DeSantis school board appointees failed in Broward. Will Adam Cervera succeed?

In the cast of characters on the Broward County School Board, Adam Cervera stands out.

He’s the only Republican, the only sitting member appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the only incumbent running against four opponents. Conventional wisdom would suggest that in deep blue Broward, the only true Democratic stronghold in South Florida, Cervera would have an uphill battle securing the seat he’s held for just over a year. After all, DeSantis’ school board appointees Torey Alston and Daniel Foganholi failed their reelection bids just two years ago.

But none of that seems to matter for Cervera, a 42-year-old attorney, in the Aug. 18 race for District 6, which includes Weston, Cooper City, Davie, Plantation and Sunrise. He’s the first Republican in at least 10 years to secure a coveted endorsement from the Broward Teachers Union, along with support from local police and firefighter unions. His campaign has out-fundraised his competitors and fellow school board incumbents with a whopping $340,000 in contributions, about $300,000 of which he loaned to himself. And he’s quickly made a splash among parents and teachers concerned by the Broward County Public School District’s dire budget constraints and imminent job cuts.

He might just be the one DeSantis appointee that sticks. And he feels confident.

“Everybody loves Cervera. I don’t say that to be a wise guy,” Cervera said. “I have support from the leftest of left and the rightest of right.”

But Cervera is not without his critics who say his time on the board may soon end the same way Alston and Foganholi’s did. A candidate in the District 6 race needs over 50 percent of the vote to win outright on Aug. 18. Otherwise, the top two candidates will advance to a Nov. 3 run-off election.

“At the end of the day, he has to face his voters,” said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic political consultant. “I would say the environment in ‘24 was more favorable for Republicans. In ‘26, it’s far worse.”

The DeSantis Era

Before there was Cervera, there was the so-called “DeSantis Five.”

In 2022, an explosive grand jury report that found serious neglect and failures regarding school renovations and safety procedures led to the removal of four school board members. (Former Superintendent Robert Runcie resigned in 2021 after he was arrested on perjury charges. A fifth school board member stepped down from the board to run for State Senate, leaving another vacant seat.)

DeSantis filled the five open seats with conservatives, and the nine-member majority liberal board suddenly leaned conservative.

The school board is officially nonpartisan, but critics believed DeSantis’ installation of five conservative board members was a politically-motivated power grab in a heavily Democratic county. It was a chaotic, divisive time for Broward County Public Schools, said Amy Shield, a Parkland resident, parent and administrator of the popular Facebook group Concerned Citizens of Broward County, which was created after the Parkland school shooting.

“The board was at war with each other,” said Shield, who has closely watched the school board for years.

Tensions were high even before DeSantis removed board members, Shield recalled. At the time, school board meetings nationwide were ground zero for culture war battles over LGBTQ policies, wearing masks and book bans. Broward was no exception, though the school district was dealing with serious administrative drama as well. “We had COVID. We had a new superintendent. The grand jury. It was everything at once,” Shield said.

There was little common ground to be found on and off the dais, even when it came to the district’s financial and administrative issues, Shield said.

“They came in hot, we accepted them hot,” said Broward Teachers Union president Anna Fusco, who was critical of the governor’s decision to remove elected board members. “And then it made a bad mixture.”

The rare Republican majority on the board only lasted for three months, but the impact was huge. The appointees voted to fire Vickie Cartwright as superintendent in a 5-4 decision.

Republican Brenda Fam was elected to fill a seat in 2022, but her other two conservative colleagues appointed by DeSantis lost their seats in 2024, leaving her as the lone conservative on the school board. She stepped down last year, citing a “toxic environment” in the district. Once again, DeSantis appointed a replacement to finish her term. But this time, things felt different.

Fusco noted that Cervera entered the board under less politically-fraught circumstances. He replaced a board member who chose to leave, not one who was plucked out of the seat.

“I think the board is much calmer now. They’re more congenial with each other,” Shield said. “I don’t know that any of the problems have been fixed. I think people got tired.”

Cervera’s Era

Cervera did not aspire to sit on the Broward County School Board. But when the call came last year, he said he saw an opportunity to give back to the school district he grew up in.

He spent his formative years in Coral Springs and graduated from J.P. Taravella High School. He went to the University of Central Florida for undergrad and Florida International University for law school. He is a partner with Association Law Group.

“Coral Springs and Broward County lifted me up. It’s a great place to grow up,” he said.

His appointment to the school board raised eyebrows as some questioned if Cervera was more of a Miami guy than a true Broward local — a narrative Cervera pushes back on and his opponents like to bring up.

Last March, four weeks before DeSantis appointed him to the school board, Cervera changed his longtime voter registration from his Miami-Dade home to his mother’s condominium in Tamarac, the Sun Sentinel reported. Cervera told the Herald that he and his family moved to Weston, and his children attend Catholic school.

“If you’re going to be making decisions for the district, you need to live in the district, and I believe that you need to have a vested interest by deciding that your children should be going to school in the district, as well,” said Jessie Bastos, a Davie resident who is running against Cervera.

Cervera made headlines in December when he called for the resignation of Broward Schools Chief Operations Officer Wanda Paul, who he said was responsible for several financial blunders, including a now-terminated $2.6 million office lease. Paul resigned hours later.

“It set the tone that, as far as I’m concerned and as far as the district is concerned, these folks need to know that I’m not ‘go along to get along.’ I’m not that guy,” Cervera said. “I’m the one who’s going to go against the grain.”

Cervera held a solo conference calling for the state’s “DOGE” task force to investigate the school district the day after DeSantis called Broward County Public Schools a “disaster,” sparred with the Broward County tax collector for withholding $5.5 million from the district and sided with students who spoke out against plans to hold graduation ceremonies in school gyms.

Another blockbluster moment came at the May school board meeting when the board voted to cut 1,000 job positions to save the district about $54 million. Cervera, who voted against the plan, made several back-to-back motions in an effort to eliminate top-level positions with mixed success.

Cervera said his experience on the board so far shows voters why he’s right for the job. If elected, his goals include securing a 7 percent raise for teachers and addressing the district’s $100 million budget deficit by cutting “a lot of the fat at the top.”

“Anybody who wants to know what I’m about, I have a track record,” he said. “You know what I stand for, you know where I’m at.”

Shield said Cervera benefits from both a milder political climate on the dais and his willingness to talk to parents to resolve day-to-day issues that may seem small in the grand scheme of things.

“"He’s super responsive. He gives his phone number out to everyone,” Shield said.

Politics in a nonpartisan race

The Broward Teachers Union has not endorsed a Republican since before Fusco was elected union president in 2016.

But when it came time for BTU to endorse a candidate, Fusco said the union didn’t consider political parties, only if the person is right for the job. When it came to Cervera, “don’t fix what’s not broke,” Fusco said.

“When he first got on board, I was like, ‘Ah, fudge, I got another problem here.’ ... But I’ll tell you what he does,” Fusco said. “He can hear my message no matter how I bring it, and that’s what separates him from a lot of the board members. They’re too fixated on how they’re being talked to.”

The four candidates running against Cervera are Bastos, a 47-year-old technology sales executive and member of the Broward County Soil & Water Conservation District; Roberto Fernandez III, a 46-year-old teacher from Sunrise; Makai Aline Henry, a 20-year-old Nova High graduate; and Lester Wilks Jr., a 38-year-old after-care center owner. Cervera is the only Republican running.

If campaign fundraising was any indication of Cervera’s main competition, that would be Bastos, who has $57,000 in contributions, including about $40,000 in loans to herself. Bastos, whose children attended schools in District 6, touts her decades of business experience as a strong asset to solving BCPS’s budget woes.

“The number one problem facing Broward public schools is that we are in a financial crisis, and we need more people with business acumen who can come in with fresh ideas from the private sector and help turn the organization around,” Bastos said.

Bastos and Cervera are also at odds over a recent defamation lawsuit Cervera filed against political consultant Michael Worley and his political action committee Making Democracy Work. A “Republican Voter Alert” text message blast sent to voters accused Cervera of using public funds to support Democrats in an ad, which Cervera denies. Worley’s consulting firm, which mainly works with Democrats, represents Bastos.

“I was not going to sit by while the political consultant behind Jessie Bastos’ campaign knowingly spreads falsehoods to mislead voters,” Cervera said in a statement. “I am disappointed that Ms. Bastos remains silent while her political advisers continue to spread falsehoods. Our community deserves leaders who reject dishonest tactics, not ignore them.”

In response, Bastos said she was not involved in the text blast or lawsuit. “All I know is I saw a copy of the advertisement featuring Mr. Cervera and the Broward County Public School logo in a partisan advertisement,” she said.

When asked if Cervera has the upper hand in the race, Bastos said she is confident in her chances and that voters appreciate having a longtime District 6 resident and community volunteer on the board.

“Voters in the district know that he was not their choice,” she said. “It was Governor DeSantis’s choice on the school board.”

Ulvert, a political consultant, said Cervera is likely to have a hard time if he doesn’t win in August and is forced to head to a run-off in November, when Democratic voters are expected to be energized. The DeSantis stamp of approval may come into play then.

“He has to create distance,” Ulvert said. “I haven’t seen anything where he’s criticized the governor broadly, the president broadly. Voters are going to look for that.”

But Cervera’s confidence seems solid. He said when he talks to voters — both Democrats and Republicans — he’s received an overwhelmingly positive response. Floridians want to keep party politics out of school boards, he said, pointing to voters’ rejection a 2024 proposed amendment that would have made school board elections partisan.

“Leave the partisan politics for the state senators, for the state house reps. Leave that for those guys,” he said. “In the school board, we’re in the business of educating kids, and that is a nonpartisan issue.”

Cervera said voters want a financially conservative board member, like himself, on the dais. When asked if he was socially conservative as well, Cervera said he’s “an issues guy” who doesn’t like to pigeonhole himself. He said that since Florida lawmakers made laws regarding “hot button social issues” in public schools, there’s less room for debate among school board members.

Besides, he said, Broward needs to focus on the finances.

“A lot of this extra stuff is just noise,” Cervera said.

This story was originally published July 14, 2026 at 5:30 AM.