Democratic Party, as well as the California Federation of Teachers union and prominent Democratic politicians, including State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and State Treasurer Fiona Ma.
Marschner is registered as a No Party Preference voter. She has been endorsed by the Ventura County Republican Party, as well as the three Republican members of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors.
Marschner also has the endorsement of three of the five current members of the Ventura County Board of Education. None of the trustees have endorsed Sher.
Rachel Ulrich, who represents Ventura, Ojai and parts of Oxnard on the board, is one of the trustees supporting Marschner. Ulrich said she's "a lifelong Democrat" and only issued her endorsement after "a long discussion with Maggie about her understanding of this role being completely nonpartisan."
Ulrich said she couldn't support Sher after she learned that Sher used her official Oxnard Union High School District email account to send an invitation to a campaign fundraiser for Richard Barrera, a Democrat running for state superintendent of public instruction.
Using government email or other resources for campaign activity is illegal in California, and the state Fair Political Practices Commission received a complaint in September about Sher's email. The FPPC notified Sher on Sept. 18 that it would not be pursuing any enforcement action against her.
Sher told The Star last month that she "made a mistake" and considers the matter settled due to the FPPC's statement that it will not be pursuing enforcement. She would not elaborate on why she used her government account rather than a personal or campaign email address.
Ulrich said the incident reminded her too much of Morales' actions in office, particularly when Morales said he hadn't known that the California Education Code does not allow county superintendents to give themselves raises or bonuses or increase employee retirement benefits without board approval.
"We're still dealing with not getting all of the truth out of the County Office of Education, fighting tooth and nail to find out what is actually happening, and to have one of the candidates send out election stuff on their district letterhead and email just to turn around and say, 'Oops,' I have to be able to believe what someone is telling me," Ulrich said.
Sher said she isn't concerned about her potential future working relationship with Board of Education trustees who have endorsed her opponent.
"I have strong working and collaborative relationships with education leaders across the county, which is why dozens have supported me," she said via text message. "I look forward to working with the board."
Candidates agree: Trust must be rebuilt
Morales' re-election hopes took a series of blows over the spring and summer when it was revealed that he gave himself a $16,000 bonus without the board's approval, as required by law; that he gave his top deputies lifetime health benefits without the required board approval; and that his office spent as much as $265,000 per year on branded merchandise.
Morales returned the unauthorized bonus and rescinded the lifetime health benefits promised to his employees. In response to the reports of improper spending, the Ventura County Board of Education instituted new oversight measures and hired a consultant to do a forensic audit of the office's finances.
Sher and Marschner both speak of transparency as the most important element in rebuilding the public's trust in the office.
"Every public dollar should be spent like it belongs to the students and families that we serve," Sher said during a League of Women Voters candidate forum on Oct. 5 in Camarillo.
In an interview a few days before the candidates forum, Marschner said there appears to be "a systemic issue that we have to address and figure out."
"We need to look at everything and figure out what's going on and then the focus needs to be put back on the kids," she said.
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism. The foundation plays no role in story selection. The Star retains full editorial control.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: County superintendent race wide open for first time in a century
