POTTSTOWN >> First-time candidate Diana Stitt was the odd-man out in the six-person race for five open seats in the Pottstown School Board, one of which went to a student in the high school.
According to unofficial results posted on the Montgomery County election web site, the winners were, in order of votes: Andrew Kefer with 2,111; Ron Williams with 2,085; Emanuel Wilkerson with 2,033, Kurt Heidel with 2,006 and Katina Bearden, with 1,405.
Bearden ran only on the Democratic line and Stitt, who won 939 votes, only on the Republican line.
Bearden, Kefer and Williams are all incumbents and Wilkerson is an incumbent of a sort.
A Pottstown High School senior, he is currently a non-voting student representative on the school board.
He was not 18 when the deadline for registering for the primary election passed, but was by the time the primary election was held.
He won both a Republican and Democratic line on the November ballot through an active write-in campaign.
“We made history today,” said Wilkerson. “And by ‘we’ I mean the student body, my family and the community. I couldn’t have done it without all three.”
“We’ve shown the people that the students are the future and we need to step up and exercise our civic duty,” he said.
Wilkerson was among the student representatives who pushed the school board to suspend its uniform policy at the high school on an experimental basis to see if the students could conform to the dress code without requiring uniforms.
Bearden who was not on the primary ballot do to a filing mix-up, won a write-in campaign for the Democratic ballot line not sought by Stitt.
